Remember a country far away ... called Afghanistan?

Blogging about the warmongers led me to think about Afghanistan.  How much have we--the US--sunk in there?

Of course, the war spending is a staggering amount.  In case you forgot that amount, you might want to sit down first and hold on to a firm table or pillar.  The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost the US.taxpayers $1.6 trillion, according to the Congressional Research Service.  But, that is an underestimate:

A truer measure of the wars’ total costs pegs them at between $4 trillion and $6 trillion. This fuller accounting includes “long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs,” Harvard economist Linda Bilmes calculated in 2013.
The Pentagon and its civilian overseers don’t like to talk about war costs, either before or after the shooting. That’s because a high price tag beforehand acts as an economic brake, making war—assuming that’s the goal—less likely.

After all that spending ...

Anyway, that was for the wars that supposedly ended.  Since then, we have also been investing in Afghanistan for its reconstruction.  How much has that been?  Even after adjusting for inflation, our spending there has exceeded the amount that we spent in Europe via the celebrated Marshall Plan.  I wonder who really benefited from all those hundreds of billions of dollars--certainly not the students in my classes who work anything between 15 and 40 hours every week in order to make sure they will not have huge debts when graduating.

So, after all that spending ...

Wasil was waiting Monday at a fruit stand in Tirin Kot, the capital of southern Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province, when he was shot dead by two gunmen. His uncle said he was 12 years old.

What was special about Wasil?

Wasil Ahmad learned to fire a gun at age 9, after his father was killed by Taliban militants.
Before long, his uncle said, the boy had become a celebrated Taliban killer, credited with gunning down six insurgents during a battle last summer.

And,

Local officials in Uruzgan and others hailed Wasil as a hero, but some said his story offered yet another example of the price paid by Afghan youth in the more than 14-year conflict.
In the first six months of 2015, the U.N. Mission in Afghanistan documented 1,270 casualties among children — 320 deaths and 950 injuries — a 13% increase over the prior year.

Yep, that is the Afghanistan today, after all that spending ...

Forgotten by the West, Afghanistan is facing a multidimensional civil war with the Afghan Taliban, which is being aided now by a plethora of groups such as al-Qaeda, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Chechens, and Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Tayyaba.

Oh, hey, aren't you glad that we were wonderfully distracted and entertained by the likes of Trump and Palin and more?

In at least two provinces bordering Pakistan (Nangarhar and Zabul) the Taliban are also fighting ISIS, which is trying to recruit among dissatisfied Taliban members. Not until the end of January were US Special Forces in Afghanistan given authorization to go after ISIS fighters in the country—one reflection of how lackadaisically the Pentagon is responding to the crisis there. US forces can now pursue ISIS fighters, who have been declared a threat to the US. One may well ask, What about the threat that the Afghan government has already faced from ISIS all these months as the group has built up its base areas?

Ah, do the blabbering bellicose buffoons who want to lead the Republican Party care about such details before they go to all corners of the world to kick ass and bomb people to oblivion?

Caption at the source:
12-year-old Wasil Ahmad, who was killed by gunmen in southern Afghanistan on Monday, Feb. 1, 2016

Malala Yousafzai is my hero!

Ever since I heard about the insane Taliban shooting a 14-year old girl only because she was so keen on getting educated, I kept thinking about a video that I had shared with one class a couple of years ago.  That was a piece on the Swat Valley before the Pakistani army went in to clean up the place.  I remembered that the video featured a young girl who was anxious about her school and her education.

Could it be the same girl?

I tried different search strings.  And then it occurred to me--to do a search omitting "Malala Yousafzai."  I clicked on the one I was sure was the same video.

Nearing the fifth minute, when the narrator uttered the girl's name, I got teary eyed. It was that girl:



That was more than three years ago.

It is bloody awful that Malala is now fighting for her life, when she ought to be enjoying school and life, without any worries at all.

The screwed-up Taliban went after her life because she wouldn't stop complaining about them.  Therefore, this cowardly and horrific act:

The teenager was attacked on Tuesday as she was returning home from school in Mingora in north-western Swat.
Two armed men, on foot, stopped a van packed with about a dozen schoolgirls in a congested area of the town. One of them got into the van and asked which of the girls was Malala Yousafzai before he fired three shots, hitting Malala in the head and injuring two others. 

I don't believe in any hell or heaven.  But, dammit, I wish these Taliban nothing but the hellest of hells right here while they are alive.

The NY Times adds that "militant commanders in northwestern Pakistan reiterated their intention to kill the schoolgirl or her father."  WTF!  Screw the Taliban!

The Atlantic notes:

While prayers are being directed and praise poured on Malala and her father, Ziauddin, both of whom were on the Taliban hit-list as a result of their battle to ensure girls' education, young Malala has revived the history of Malalai of Mewand, popularly known as Malalai Anna, who rallied Pashtuns against the British during the second Anglo-Afghan war in 1880 at Maiwand, in Afghanistan.

While the Malalai of Maiwand played a heroic role in winning the battle by tending the injured Pashtuns and supplying water and weapons, the Malala of Swat fought with her pen and tongue to encourage her countrymen to send their children to school despite threats from the Taliban. Born in 1998, Malala was only 11 years old when she started her jihad (holy war) against ignorance and oppression. ...

Malala's rallying cry has proven stronger and more lasting than the gunshots from her would-be assassin and is resounding in every corner of Pakistan, inspiring her countrymen to stand up and emancipate themselves from the thugs who are out to steal the future of coming generations and snatch their individual and collective freedoms. Yesterday's Malala of Swat has become the Malala of Pakistan and the Malala of the wider civilized world.

Yes, Malala of the Civilized World.

I am going to play this video in my class on Monday. The syllabus be damned; isn't education what Malala is fighting for?

Nothing seems to go well in Pakistan!

There are a few countries in the world that are in need of an extreme makeover.  Zimbabwe, North Korea are in the top rung. Not far behind them is Pakistan.  And, lately, everything seems to be going in the wrong direction for this country.

I mean, look at the recent issues alone, even without going too much back in time.  The catastrophic floods even failed to generate significant global interest in this human tragedy.  Even as the government was ineffectively managing that crisis (their version of "heckuva job, Brownie," right?) the cricket team decided that they needed to shine the Commonwealth's attention on the Pakistan--not because they played well, but with a few players engaging in match-fixing schemes. One can imagine the magnitude of this scandal when even the Los Angeles Times reports on this. In America.  On the game of cricket!

The Times notes:

At the core of the scandal are allegations that two cricketers colluded with a middleman to manipulate the course of a match against England last week in London.

Since then, Pakistani television channels daily have been airing video of the middleman, identified as London-based businessman Mazhar Majeed, flipping through wads of cash as he meets with British tabloid reporters posing as members of an Asian gambling cartel.

The tabloid, News of the World, said Majeed accepted $232,000 from the undercover reporters to ensure that Pakistani cricketers bowled "no balls," the equivalent of an illegal pitch in baseball, at specified times during the match. The manipulation, known as spot-fixing, occurs because gamblers sometimes bet not only on the outcome of a match but on individual occurrences or actions during the contest.

Say it ain't so, Joe Asif!

Meanwhile, the terrorists--of which many flavors operate in Pakistan--decide that this is no time to pause. So what if 20 million are messed up thanks to the floods is their thinking, I suppose.  Further, with the weak government's attention being forced on the crisis, and with people unhappy with the government's performance, perhaps the terrorist elements are all the more pumped up. Thus, Pakistan continues to rock with explosions; the latest was in Lahore, whose soil has been bloodied quite a bit with such tragedies in recent months.  The latest one:

At least 25 people have been killed and 170 injured after three bombs exploded during a procession by Shia Muslims in the Pakistani city of Lahore. ...

Officials say the first explosion came shortly before nightfall on Wednesday, at the end of a procession by some 35,000 Shia to mark the death in the Seventh Century of the first Shia imam, Ali bin Abi Talib.

Footage of the moment shown on Geo television showed a small explosion amid a crowd of people near the Karbala Gamay Shah imambargah, followed by a large plume of smoke.
Minutes later, as hundreds of people fled, a suicide bomber blew himself up near an area where food was being prepared for the marchers to break the Ramadan fast, a senior police officer, Zulfiqar Hameed, told the Associated Press news agency.
A second suicide bomber then detonated his explosive belt at an intersection near the end of the procession, Mr Hameed added.

That's right--in the middle of the month-long Ramadan fasting ... how awful!

Taliban stones couple to death

A few days ago, we witnessed from afar the Afghanistan Taliban executing a pregnant widow--because of relationships outside of marriage.  In case we thought that was the worst they could do, it turns out that the Taliban is far from done.  This time, "The Taliban has stoned to the death a couple in northern Afghanistan over charges of adultery."

I cannot even begin to imagine the cruel punishment the couple endured before their deaths.

"The two were stoned to death in a bazaar of Dasht-e Archi district on the accusation of committing the act of adultery," said Mohammad Omar.

Last week, Islamist militants publicly flogged and killed a woman, accused of adultery, in the Badhgis province in northwestern Afghanistan, said officials.

These killings in Kunduz, if confirmed, would be the first of their kind by the Taliban in northern Afghanistan, where the militant group has comparatively lower influence than in the south. The stoning follows last week's call by a section of clerics for the imposition of a strict code of Islamic law that has frequently awarded capital punishment.

Afghan authorities say the Taliban had arrested the couple following complaints by their parents, as the two were to be married to separate individuals. The Taliban, during their rule of Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, is known to have imposed draconian punishments on people who did not subscribe to its strict code of social behaviour.

As an atheist, I don't imagine that there is anything waiting for us after we die--which rules out heaven and hell.  But, if I am proven to be wrong, I wish that there does exist a special place, call it hell or whatever, which is where I want these murderous and barbaric thugs to end up--after they go through the worst possible torture and death in this world.

Taliban executes a 47-year old pregnant widow :(

What an awful news!  May the people who inflicted this punishment die the worst possible torturous death!

The Taliban has executed a pregnant widow accused of adultery in western Afghanistan, provincial and district officials said Monday.
The 47-year-old woman, Sanam Gul, also known as Sanam Bibi, was killed in Badghis province Saturday morning, said Ashrafuddin Majidi, the provincial governor's spokesman.
The district governor of Qades, Hashim Habibi, confirmed the execution. He said the woman was accused of adultery that left her pregnant. The Taliban shadow district governor, Mullah Abdul Hakim, and his judge ordered the woman to be executed, he said.
Mohammad Yousuf, a Taliban commander, carried out the execution, shooting the woman in her head, Habibi said. ...

... The statement from the ISAF cited reports that the widow was whipped 200 times before she was shot.

"The Taliban shadow district governor"???? WTF!!!

'It's taken a year to move 20km' in Afghanistan

The troops are doing wonderful work under tough conditions.  This video from the Guardian has some bloody details--yes, bloody.  The reporter notes that it is 55 degrees centigrade.  That is 130 degrees F.  130!  And these guys are walking and running with all the gear to get the wounded ... I was beginning to feel sick from merely watching the video, and forced myself to watch the entire video.
The call to prayers in the morning calm all of a sudden comes across as a surreal Hollywood video clip.  For a few seconds.  Then, we are reminded that it is the war, with injuries and death.
I wish them all well, and hope that the entire US and NATO forces will quit Afghanistan soon and the troops will return home safe.

Can we please end the war there and in Iraq too?

Fareed Zakaria is funny ...

out at the Daily Show ... and damn knowledgeable ... ahem, the Indian heritage? :)
unfortunately, the AfPak situation that the US is in isn't ... Zakaria notes:

When you have a country as screwed up as Pakistan, I don't know what the answer is

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Fareed Zakaria
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Afghanistan: remember that war over there?

A student I have known for a couple of years now is headed to Afghanistan; he got his deployment orders a few weeks ago, and is in the training phase now.  I wish him well. 
But, I have no idea why we keep sending troops there.  Instead of writing about it, well, the editorial cartoons convey the point

Horror story of the day: rape of Afghan women

Anna Badhken writes in Foreign Policy:

Eight years ago, four Pashtun women told me of their assailants, three fighters from Dostum's militia, Junbish-e-Milli-e-Islami who took turn raping them all night. Technically, only one of them, Nazu, was a woman; her daughters were 10, 12, and 14. The youngest, Bibi Amina, was playing with the fringe of the giant red scarf that covered her head and smiling. It seemed to me that she had not understood what had been done to her.

One of the many incidents of rape as a weapon .... this is after the fall of the Taliban government!!!
And, apparently all those crimes will go unpunished; Badhken concludes:

Last month, the Afghan government confirmed that it had signed into force the National Stability and Reconciliation Law -- and what a tragic misnomer that is. The law effectively amnesties all warlords and fighters responsible for large-scale human rights abuses in the preceding decades. "Their view," says Farid Mutaqi, a human rights worker in Mazar-e-Sharif, "is that justice should be the victim of peace."
You know what this means, daughters of Balkh: This means your rapes will never be punished. Perhaps, in some future iteration of war that has been rolling back and forth through these green wheat fields almost incessantly for millennia, they will be avenged -- through some other rapes, of some other women.

Suicide bombing in Kabul: Headlines differ!

So, we have news media reporting on the same incident in Kabul--the Taliban carried out coordinated attacks on two hotels.

From The Hindu (India): Nine Indians killed in Taliban attack on hotels
AP:  Kabul Taliban attack shows insurgents not crippled
Daily Times (Pakistan): 17 killed as terrorists target foreigners in Kabul
Miami Herald (US): Taliban says Kabul bombs meant to drive Americans out

Yes, the perspective changes depending on where we report from, and for whom we report ....

It is awful, such violence and deaths.  I don't think it is a coincidence either that this attack happened, particularly targeted at hotels preferred by Indians, just as the Indian and Pakistani governments are exploring another round of talks. 

Forty years of war in Kabul

This is one of the most telling images ever:

The person who took the photo on the right writes:

I took the photo of the bombed out Paghman Gardens in the spring of 2007. I had been in Kabul for several months and had searched for pics about what the old Afghanistan was like. A week or so later I took a day trip to Paghman and I seemed to recognize the area. I got home later that day and looked back through the photos online and finally came across the old photo with the two women in it. I drove back there the next weekend and tried to retake the exact same photo.

To Afghanistan and Taliban via Baluchistan? Please, no!!!

In the NY Times op-ed, Seth Jones writes:

Like a typical business, the Taliban in Pakistan have an organizational structure divided into functional committees. It has a media committee; a military committee; a finance committee responsible for acquiring and managing funds; and so forth. The Taliban’s inner shura, or governing council, exerts authority over lower-level Taliban fighters.

This part I agree with.  It is a neat reminder that to some extent all this crazy organization has to do is engage at a minimal level, to remind everybody that they are still around, and otherwise wait for the Americans and the NATO forces to leave.
But, I don't agree with Jones' argument that we need to target the Taliban in Baluchistan.  Jones writes:

 ... relatively little has been done in Baluchistan.
The United States and Pakistan must target Taliban leaders in Baluchistan. There are several ways to do it, and none requires military forces.
The first is to conduct raids to capture Taliban leaders in Baluchistan. Most Taliban are in or near Baluchi cities like Quetta.

Why do I disagree with him?  Because, our failed attempts in Iraq and Afghanistan have made the Iranian theocracy that much stronger.  And then our missteps with their nuke program.  If we go into Baluchistan, then we make Iran that much better off--Iran also would like the Baluch problem go away.  I wrote about this, like, a gazillion days ago!:

Iran shares a long border with Afghanistan. Iran and Pakistan are also neighbors, with a border that simmers with its own set of ethnic disputes, religious tensions and drug trafficking.

The best way to understand the Iran-Pakistan border issues is to start with one of the most under-reported stories from two weeks ago. At least 20 people were killed, and more than 50 were injured, when a bomb exploded in a mosque in the city of Zahedan in Iran. Zahedan is the capital of Iran’s southeastern province of Sistan-Balochistan, and the city is practically at the junction of the borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

At least three aspects of this bombing deserve our attention.

First, this part of Iran has a predominant Sunni population in a country that is otherwise majority Shiite. Keep in mind that Iran and Iraq are home to Shiite Muslims, while surrounded by Sunni majority countries.

Second, the explosion came only a few days before the presidential elections, which are scheduled for Friday. Further, the explosion occurred only three days after a historic trilateral meeting in Tehran of the presidents of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Third, and most important, a group called Jundallah claimed responsibility for this blast. Jundallah, which means “soldiers of Allah,” has gained strength in the post-Sept. 11 years. Jundallah claims to be fighting the Iranian government to secure equal rights for the Sunni and the Baloch people.

The Balochs are spread across the modern boundaries of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Pakistan, the largest province — in terms of land area — is Balochistan, where about half of the 10 million population is ethnically Baloch.

Read the entire piece here, which I ended with:

I certainly hope that we will not enlarge our engagement into the Iranian issues.

Why are we in Afghanistan? seriously ....

The photos and read the text under each of them (ht).... Withdrawing the troops is seven-years overdue ... at least 
The text under the photo that is to the left here:
Soldiers from the U.S. Army First Battalion, 26th Infantry take defensive positions at firebase Restrepo after receiving fire from Taliban positions in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan's Kunar Province on May 11, 2009. Spc. Zachary Boyd of Fort Worth, Texas, far left was wearing "I love NY" boxer shorts after rushing from his sleeping quarters to join his fellow platoon members.

Seven months in Taliban captivity

Afghanistan: photo of the day

After looking at this photo and spotting the military vehicle, remind me why we need to be there for years to come?

Photo from latimes.com

"Obama's war" and Pakistan's fate

I am not a big fan of Tariq Ali; but, hey, I have to give credit where it is due. Ali details the mess that Pakistan is in this essay in the London Review. He writes:

As far as the political temperature goes there is never a good month in Pakistan. This is a country whose fate is no longer in its own hands. I have never known things so bad. The chief problems are the United States and its requirements, the religious extremists, the military high command, and corruption, not just on the part of President Zardari and his main rivals, but spreading well beyond them.

This is now Obama’s war. He campaigned to send more troops into Afghanistan and to extend the war, if necessary, into Pakistan. These pledges are now being fulfilled. On the day he publicly expressed his sadness at the death of a young Iranian woman caught up in the repression in Tehran, US drones killed 60 people in Pakistan. The dead included women and children, whom even the BBC would find it difficult to describe as ‘militants’. Their names mean nothing to the world; their images will not be seen on TV networks.

And this is only the beginning of a very depressing essay. I cannot imagine how regular life goes on in Pakistan. I wonder if people just shut themselves off--a denial of sorts?

Pakistan is not salvageable

I am always worried about Pakistan. And it is not because I was born in India, but because of the immense geopoloitical fallout from the Pakistan disaster.
It, therefore, feels good to know that I am in good company; here is Christopher Hitchens in an interview with The Walrus Magazine:

On a bit of a different subject, I’ve been reading your more recent columns, and in your opinion, what do the next few years hold for Pakistan?

Well, the column I’d like you to read is called “On The Frontier Of Apocalypse,” and I wrote it in late 2001 after I went out to the Afghan, Pakistan and Kashmir after 9/11, for Vanity Fair. It’s in my collection, called Love, Poetry and War. And in there I say the problem is not Afghanistan, the problem is Pakistan. And I give quite a lot of reasons why that is. If I can say it without being facetious, in the last year or so I’ve been sort of almost hysterically proven right, with people crowding around me to say “Goddamn.” I’ve had more vindication than anyone should have. The original mistake in that region was the creation of separate states. The amputation of India instead of independence; the worst thing the British empire ever did was to give way to religious sectarianism, and not promise that we were there to unify India, not divide it. A terrible betrayal, and it got worse every decade. And this decade is no exception. We will never stop paying for the mistakes of 1947-1948. It’s one of the reasons why Salman’s novel Midnight’s Children is almost better than The Satanic Verses, because it’s prescient in just the right way. So I think the endgame in Pakistan... it’s conceivable that the state has enough resources left to battle those who care more about the Muslim bit than the state bit. Pakistan’s institutions are fighting the people who take the idea of Pakistan seriously, the idea of a Muslims-only state. Boy, we are gonna pay for this. Obama has no idea.

You don’t think?

He made a glib decision, the same mistake John Kerry made, that you can’t lead an anti-war, pacifist, isolationist party into an election, that you could in essence say there’s a great war in Afghanistan and a bad one in Iraq. One is good and just and legal and winnable, and the other is none of the above. And it’s exactly to the contrary. Well, not exactly to the contrary, because of course Afghanistan is a just war and a legal one. But it’s not winnable, though, and it’s not the important battle. But because [Obama] thought this was such a clever idea, and because it worked so well with his Democratic constituents, and because it confused the Republicans, he promised a demonstration of a very private stand. I put it down in several columns before the election. His supporters have no idea how much war the president is promising. Endless, endless. So if there’s anything keeps him awake, it should be that. Because he’s either got to go through with it, and see a lot go straight down a rat-hole, or he’s got to do a scuttle that will be more humiliating than any American president has ever had to face. It’s much, much worse than the risk Bush took in Iraq. And hey, the wonderful thing is that there isn’t a single liberal in North America who understands this. Or is willing to admit it. That makes me laugh. I do not want to give up Afghanistan or Pakistan, but I do not think the state of Pakistan is salvageable.

It is a stark choice for the president.

The best thing Bush did as president, apart from removing Saddam Hussein and removing the Taliban, was to make friends with India, and shift American foreign policy away from Pakistan. I think that was a long and vastly overdue move. And he gets so little credit for it. And I think Obama should build on that. I’m not sure we can save Pakistan; I’m pretty sure we can save Iraq and defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, and Iraq is important to us, strategically, economically. We don’t need to control Afghanistan. We need to have a say, and make sure it isn’t controlled by our deadly enemies — or that if it is, they live in constant fear. But anyway.

If Pakistan falls, then Afghanistan falls too?

Well, the British partition lines, I’m an expert — well, I’m not an expert, but I know more than most people do — but the British drew the lines of partition in Kashmir, which is where Pakistan once raised fight with India; they drew the Durand line, which is what separates Afghanistan and Pakistan; it runs through Pashtunistan, as you know; they drew the other line separating India from Bangladesh, which used to be East Pakistan. I thought all of those lines were lines in the sand, they were very well positioned. Fighting to keep them going any longer is very problematic. There are large bits of Pakistan that wouldn’t submit, I think ever, to Taliban rule, and of Afghanistan too. They’ve come up against some really tough opposition from people who’ve never put up with them.

But not the region they’ve just been handed.

What, the Swat valley? No. No one fought the war on that. Swat is like giving the Christian Coalition Northern California. There’s a difference between fundamentalist rule in an area like this, and having a launching pad for jihad. They just took it as their due, most of the inhabitants ran away, and then they used it to try and attack the capital city. And they’re twenty miles from where the [nuclear] reactor is.

Pakistan. Taliban. Al Qaeda. Nukes. Be afraid!

As much as I am relieved that finally Pakistan is being brought to the front and center of our attention, I can't but think: "where were all these people when even semi-literate people like me were yelling at our loudest that we need to worry about Pakistan?"
I suppose America was so blindered by its ideological framework that not only did we not recognize that Pakistan is even worse than the Israel/Palestine situation, we even continued to pour money into Pakistan.

Anyway, Professor Steven David writes in Foreign Policy that:

What then can the United States do to reduce the threat from Pakistan? Washington must first do more to mitigate the tensions between India and Pakistan, thus encouraging the Pakistanis to redirect their military away from the Indian threat and toward the more pressing dangers posed by the Taliban. The United States must be more creative in ways that might help the Pakistanis ensure the security of their arsenal, including assisting them with better command-and-control procedures and safer deployment options for their nuclear forces (thus avoiding a hair-trigger posture). For the long term, the United States can work to build up the Pakistani state, improve Pakistan's education system, enhance its economy (through the elimination of tariffs on Pakistani textiles), and subtly convince the Pakistanis that the moderate Islam for which the country is known is the best path.

Although all of these steps are necessary, none will end the threat of a Pakistani nuclear weapon falling into the wrong hands. So what the United States must do is confront the awful possibility that the Taliban or al Qaeda might one day get its hands on a Pakistani nuclear weapon. To prepare for that contingency, Washington must do more to learn where the Pakistani nuclear arms are located (to destroy or seize them), do a better job at preventing the smuggling of nuclear weapons, and, most horribly, prepare for the nightmare of losing an American city to a Pakistani bomb. That means issues such as continuity of government and public health plans must be made now, for "the day after." It also means that Washington must do better at determining the source of a nuclear explosion and think seriously about how to react if one occurs. Lashing out at Pakistan, especially if the regime was not behind the attack, makes little sense. Learning from the Pakistanis just how many weapons went missing, how it happened, and whether it could happen again might not be as emotionally satisfying as a counterstrike, but makes more sense.

Even during the worst days of the Cold War, Americans and Soviets recognized that a nuclear strike would be folly. The same is not true for the groups that are poised to seize Pakistani nuclear weapons. With luck, we may all survive this crisis. But that does not change the realization that an American city faces a far greater threat of nuclear destruction from a wayward Pakistani nuclear weapon than it ever did from a deliberate Soviet attack.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Run! Now! Pak says nukes are safe!!!

It is way past time to worry when the prime minister has to go around trying to convince everybody that the nukes are safe! The good thing for us in America: we are far away from the chaos. The bad news: that is what we used to think until September 11, 2001!
The following excerpt is from The Hindu

Nuclear weapons in safe hands: Gilani

General Kayani vows to defeat terrorism at all costs

— Photo: AP

Tactical retreat?: Taliban members leaving Buner on Friday.

Islamabad: Pakistan Premier Yousuf Raza Gilani on Friday addressed growing international concerns on the Taliban’s advance towards Islamabad, saying the country’s defence is in “safe hands” and its nuclear programme completely secure.

“If anyone casts an evil eye on Pakistan, it will be over our dead bodies,” said Mr. Gilani while participating in a debate in the National Assembly or Lower House of Parliament.

I am not sure whether Gilani understands that the Taliban and al Qaeda does not care about the "dead bodies" :-(

F%&*ed up in Pakistan

I earlier blogged about reports that the pilotless drones that the US was using to bomb militants in the Pakistan/Afghanistan border were flying out of bases in Pakistan. And my fear was that crap will start flying all over the place.

Now, there is more evidence of our base(s) in Pakistan. Yes, real photo evidence. Thanks to Google Earth!

The Times (London) reports with photos that the US has been flying drones from the Shamsi airbase in Baluchistan--as early as 2006. Does the acronym FUBAR come into your mind?

An investigation by The Times yesterday revealed that the CIA was secretly using Shamsi to launch the Predator drones that observe and attack al-Qaeda and Taleban militants around Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.
US special forces used the airbase during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, but the Pakistani Government said in 2006 that the Americans had left. Both sides have since denied repeatedly that Washington has used, or is using, Pakistani bases to launch drones. Pakistan has also demanded that the US cease drone attacks on its tribal area, which have increased over the last year, allegedly killing several “high-value” targets as well as many civilians.
The Google Earth image now suggests that the US began launching Predators from Shamsi — built by Arab sheiks for falconry trips — at least three years ago. The advantage of Shamsi is that it provides a discreet launchpad within minutes of Quetta — a known Taleban staging post — as well as Taleban infiltration routes into Afghanistan and potential militant targets farther afield.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani government has okayed shaira law in the Swat region. Hey, more power and influence for the Talibans, and we are not worried, right? Again, FUBAR! The BBC reports that the US is concerned. "Concern" is not the right word here, Mr. President. Concern is if the Pakistani president has a fall and fractures his hip. In this situation, the master of the language that Obama is, I bet he can easily use way more powerful words.