In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
More on that Orange Alert
Lest anyone accuse me of ahem not believing the official reports of why we went to orange in selected northern East Coast cities, here's a good article suggesting that the capture just may have been politically timed.
[Editor's Note: Earlier this month, John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman, and Massoud Ansari broke the story of how the Bush administration was pressuring Pakistani officials to apprehend high-value targets (HVTs) in time for the November elections--and in particular, to coincide with the Democratic National Convention. Although the capture took place in central Pakistan "a few days back," the announcement came just hours before John Kerry will give his acceptance speech in Boston.]
Choice quote:
One Pakistani general recently in Washington confided in a journalist, "If we don't find these guys by the election, they are going to stick this whole nuclear mess up our asshole."
Here's the kicker:
But there is a reason many Pakistanis and some American officials had previously been reluctant to carry the war on terrorism into the tribal areas. A Pakistani offensive in that region, aided by American high-tech weaponry and perhaps Special Forces, could unite tribal chieftains against the central government and precipitate a border war without actually capturing any of the HVTs. Military action in the tribal areas "has a domestic fallout, both religious and ethnic," Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri complained to the Los Angeles Times last year. Some American intelligence officials agree. "Pakistan just can't risk a civil war in that area of their country. They can't afford a western border that is unstable," says a senior intelligence official, who anonymously authored the recent Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and who says he has not heard that the current pressures on Pakistan are geared to the election. "We may be at the point where [Musharraf] has done almost as much as he can."
That's right, just go ahead a start a civil war on an unstable border between two nuclear powers who hate each other's guts because it's an election year. I hope you're paying attention, because if there's going to be a nuclear war, it'll start right here, on this border.
It'll be really fun to be president in a bunker in an undisclosed location when the rest of us are dead.
- Michael 3:13 PM - [PermaLink] -
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