West ‘will fail’ without Pakistan
Pakistan’s president has warned the West would be “brought to its knees” without his country’s co-operation in the so-called war on terror.
“If we were not with you, you won’t manage anything,” said President Pervez Musharraf in a BBC Radio 4 interview.
He said the Taleban, not al-Qaeda, was now the focus of the struggle against militancy in the region.
“The greatest danger today is if the Taleban movement gets converted into a people’s movement,” he warned.
Earlier this week Tony Blair assured Gen Musharraf a leaked paper condemning Pakistan’s intelligence service did not reflect his government’s view.
In the leaked report, a naval commander at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) claimed Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI, had indirectly helped the Taleban and al-Qaeda.
In the BBC interview Mr Musharraf rejected these claims and said ISI’s support was vital.
You’ll be brought down to your knees if Pakistan doesn’t co-operate with you. That is all that I would like to say. Pakistan is the main ally. If we were not with you, you won’t manage anything,” he said.
“Let that be clear. And if ISI is not with you, you will fail.”
He also claims the US and Britain had a historic debt to pay as Pakistan had helped “win the Cold War” for the West.
His comments develop arguments he has made over the past few days at meetings with US President George W Bush and Tony Blair and a speech given in Oxford.
Gen Musharraf said the Pakistani government’s aim in the country’s tribal border areas was to “wean the people away” from supporting the Taleban, pointing out that while al-Qaeda was mainly comprised of “foreigners”, the Taleban’s support was more locally based.
He denied the suggestion that the tribal elders with whom the government has forged a recent agreement are a front for the Taleban.
He said the tribal elders were the “only way” to establish support from the local population: “The army cannot get them on our side”.
After two hours of talks on Thursday Downing Street said Gen Musharraf had accepted Mr Blair’s reassurances.
Wild Thing’s comments…..
This Musharraf is a piece of work! He has a lot of nerve to say the things he has said. NEVER trust these people!
Pakistan is lost to us as an ally. They have ceeded ALL their Taliban/Al Qaeda infested territories to the terrorists as of last week. Pakistan CANNOT control the terrorists in their midst and Musharraf is on borrowed time.
I do not trust Musharraf or Pakistan.
This Pakistani dictator is playing Bush for a fool. After the 911 attack he played wargames to determine whether he could stand against us. He wisely thought that that would be suicidal and decided to pretend to be a great ally while at the same time refusing to take action against the radical islamics in his country.
He has thwarted every effort to kill or capture Osama Bin Ladin and continues to this day to aid the Taliban and Al Qaeda. I believe the so called assassination attempts against him in Pakistan are manufactured. He is playing the US like a fiddle. He will continue his duplicity as long as we allow him to do so.
Pakistan’s barely rises above Afghanistan in terms of “statehood”. It’s an artifical creation of the British, who separated Hindus and Muslims across a bloody river, and the Pastuns…of whom there are about 30 million, across the rocky border with Afghanistan.
Pakistan is also even worse than Iran, Iraq or Syria for malignant Islamism. Musharraf is just another Muslim crook and terrorist collaborator with a Swiss bank account. He’s a liar and his particular Muslim sect encourages it (I’ll look this up). When he retires, he’s outta there to Southern France.
The current facts in both Iraq and Afghanistan (with Pakistan being the mover in Afghanistan) have rendered the old strategies and expecttions…democracy as the great final liberator of mankind…obsolete.
We need new thinkers in this war.
Is “Pervez” Islamic for ” perverted view of reality”. I did a quick inventory and came to the conclusion that I, for one could survive without Pakistan. Then I thought about it a little more and realised that I could probably even survive without Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey, the Phillipines, the Palestinians, and France.
Al-Qaeda is not the focus of the struggle? It is now the Taleban? And what will it be next week??? Abu Sayyaf? Hezbollah? Hamas? Black September?….. There are hundreds of radical Islamic groups. Hundreds.. While we attempt to rotate the blame amongst these group the fact remains, and it has for YEARS, that they all have one common denominator….Can you guess what that is class?????…. Who said Islam????..Ding, ding, ding ding,……give that person a wilke button!!!!!
Islam isn’t being perverted by these groups, it is perverted. Islam is to terrorism what bread is to a sandwich It is what holds all these groups together.
Until ‘leaders’ like Perv Musharraf aggressively do some in house cleaning in their respective countries, this problem will continue.They need to go into the mosques and disinfect these petri dishes of terror. Cowards like Musarraf who play both sides of the fence are doomed to fail or worse.
We can’t continue to be shouted down by wild eyed muslims who get upset over us voicing concerns over the direction Islam is headed. Shoot them. No rubber bullets, no tear gas, no police with shields and batons,……shoot them. Give them something to really complain about.
They don’t seem to have a problem shooting themselves and blowing themselves up. If they can’t blow up an American, ah heck, just blow up Ahmed until they can find an American to behead. Then blame the sectarian violence on America. Yeah, that’s it!!! It’s all America’s fault! Yet we can’t survive without them?????
And this week it’s the Taleban eh???
Is this candid camera?
Billy
Billy’s right. Not long ago I thought the idea of “containment” for fanatical Muslims was delusional, but now I think something like it must be discussed. IMO, our belief that democracy would lift these savages above their own level (and I firmly believed it), has been proven wrong. They don’t trust it, they don’t want it, and they have none of the societal norms that precede it, and which are necessary for modernity. Add in their national sport of sectarian killing and essential primitivism, and you have a permanent pariah system on the globe.
Mass immigration doesn’t help, either, because those Muslims who wish for a better life haven’t the guts or determination to find it at home, but instead come to The West. Pakistan, for example, is just barely a “state” in any meaningful way, with a fanatical Islamic population just itching to nuke the infidels in India and elsewhere. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t stay there either.
Musharraf’s political withdrawl from Waziristan is the beginning of the end for Afghanistan. Waziristan is a haven for Taliban and the Pashtun majority there. Pashtuns are the majority tribe across the border in Afghanistan, and the rocky border has never mattered to them.
We have few enough real friends in Afghanistan now, and there aren’t enough Anglo-Saxons in the world to dampen the determination of Pashtuns to live in the sludge of backwardness and decline. Let them. Where does our humanitarian responsibility end? Where the objects of it aren’t worth the effort.
I don’t know where this argument of mine can go, but from the Horn of Africa, to Indonesia and the Phillipines, throughout portions of Asia and the Middle East to Europe and America, a vicious, murderous Islamic pest colony is forming. We can’t kill them all without destroying ourselves in the process. Time to cut them off and build a military, legal and metaphorical wall between them and us. Let them kill themselves over time.
Agreed. They are not to be trusted. Like a brood of vipers, thay line in wait. On the surface they will say and do what is neccessary, including lie, until they think they have the upper hand. Then they will strike. Time is not on our side. They know that they don’t possess the tech (militarily) to combat us. But given time, they will eventually get a foothold somewhere that does, even if on a modest scale. And add to it the growing enclaves in our borders to further complicate matters.
Having worked with Paki’s what can I say about them? They always work the system to their advantage, truth as we know it doesn’t exist, duplicity comes to mind. The Bush administration has poured $millions into Musharraf’s pockets to buy his support so he and his countrymen can protect and harbor terrorists. All in return for an expensive rat hunt along the Pakistani border where the rat was alerted and protected by other rats.
The true Musharraf has emerged and people are disappointed, he is a dictator who took power in a coup in 1999, and has used the United States to strengthen that strangle hold. Never forget that with Moslems the word implacable applies and death rules. Billy is right, there is only one solution, but before we start there let’s start with the reason the Moslems believe we can’t survive without them, our own anti-American pro-Communist media who has been at war with the United States since 1961 keeps them informed with propaganda that Americans don’t want to be free, and half of them don’t. They are Implacable!!!
You have got to be kidding me, it’s Pakistan..a country that has absolutely no economic, political, or social value to any other country in the world. H ow will the west be brought down to its knees without cooperation. They’ll just become an enemy and same thing happens all over….he just wants people to buy his book.
I certainly do hope our next President has a more realistic grasp on who he picks as back slapping friends. Bush is the biggest sucker since Carter. Vincente Fox, Vladimar Putin, Musharraf have all used Bush as their “useful idiot”. In other respects I really don’t know and I wonder, is Bush and crew really brilliant in a tough environment. Or, are they out of touch with reality.
I am also questioning my support for this war. A few radical imans can influence the idiots more than an American brigade. We are allowing young moslem males and islamic clergy to come into our America in numbers that I have read are greater than before 9/11. While our firepower is being worn out in a “nation building” endeavor, our front and back doors are wide open to predators.
Any alliance we have in the Third(Turd)World is only as stable as the whim of the dictator(s)of the moment. And the most unstable people are anywhere on the African Continent.
I cringe at our present leadership which seems unable to actually lead our citizens. The Administration at times seems rudderless, asking us to have faith. I have no doubt our troops are doing a great job and they believe in their mission. However, moslems are about as stable as Haitians and I think maybe they should be left to killing themselves.
We need to secure our borders, remove all islamic clergy and any radical moslems like CAIR, and be ready to use our stand-off power to keep the moslems in their own stinking part of the World.
I know we have our own Leftist opposition, RINOs, environmentalists, et al to deal with, but the average American is not with the Left. One of my biggest fears is when the numbers change and the average American is one for whom English is a second language.
I am not forming a good essay, but I cannot see a good blueprint in our present war, with clear obtainable objectives being pursued in a logical manner. I have to fall back on, “it is a war with islam and islam needs to be contained, punished and maybe destroyed”.
Tom Smith:
Pakistan is one of the most radicalized Muslim countries in the world; they have nukes and have probably supplied nuke technology to North Korea. The goals of the Punjabis, who occupy most of the positions of power, seem to be to bring Kashmir under their rule, to kill Hindus and other infidels, and possibly, eliminate the Durand Line, which is the unofficial border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. True, they make nothing of importance except trouble.
TomR:
Agreed. This thing is falling apart. As you know, I have a son on the Pakistan border, an airborne combat engineer, doing as much fighting as leg infantry. Your last paragraph…wrong, a great essay, and right, contained, punished or destroyed.
Rhod-
Thanks. I pray for your son. I wish I knew what was going on, but our leader does not do a good job of informing the citizenry.
I think we need a little humor here, as this
off post, but what the hell
a quote from Ted Kennedy: I would rather have
a bottle in front of me than a frontal
lobotomy…
Ok, humor….. A Pakistani walks into a bar with his dog. They pull up two cahirs at the bar and when the barkeep comes over, the Pakistani says, Two rum and cokes please”. The bartender hesitates, looks at the Pakistani, looks at the dog, shakes his head and goes to retrieve the drinks. Upon his return, the bartender asks, “Ok, where did you get the pig?” The Pakistani, both offended and confused, says to the bartender, “That’s not a pig, it’s a dog”. The bartender smiles and says, “I was talking to the dog”.
Billy
Rhod…..”We need new thinkers in this war.”…..oh Rhod we sure do.
Billy….
“Islam isn’t being perverted by these groups, it is perverted. Islam is to terrorism what bread is to a sandwich It is what holds all these groups together.”…..
Exactly!!
Rhod that is I keep feeling in my gut that we can’t kill them all. That really would be impossible and they are raising a whole new generation to keep killing, more and more and never ending.
Like you said too …”Time to cut them off and build a military, legal and metaphorical wall between them and us. Let them kill themselves over time.”.
razOr they are even taught to lie. How can we ever believe any of them. To lie is natural to them and to kill, heck they are taught from tiny children to want to kill. It is so horrible.
Jack exactly, our media feeds them and it should have it’s loyalty to America and we citizens but it doesn’t at all. How awful to be aligned with the media that seeks every day to bash our country in sly ways, aid the enemy both off our land and within our country.
TomR I agree so much with what you wrote!!
Tincan Sailor that sure describes Kennedy. I bet his blood is almost solid booze.
Billy hahaha that is a good one.
THe west has woken up to the islamic agenda 40 to 50 years too late! If they feel they have an advantage,they will attack while screaming verses from the Koran justifiying there actions. AS soon as they are on the receving end their peace makers come out of the woodworks (who are silent till then -hoping to benifit from the spoils in case they win)saying how misunderstood their great religion is! By the way misundrestanding is due to the evil propaganda of non muslims according to them.
They have played this game throughout history and it is only now that the world as whole is wiseing upto them.