Our great ally in the “global war on terror” and Cheney’s favorite military dictator Pervez Musharraf declared emergency rule last week, just ahead of a ruling by his nation’s 
supreme court on whether or not he could remain both president and army chief at the same time. (Hey… he’s multi-tasking. What’s wrong with that?) Before they could rule against him (as they were expected to do), he dissolved the court and appointed puppet justices in their stead. Case dismissed! Or rather, Court dismissed! Musharraf’s placing his political opponents in fetid jails (or under house arrest for those of a more lofty social rank) and general (no pun intended) heavy-handedness sufficiently embarrassed the Bush administration (to the extent that it is capable of being embarrassed) into pressing for Pakistani elections and a call for Musharraf to “take off his uniform,” in Dubya’s words. Sure, it took a few days for them to react, but then it always takes at least that long for them to figure out that they need to do something. (See: Katrina) My guess is that the impulse came from either Rice or Gates (who was put there after the Baker-Hamilton commission to keep half an eye on things).
Here again, our lunatic foreign policy has made the world a far more dangerous place. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed nation run by the military. Its intelligence service (ISI) contains elements that are very close to the Taliban and, to a lesser extent, Al Qaeda. Because Pakistan shares a long border with Afghanistan (one so rugged as to be nearly impossible to secure) as well as deep cultural ties with Pashtun Afghans, the country has had an abiding interest in the political affairs of its neighbor, not surprisingly. Of course, our CIA managed proxy war in Afghanistan during the Reagan years leveraged that relationship, building with the assistance of the ISI a substantial army of “Arab” Afghans to fight the Soviets, from which sprang Al Qaeda. Our current war in Afghanistan put substantial pressure on Pakistan, the Musharraf regime being compelled by the U.S. to turn against its longtime allies, the Taliban. (In effect, they convinced Mullah Omar’s crowd to fold shortly after the U.S. invasion.)
The subsequent war in Iraq has only increased the pressure. Though Afghanistan was always largely a war by proxy, U.S. forces and intelligence resources were transferred to Iraq, leaving that conflict to fester. As Iraq went septic, Iraqi insurgent tactics were increasingly exported to Afghanistan, where suicide bombings – virtually unknown in that country a few 
years ago – are now quite common, as are roadside bombings. Seeing a resurgent Taliban, our fearless leaders have pushed applied more air power, which means more indiscriminate killing on both sides of the Pakistani border, while pushing Musharraf to do more with his own forces. The result of the latter has been a kind of scorched earth policy in Waziristan, where collective punishment by the Pakistani army is relatively commonplace. This has raised the anger level against Musharraf’s regime, and has likely produced more extremists than it has eliminated. Now we’re threatening Iran with attack, raising the potential of an all-out regional war. And I’m sure Dubya is scratching his head and wondering why Pakistan is falling apart. Didn’t he shake Musharraf’s hand and see good in his soul, like he did with Putin, Blair, and Howard? What part of “useful to the U.S.” do the Pakistani people fail to understand?
Don’t get me wrong – there’s plenty of blame to go around on this policy, the roots of which stretch back decades. But Bush and his crew are pouring gas on the fire… and we keep tossing them matches.
luv u,
jp
Antlers? Not antlers. That won’t work at all. You need something more simian looking. A chimp’s muzzle, perhaps, or lemur tail. Prehensile, yes… that’ll do the trick.
loaded a few more logs on the atomic propulsion fire and gave us enough additional thrust to reach Mars about 20 hours late (right about when we were scheduled to start playing our first gig, in an open-air stadium at the foot of Mount Olympus, the tallest peak in the known solar system already.) Luckily, time is not as precious on the red planet as it is on the green, so we were able to gather ourselves together, take a few quick belts of kilulu juice (official beverage of Big Green), and take our places on Mars’s most prestigious concert stages. Oh, yes, friends, this is the top of the world out here. No doubt about it – ask any Martian. (Note: This is what our Loathsome Prick publicist told us to say. Actually, it seems a hell of a lot like a graveyard to me, but…)
Pretty soon, we started wondering about the crowd… could there be that broad a variety of head shapes, body sizes, and antennae styles? Seemed odd. Then John noticed an alien with a pirate hat on, and we realized what was up. Hallowe’en on Mars – guess it’s pretty big in these parts, or so Marvin (my personal assistant) tells me. (Don’t ask me how he knows. Like Tonto, he hangs out in those barrooms and hears things, I imagine.) And of course sFshzenKlyrn, our perennial sit-in guitarist, had a thing or two to say about this imported tradition. (He tells me the bastardized Martian term for the holiday, literally translated, is “Hollow mo’on.” Doesn’t lose much, actually.) So when in Rome…. don a costume and join the festivities. (But no antlers, Marvin. They don’t suit you.)
dead – that’s just a little more than one a day (a bitter pill for someone to swallow, but no one who counts, apparently). I don’t recall what the Iraqi corpse figure was – it had four digits, for sure – but (and this is important!) the first digit was smaller than last month’s. Progress! Or so we’re told by the administration, the “commanders in the field”, the mainstream press, and supporters of the “surge” in general. This is, after all, best framed (from their point of view) as some kind of ball game wherein the winning team is the one with the highest (or lowest) score. It makes the war easier to sell, report on, and defend. But war differs from sports in one very important respect – in sports the object is simply to win, so numbers count; on the other hand, there is typically a strategic or tactical purpose to any war, and this one is no exception. While we should be thinking about why we’re in Iraq, the “surge” cheering section wants us to think about how well we’re doing. There’s light at the end of the tunnel! they tell us… but what’s the destination?
we invaded to establish that “enduring relationship” Bush now speaks of; a long-term military presence in the heart of the middle east’s richest oil producing region. In this respect, the mission has succeeded, because now both major U.S. political parties support the idea of staying in Iraq for years to come. If the administration, the major parties, or our military leaders gave a damn about the Iraqi people, they would make some minimal effort to a) determine how many have been killed, injured, or displaced by our invasion, and b) pay reparations for the terrible toll we have taken on their lives and their nation. This won’t happen (unless we insist upon it), and our so-called experts – Republican and Democrat – will do and say anything it takes to keep our military in the heart of Iraq. That’s the point of this game.