Washington has pushed Pakistan to launch an operation in North Waziristan, but the government has so far refused. The Pakistani army says its soldiers are stretched too thin by military operations against Islamist militias in other tribal area.But many analysts believe the army is reluctant to cross militant groups with which it has historical ties, such as the Haqqani network, who could be useful allies in Afghanistan after foreign troops withdraw.
Terrible, isn't it? Those treacherous Pakistanis are truculently
refusing to launch a massive war on their own people to ease the
pressure on America's interminable war-profiteering operation in
neighboring Afghanistan. And this ungrateful refusal of great Caesar's
reasonable request stems not from any concern on the part of Pakistani
officials that launching a vicious civil war would tear their fraying
country -- still recovering from one of the greatest natural disasters
in modern history -- to pieces, or even from a simple reluctance to
slaughter tens of thousands of their fellow citizens. No; according to
AP -- or rather, according to the anonymous "many analysts" who provide
the sole, unsourced, unsupported viewpoint given voice on the matter --
the only reason that Pakistan is reluctant to destroy itself on
Washington's orders is a desire to play games in a post-war
Afghanistan.
In fact, even as Obama was making "one of the greatest speeches ever given by any sitting president"
and "calling all of us to realize a larger purpose," his vice
president, Joe Biden, was touring the imperial frontier, warning the
Pakistanis that America's patience is growing thin over their continuing failure to instigate a civil war,
and hinting darkly the Empire "would not wait indefinitely" for this
act of national suicide, but may be 'forced' to start carving up the
country itself.
Biden then moved on to Iraq,
to discuss "the issue of whether to keep some U.S. forces in Iraq
beyond the Dec. 31 deadline" for withdrawing all American forces from
Iraq. (Except for the thousands and thousands of soldiers and
mercenaries needed to guard the American fortress city in the midst of
Baghdad, of course.) The Americans say they will stay only if the Iraqis
need them; and Iraq's top military commander recently said that the
American military guests should stay at least until 2020.
"Sharpen your instincts for empathy." That is what the words say. But the actions say something else altogether: "Close your hearts to pity."
NOTE: While finishing this piece, I ran across Arthur Silber's latest essay, which deals more deeply, broadly and eloquently with this same theme. I urge you to read it in full right away.
UPDATE (Jan 14): The indefatigable Jason Ditz at Antiwar.com brings word of yet another murder spree in the border areas of Pakistan. Even as the warm glow of Obama's Tucson speech spread over the political establishment (see Arthur Silber's scathing assessment of this development), mortar fire from American-occupied Afghanistan killed eight more human beings: five men and three women. As Ditz reports:
Pakistani officials report that a barrage of mortars was fired from across the Afghan border, likely from either NATO troops or Afghan military forces, and destroyed a home in the North Waziristan Agency, killing eight people.The attack comes just a day after Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Pakistan, during which he warned that his patience was "wearing thin" with the government for not having invaded North Waziristan yet. NATO has yet to confirm that it was their attack, but promised an investigation.
As with the mystery of who launched the attack, the identities of the victims are unclear as well, with Pakistani officials describing them only as five men and three women and reporting no indications of any militant connections, beyond living in a tribal area that the US wants attacked for being a militant hotbed.
But you know what really matters? Not the shredded viscera of eight defenseless human beings, not the further destabilization and radicalization of a nuclear-armed nation suffering from vast natural disasters and mind-boggling levels of corruption in its American-sponsored elite; no, what really matters is that our bipartisan American elites are pledging to be more civil to each other as they rain death, murder and chaos all over the world.
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