- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
As usual, Sidney rants and raves and pulls out his best invective while missing the whole point about the Taliban and Afghanistan - they are and forever will be a creature of Pakistan and the ISI. The uncomfortable truth is that both the Bush and Clinton administrations have done nothing about this because Pakistan has nuclear weapons - and a culture of corruption (remember A.Q. Khan?) that would sell them in a second if they thought that they could get away with it. Couple that with the fact that Waziristan and Afghanistan share the Pashtoon tribe - who feel that they have the right to rule in Afghanistan - and you have the two prime motivations driving policy in the region.
Pakistan is a failed state - the tribal regions have essentially become independent, the army sucks all the money from the budget, and you have a security service that also operates independently, but is driven by it's own ideology (Islamic) and realpolitick (destabilize the neighbors) agenda. And the "recruits" for the Taliban these days seem to come mainly from Pakistan - from Afghanis who have lived there since the Russian times and from "ethnic" Pashto brothers in search of heaven.
If Cheney was in Pakistan delivering a message that the Pakistanis need to clamp down on the support for the Taliban - then it is about time that someone has finally figured out that the only way you are going to shut down the violence in Afghanistan is by shutting down the enabling agencies. And if you are dreaming that more "aid" in Afghanistan is going to suppress the outsiders - then you are just continuing down the same "build it up - they tear it down" road that has been going on for years. Cure the disease and the symptoms go away.
