Andrew C. McCarthy at the National Review has written an article on Pakistan. I wish I’d written this one.
The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.
The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.
The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.
I’ve never really understood why we were so “buddy buddy” with Pakistan, and less so with their neighbor India, who is the worlds largest democracy. I suppose part of it could be the whole “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” strategy. Pakistan is more dangerous and unstable than Iran in my opinion. If the government falls into the wrong hands, which isn’t unlikely, we could have a major nuclear problem on our hands.
