Wheat, Bread, Noodles and Global Competition

By Alan Caruba

My late Mother used to bake her own breads, along with cookies, cakes, and pies. I miss the taste of freshly baked bread and I miss the aroma that floated from the kitchen to the rest of the house. The author of several cookbooks, she knew a lot about the history of foods. Much of history was shaped by the development of agriculture, the growing of grains.

In the Middle East, it wasn’t called the Fertile Crescent for nothing. In Rome there were public ovens. The bakers of ancient Greece had a worldwide reputation. Much later when French peasants could not get bread, it sparked a revolution. “Let them eat cake” cost Marie Antoinette her head!

Great famines have marked history as well. There is a reason why bread is called the staff of life and there is a reason to keep an eye on today’s worldwide market for wheat. It reflects the competition between nations for the sale of this vital commodity.

Casting an eye over the world, one learns that Syria, in the midst of the riots to overthrow the Assad dictatorship, the more mundane business of the country goes on including the announcement that it plans to sell 50,000 tons of durum in extra stock bought from farmers last year.

Wheat Life, a publication of the Washington Growers of Wheat Association, monitors the global wheat market for its readers. Suffice to say that wheat is a major export for the U.S., generating billions in revenue every year. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. wheat exports will reach 31.3 million metric tons (mmt) in 2011 and 2012.

Farmers, as always, are dependent on the weather and other factors over which they have no control. In the U.S. the environmental movement has often been responsible for shutting off their access to water to “save” some reptile or other species. The EPA is trying to define “dust”, a by-product of farming, as a “pollutant.” This kind of regulation has a serious impact on the availability of all manner of foods at your local supermarket, in restaurants, and bakeries.

Since the growth of all vegetation, including wheat, is dependent on an abundance of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, the demand by global warming hucksters that emissions of this vital gas be reduced is idiotic, either domestically or worldwide.

But I digress. The fact that the world is now home to seven billion hungry humans will put a lot of pressure on farmers to produce more wheat, rice and other grains.

In 2007 India banned the export of wheat, but “large crops and inefficient storage centers means large quantities of India’s crop is spoiled every year.” India’s politicians are under a lot of pressure to ensure that the price of wheat remains within reach of its millions of poor people. Recently, however, India announced that it would allow private companies to export two million metric tons from its 86 mmt annual yield. That would make India the world’s second largest wheat producer after China.

China, however, is paying a price for the expansion of its wheat production. The Chinese Academy of Sciences says that the overuse of chemical fertilizers for the past thirty years is causing the deterioration of arable soil. When you have more than a billion people to feed, it poses a problem that could translate into political unrest, so the Chinese leadership pays a lot of attention to such things.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Russia’s export of wheat is expected to quadruple from last year to 16 mmt. In 2010, a hot summer that resulted in poor production led to a ban on wheat exports. The demand for Russian wheat has “outstripped the ability of the ports to handle it.” Former Soviet satellite nations such as Bulgaria and the Ukraine have had a banner year for wheat production.

This in turn has knocked Pakistan’s wheat producers out of the competitive marketplace despite the fact that it is the Middle East’s third largest wheat producer. Its expected exports of 3 mmt have been reduced to 1.8 mmt. Along with all its other problems, the excess wheat is likely to be dumped on the domestic market, driving prices downward.

From nation to nation, wheat, whether in abundance or the lack thereof, affects their internal affairs in ways that only rarely make headlines, but it remains as valuable as oil and other commodities that shape policies.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Pakistan Conundrum

By Alan Caruba

The answer to whether Pakistan is our friend is “It depends.”

That’s an apt description of U.S.-Pakistani relations over the years, but one thing is sure, Pakistan believes it is surrounded by enemies in general and fears India in particular. With a mindset like that, friendship is not a priority, but survival—even if it just means muddling through another day—most surely is.

I have read several books about Pakistan in order to understand this odd nation that was peeled off from India in 1947 when the British left. Divided between eastern and western sections, even Bangladesh, formerly East Bengal, separated from its western cousin, declaring its independence in 1971. In the ensuing civil war, a million died and ten million fled to India.

In “The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad” by John R. Schmidt, a former State Department diplomat for three decades, reflects on his years in Islamabad in the years leading up to 9/11. He is a sharp observer of Pakistan and provides a lively history while unraveling the complexities of its various tribal groups, who the Taliban were and are, and how Al Qaeda established itself there.

To understand Pakistan is to understand how very different it is from America. It is a feudal society from top to bottom and it came about because its founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a Bombay lawyer, envisioned a nation separate from India because he feared that Muslims would become a political underclass in a unified India dominated by Hindus.

Fully one-third of India’s Muslim population numbering 35 million people remained behind in India. In Pakistan, it took until 1956 to come up with a constitution, a decade after independence.

A feudal society relies on patronage to function. Thus, whoever holds power at any level in Pakistan is focused on looking out for his own patronage network and not for the general welfare of the nation.

As Schmidt explains, “It requires little imagination to see where such policies lead. They lead to the poorhouse. Nations whose economics are uncompetitive in the global marketplace yet dependent on imported fuel and other vital commodities, and whose governments pay out more than they take in, are bound to be chronically broke.” As a result, a third of the Pakistani federal budget is consumed by servicing its international debt.

Typical of the Muslim outlook, if you are not a Muslim you are simply the enemy. It doesn’t matter if you are Hindu, Christian, Jewish, or any other faith. The problem is exacerbated because of the divisions within Islam, primarily Sunni and Shiite, have little love for one another.

Based on its fear and loathing for India, Pakistan’s various leaders concluded they needed to be a nuclear power as a deterrent. That makes Pakistan a major concern for everyone around them, the world in general, and the U.S. in particular. “If jihadists succeed in seizing power in Islamabad,” notes Schmidt, “they will inherit an arsenal that today numbers approximately one hundred nuclear warheads.”

Pinioned between India on the south and Afghanistan to the north, Pakistan’s leaders, as often as not its army generals who seized control, have only their grievances and themselves to blame for troubles with India and the rise of the Taliban who threaten the government. This explains in part why its military has always been the most stable factor throughout its relatively brief history. Based on merit, it is also represents the best leaders the nation can produce.

Even so, the decision to use proxy jihadist fighters to influence who controlled Afghanistan turned out to be a very bad one. Schmidt believes that “Pakistan seems ill-equipped to deal with this rapidly metastasizing radical Islamic threat.” Can there be a more ironic fate for a nation founded to provide a home to Muslims? The threat the Islamic radicals represent is particularly painful in a nation, the majority of whose population, are more tolerant and moderate followers of Sufi Islam.

The U.S. was none too happy to discover that Pakistan had become a nuclear power. When 9/11 occurred, its leaders were told that their cooperation was required to facilitate the attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was told to break off relations with the Taliban and close its borders to Al Qaeda.

This explains why Pakistan has cooperated with the U.S. in the capture of top Al Qaeda leaders such Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but professed to be ignorant of the fact that Osama bin Laden was living in Abbotabad, a short drive from Islamabad. Indeed, for the Pakistanis, the news came as a shock and his assassination a cause for much chagrin.

In a similar fashion, the attack on Mumbai, India, by a radical Islamic group ended promising peace talks with India over Kashmir and left Pakistan’s international reputation in tatters.

As is the case in one Muslim nation after another, the central problem to their governance and international relations is radical Islam. Some nations like Indonesia have cracked down on it. Others like Yemen have been over-run by it.

Radical Islam, unless addressed by Muslims will remain a threat. It explains why U.S. troops will likely migrate in and out of Middle Eastern nations for years to come, shooting as many jihadists as possible, taking casualties, angering the local population, and confounding the public at home trying to understand why we’re there.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Pakistani Pit of Deception

By Alan Caruba

Even Pakistanis do not believe that their political and military leaders did not know bin Laden was living, as one columnist put it, “wrapped in the bosom of the Pakistani security establishment.”

Cyril Almeida, writing in the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, a few days after the killing of bin Laden noted that, when the question is asked privately, “No one will say anything but, yes, they knew he was there.”

For 34 of its 64 years, Pakistan has been run by generals whose military intelligence presumably works in league with its Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), though both have their own agendas. It is unlikely that much civilian control over either exists.

Almeida wrote, “If we didn’t know, we are a failed state; if we did know, we are a rogue state. But does anyone believe they didn’t know?”

If it were an individual, Pakistan would be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, subject to raging fears that India intends to invade on a moment’s notice and antagonistic to Afghanistan as it harbors those who attack it.

In his recently published book, “Pakistan: A Hard Country”, Anatol Lieven provides insight to a nation that, until lately, was home to the most wanted man on the face of the Earth, Osama bin Laden. He was dispatched in a compound that was within a short distance of Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point or England’s Sandhurst. If we are to believe Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership, neither had any idea he was there.

“Trying to understand Pakistan’s internal structures and dynamics is complicated,” writes Lieven. “If there is one phrase which defines many aspects of Pakistan…it is ‘Janus-faced’: in other words, many of the same features of Pakistan’s state and government which are responsible for holding Islamist extremism in check are at one and the same time responsible for holding back Pakistan’s social, economic, and political development.”

“Pakistan,” writes Lieven, “is divided, disorganized, economically backward, corrupt, violent, unjust, often savagely oppressive towards the poor and women, and home to extremely dangerous forms of extremism and terrorism.”

Pakistan came into being in 1947 when leaders of India’s Muslim population like Mohammed Ali Jinnah, its founder, made it clear they did not want to be part of the newly independent India after Great Britain relinquished its colonial rule. Later, when East Pakistan broke loose to establish its independence in 1971, it became Bangladesh.

The thing Westerners find difficult to understand is the tribal nature of nations like Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it is not difficult to understand “Muslim nationalism and the bitter hostility to the U.S. role in the Muslim world in general and Pakistan’s region in particular.” However, in order to pursue the present combat role against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the U.S. and its European allies rely on neighboring Pakistan in order to provision supplies to their troops.

Since the Taliban are a creation of Pakistan’s ISI and because Pakistan has long been where al Qaeda has found refuge, those in charge have played a Janus or two-faced role for a very long time; at times providing intelligence of great value and at others aiding or at the very least, protecting the terrorist organizations. In return, the Taliban have proven an internal problem for the military and the government, occasionally requiring that they be driven out of areas they have seized.

In many ways, Pakistan is barely a nation. In its tribal northwest regions, such as the now fabled Waziristan, the state has little influence or control. As to its tribes, the two dominant ones are Punjab and Pathan. Both pursue their own interests.

As Lieven describes it, “A fundamental political fact about Pakistan is that the state, whoever claims to lead it, is weak, and (the) society in its various forms is immensely strong.” It is a nation of many separate fiefdoms who “plunder the state for patronage and favors” and this is graphically demonstrated by the fact that “barely one percent of the population pays income tax, and the wealthiest landowners in the country pay no direct taxes at all.”

Thus, the billions that the U.S. has pumped into its economy take on a very critical role, particularly for the military. This is a very different world from that of the West. The majority of Pakistan’s political parties are dynastic, led by a few powerful families. The entire society operates on kinship loyalty.

Pakistan is a perfect example of why the U.S. and the West are stymied by the illogic, the irrationality, and the duplicity of nations in which Islam is the predominant factor in their politics and society.

When you add in the geography of Pakistan, lodged between India and Afghanistan, bordered by China and Iran, you have a nation that can neither be ignored nor abandoned because of its strategic location.

Finally, there is the fact that Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal that must never be allowed to fall into the hands of the Taliban, al Qaeda, or anyone else crazed enough to use it for the greater glory of Allah.

Pakistan is a pit of deception and it is notable that our current relations with it consist of the special operations raid that killed bin Laden and the drones that continue to kill al Qaeda and Taliban who make themselves available targets.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Mysterious Middle East

By Alan Caruba

I don’t think anyone knows what’s going to happen in the Middle East and that includes the people who live there as well as those who have ruled them despotically for decades, if not centuries.

The bad news about the Middle East is that all this rioting, insurrection, et cetera, has very little to do with “freedom” and everything to do with its peoples wanting Sharia law and mullah control. In that area of the world that is what Islam preaches and what Muslims want. When you have to pray five times a day, there's not a lot of time left over for an objective understanding of the world.

Muammar al-Gadhafi is doing what one would expect him to do. He’s trying to stay alive and to keep his hold on the oil riches of Libya. To accomplish this, he will kill as many Libyans as necessary. We tend to forget that despots in Syria and Iraq, the late masseurs Hafez al Assad and Saddam Hussein, slaughtered thousands of their own people to gain and retain power. One can only guess at the death toll in Iran.

Egypt gave the impression of being a not too horrible place to live, so long as you lived in America or somewhere else. The military essentially owned Egypt and everyone else there resents it. What do we want in Egypt? Stability. Therefore we want the military to stay in power since most of its officers were trained by U.S. military and we give them over a billion a year not to attack Israel. Again. And get whipped. Again.

Only at this point there is no stability in Egypt and typically everyone at the bargaining table wants a piece of whatever wealth there is to be had. The Muslim Brotherhood wants a return to the seventh century as soon as possible.

The real action will be in Saudi Arabia where the wealth really exists and has been carefully tended by the “royal” family of Saud. They have worked closely with America because, oddly enough, we are the only major power they trust. We need their oil. If it takes every carrier, destroyer and cruiser we have in that part of the world, plus a lot of Marines, Army, and Air Force, you can bet we will ensure they stay in power and in the oil business.

The other Gulf States are strategic U.S. assets. We park our Navy in Bahrain. We do a lot of business in Abu Dubai. We want the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait to keep pumping oil and sending it to us. They want to avoid being taken over by Iran.

Nobody, but nobody knows how Iran will end up. A lot depends on whether a whole generation of young Iranians can stage a successful revolution, drag the ayatollahs into the streets, and hang them from telephone poles. So long as the nut jobs remain in power they will get nuclear weapons and force everyone to bomb the crap out of them.

Not mentioned at this point is Pakistan, a failed state beset by the Taliban with whom it has tried to maintain good relations despite the threat they present. Pakistan remains insanely afraid India will sneak in one night and reclaim their territory. It has nuclear weapons that the U.S. and all other nations want to ensure do not become the property of either al Qaeda or Iran. Islam is killing Pakistan.

There are three wild cards at this point, Lebanon, Jordan, and Yemen. The first two have large Palestinian populations. Lebanon is now controlled by Iran and Syria via Hezbollah. Jordan’s fallback position is the Bedouin tribes that support its king, but there is increased clamoring in the streets because that’s what Palestinians do.Yemen like other Arab states is in turmoil and only military analysts pay it much attention. Then there is Somalia, pretty much "Apache country" because no one who goes there comes back alive.

Lastly, there’s Afghanistan, a nation that has been unsuccessfully invaded by great powers who never learn one of the first lessons of history, never invade Afghanistan.

If you harbor the illusion that the White House, Department of State or the Pentagon has the slightest idea what is happening in the Middle East or what will happen in the Middle East, you are mistaken. And they are currently led by the most pro-Islam President in the history of the nation.

No one knows. Everyone wishes they did.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Faisal Shahzad Warns America

By Alan Caruba

Faisal Shahzad was sentenced to life in prison on October 6th for trying to kill a lot of innocent Americans in Times Square on May 1, 2010. He was completely unrepentant and we need to understand the funhouse-mirror mentality of Muslims who believe that Allah, through the Koran, has granted them, not just the right, but the duty to kill infidels who offer any defense against their outrages.

There is no question that the U.S. has had to be active militarily in the Middle East ever since the former Iraq dictator, Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait on President George H.W. Bush’s watch.

The former director of the CIA, ambassador to China, and then leader of the free world understood that, if no action was taken, Saddam would be into Saudi Arabia next. Saddam had previously spent eight fruitless years in a war with Iran. It is one of history’s ironies that his son, George W. Bush was president on September 11, 2001 when the homeland was attacked by Muslim terrorists.

According to Iran’s president, Mamoud Ahmadinejad, and most of the people in the Middle East, 9/11 was an “inside job”, staged by the CIA or even the White House for the sole purpose of justifying the invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq. You have to be able to believe the unbelievable to be a Muslim and the more absurd the better.

That’s the background to the story of Shahzad who was born in Pakistan in 1979 and, on December 22, 1998, was issued a student visa in Islamabad to come to America. In a stunning article by Jessica Vaughan, “Faisal Shahzad: So Easy, Anyone Can Do It”, the author spells out why America, before and ever since 9/11, has been allowing Middle Easterners to come here and plot to kill us.

Vaughan, a former U.S. consulate officer who dealt with the issuance and denial of visas, spelled out why Shahzad was a poor candidate for the bounties America would bestow upon him. To begin with, he failed to demonstrate that he had the academic qualifications to study here.

“He was applying as a transfer student, and his transcript from his correspondence course with Southeastern University, a now defunct fourth-rate academic program, show a GPA of 2.78, including several D’s and an F in basic statistics.” Moreover, there has been no information released regarding how Shahzad claimed he would pay for his education, “another common deal-buster for student visa application.”

Vaughn speculates that since Shahzad’s father was “supposedly a prominent military officer” the consulate did not want to deal with his or his government’s complaints if his son was refused a visa. Oddly, the visa was for four years when two would have sufficed for him to complete his degree requirements.

What emerged was a pattern of behavior that should have gotten Shahzad on the next plane home to Pakistan, but did not. In 2001 he began working for a temporary staffing agency even though his student visa did not include permission to work. A year later he was issued a H-1B visa. This particular visa is intended to bring in the best and the brightest to work here, not some middling, ordinary worker.

For reasons unknown, in 2004, Shahzad came under the scrutiny of the local Joint Terrorism Task Force. Despite this, his U.S. born wife filed a green card petition for him and it was approved in January 2006 even though the marriage was quite sudden, a red flag as some foreigners marry to establish grounds to stay.

Vaughn notes that “the green card application process is firmly rigged in the alien’s favor, with few applications refused or challenged, especially those involving marriage to a U.S. citizen.” In October 2008, Shahzad applied for U.S. citizenship. The fact that most immigrants wait six to ten years before applying didn’t raise any suspicions seven years after 9/11. And this one was from Pakistan, a hotbed of jihadist activity.

The U.S. is in a virtual state of war with Pakistan. It is blocking a major supply route to ours and NATO troops in Afghanistan and it is harboring the Taliban. It is a nuclear state so the stakes are quite high.

On April 17, 2009 Shahzad was sworn in as a U.S. citizen. In the vast bureaucracy of the immigration process, the fact that he had earlier aroused some suspicion was lost.

After that, it gets very dicey. On June 2, 2009, Shahzad left for Pakistan and did not return until February 3, 2010. Three months later, he attempted to kill Americans in Times Square.

At his sentencing, he told the court, “Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun. Consider me the first droplet of the blood that will follow. We are only Muslims trying to defend our religion, people, homes and land, but if you call us terrorists, then we are proud terrorists and we will keep on terrorizing you until you leave our lands and people at peace.”

This does not, of course, explain why Muslims have been committing acts of terror worldwide in London, in Madrid, in Mumbai, in Bali, and everywhere else they seize the opportunity to use terror to advance their ultimate goal of global domination. Claiming to be victims is bizarre.

Every step of the way, the U.S. made it easy for Shahzad to betray a nation that offered him an opportunity that countless thousands around the world want; the chance to become an American.

We need to pay attention to the warning Shahzad gave us. Somewhere in the huge bureaucracy of our immigration, our homeland security, and our intelligence services, those issuing visas and those charged with protecting us need to make it far more difficult to permit anyone from the Middle East to arrive, to blend in, and to plot the next terrorist act.

We are all just that much more vulnerable because in 2008 we elected a president who has made it clear that one of his objectives is to “reach out” to the Middle East in order to convince Muslims we are their friends. They are not our friends, nor even friends to one another.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Why Are We Still Asking Why?

By Alan Caruba

We are now nearly nine years passed the attack on September 11, 2001 that killed some 3,000 Americans in the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and seventeen years since the first attack, a car bomb, failed to bring down the Twin Towers.

Jihadists have been killing Americans for a long time; from the 1983 attack on the Beirut Marine barracks to the attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole, the recent Fort Hood attack, and now the abortive car bomb attack in Times Square.

Why are we still asking why?

Why is the mainstream press publishing headlines such as the Associated Press gem, “NY car bomb suspect cooperates, but motive mystery” or USA Today’s “Motive of NYC car bomb suspect remains a mystery.”

Why does the press continue to speculate or to publish the now standard “explanations” that the terrorist, whether it be Major Nidal Malik Hasan who killed 13 Fort Hood soldiers while yelling “Allahu Akbar” or the latest manifestation, Faisal Shahzad, who tried to kill countless Americans in Times Square on Saturday evening is motivated by anything other than Islam?

Every other reason than Islam is offered and this opinion-shaping process is getting old. Since 2002 the U.S. has tried dozens of Muslims involved in various plots.

It’s not some odd mental derangement. It is Islam.

It is not all Muslims, many of whom have ample reason to fear the jihadists in their midst, but there have been enough jihadists and more than enough terrorist events worldwide to recommend a united front against them.

It can be argued that more Muslims have died at the hands of the jihadists than “infidels”. A website, www.thereligionofpeace.com, has recorded 15,247 Muslim terrorist incidents since 9/11 and yet all manner of U.S. officialdom keeps saying there must be some other reason than Islam.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s first response was that the car bomb might have been put in Times Square by “somebody with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill or something. It could be anything.” How detached from reality is the Mayor? Having asked, it’s worth noting that he also once proposed putting windmills on top of all the city’s buildings to generate electricity.

No one is more skilled at denying reality than Muslims themselves. Dawn, a leading Pakistani newspaper, followed the breaking Times Square bomber story. “We are shocked, why did he do this?” asked one man in the street in Peshawar.

Did it have anything to do, as Dawn reported, with the fact that “In the 1980s, when Shahzad was a child, Peshawar was a staging post for the mujahideen who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a place frequented by Osama bin Laden and swollen by a morass of two million Afghan refugees”?

Dawn interviewed Advocate Kifayatullah Khan, a former member of the provincial bar council. “He said the family believed that Shahzad had been framed. ‘The entire family is highly educated and enlightened. The villagers don’t believe that Shahzad could act in such a manner.’”

As any observer will tell you, an advanced education is often a component of the jihadist’s decision to use terror against America. Major Hasan and even 9/11 pilot, Mohammed Atta, were college graduates and Shahzad was a 2000 graduate of the University of Bridgeport (CT) with a degree in computer science who is a naturalized American.

Islam is in confrontation with every other religion worldwide and has been since the seventh century. It lacks any theological impetus toward tolerance. Its holy book, the Koran, heaps calumnies on Jews, Christians, and “those without a book”, Buddhists and Hindus. Any criticism is justification for threats and worse. It sanctions the killing of infidels and apostates,

It is the state religion and the highest legal authority of Middle Eastern nations that have proven resistant to any true modernization beyond the adoption of Western technology. All, with the exception of Turkey, are dictatorships or monarchies though Iraq, liberated by U.S. intervention, is moving slowly toward democracy.

Despite a long history of terrorist acts in New York, Bali, Madrid, London, Mumbai, and in the nations of Israel, Lebanon, Kenya, Tanzania, Russia, Iraq, Thailand, Indonesia, and Sudan, some people and elements of the nation’s media keep asking why!

For now and into the immediate future, it would be a good idea if the U.S. State Department stopped giving out visas like lollypops to Middle Easterners and others from predominantly Muslim nations.

It would be a good idea if the Department of Homeland Security would begin paying more attention to Arab visitors as well as native-born and naturalized Arabs in America instead of members of the Tea Party.

It would be a good idea of the U.S. military would take off the politically correct blinders and stop blathering about “diversity.”

It would be a good idea if we stopped listening to the eyewash of the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations and other apologists for Islamic terrorism.

At some point Americans have to stop asking why we are targeted.

We know why the car bomb was set to kill Americans in Times Square. We know why the Christmas Day bomber came close to killing those on the airliner. And we know that militant Muslims will try again.

For seven of the last nine years the Bush administration kept Americans safe from further attacks through vigilance and the preemptive use of power. Since the advent of the Obama administration in 2009, terrorist incidents have increased.

Worried about terrorism? We now have a president who, in his book, Audacity of Hope, wrote: “The stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their [Arab-Americans'] sense of security and belonging.... I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Islamists Think It's Open Ended

The Open-Ended War

By Alan Caruba

As I listened to the President address the nation from West Point, I was reminded of how well he can deliver a speech. It’s like watching a slight-of-hand magician. You marvel at his dexterity, but you know he’s still skillfully fooling you.

The speech, given in the Eisenhower auditorium at West Point, reminded me of President Eisenhower, the former general who led allied forces to victory in Europe in World War Two, the man called back to serve his nation, and a man who was hard on the ears when it came to delivering a speech. It made him more human. We forgave him his blunt manner. After all, he had spent his whole adult life in the U.S. Army, taking and giving orders.

Similarly President Bush never seemed all that comfortable giving a set speech, but you knew he meant what he said. You knew he hated the evil of al Qaeda and the Taliban. You knew he despised Saddam Hussein and other enemies of America, of freedom, and human dignity. He was not smooth, not articulate, but he was genuine.

Barack Hussein Obama never spent a day in uniform and something in the area of two years out of six of his first term in the Senate before being launched on the nation as its savior, its messiah. I always found the references to spiritual powers jarring though, like most, amusing in their over-reach. Obama did nothing to discourage the image.

His West Point speech was primarily political. The military elements revealed a get-in and get-out strategy in what has already been a long engagement of the U.S. military in the Middle East. It was filled with talk of NATO partners, Afghani partners, and Pakistani partners, but it also told the enemy that, if they were just patient enough, the U.S. would leave.

Wars, the generals tell us, have to be fought in terms of what the enemy does, not by any timetable we devise. Obama handed us, al Qaeda, and the Taliban a timetable.

When we leave, the Afghan government will still be as corrupt as ever. When we leave the Pakistan government will be as shaky as ever, though perhaps a bit bolder in its desire to resist the Taliban.

Obama made a powerful argument for the need to stamp out the Taliban and kill al Qaeda. He also said that both had “defiled” Islam “one of the world’s great religions.”

Islam is also the world’s single most violent and destabilizing ideology, causing death and spreading terror recently in the Philippines, destroying Somalia, and with a list of atrocities from Mumbai, India, to Madrid, Spain, to London, England. And, of course, on 9/11.

Islam struck again at Fort Hood, Texas.

The one undeniable fact of our times is that the U.S. and the civilized world are in an open-ended war with Islam.

Ironically, one of the expressed aims of al Qaeda is the overthrow of the monarchs, despots or elected leaders of Middle Eastern Islamic nations.

Neither al Qaeda’s soldiers, nor the Taliban, wear uniforms. They are classic guerrilla fighters, fading away like fog into the indigenous population. Not since the day of the Kamikaze, has the world witnessed suicide as an act of war.

While listening to our young President, I was reminded, too, of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, possibly one of the greatest ever delivered in America since Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.

On that cold January day in1961, Kennedy said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

While Obama’s speech was delivered well and met with polite applause from the cadets and others at West Point, its real message was that America will not shoulder the burdens of an open-ended war by itself or with the desultory support of NATO allies.

I thought, too, of the long Cold War America fought with the former Soviet Union.

For a little while, Afghanistan will be Obama’s war. And then we will leave.

We have some big problems here at home, a recession and joblessness, but we have always been able to work our way out of these cyclical financial difficulties.

This time it’s different. We have a White House and Congress hell-bent on initiatives such as Obamacare and Cap-and-Trade that will utterly destroy the economy and the nation. And they know it. And they don’t care.

One wonders, at this time and place, which is the worse enemy?

Afghanistan, Bananistan

By Alan Caruba

Though it pains me deeply, I have to agree with President Obama’s reluctance to send more troops into Afghanistan.

Perhaps he is thinking about the problems the Soviet Union encountered even though they had an estimated 100,000 troops there in the 1990s? Perhaps he is wondering why the United States has been there now for eight years with not much to show for it?

I am not interested in the “politics” of the President’s decision whether to stay, to increase troop strength, to maintain the current status, or to leave. Only leaving makes any sense and I worry that Obama may want to avoid looking like a wimp by pulling out.

To those that argue that leaving will embolden the Taliban or al Qaeda, may I respectfully suggest they don’t need anything to feel that way other than their fanatical belief in Islam.

Then there is the nasty little problem called Hamid Karzai and his government of Afghanistan; the one that stuffed the ballot boxes so blatantly in a recent election even the United Nations could not ignore it. As for his government, it ends at the city line of Kabul.

In the event you missed the news this week, we are bleeding troops there at an indefensible rate. Meanwhile, in Iraq, al Qaeda or some other group blew up a chunk of the presumably secure “Green Zone” in Baghdad, killing some 165 people, in order to undermine confidence in their current government. Another car bomb just went off in Pakistan; hardly news in a region where car bombs are the calling cards of every insurgency.

That’s what Arabs do. They may not like dictatorships, but they give ample evidence of being incapable of self-governance. The Ottoman Turks controlled the region from the 18th century until the demise of their empire following World War One. What we call the Middle East is largely the invention of the British and French.

Egypt has been run by Mubarak since 1981. The Assad family seized control of Syria in 1963. Iran has been run by the mullahs since 1979. Iraq was run by Saddam Hussein from 1979 until deposed by an American invasion in 2003.

Saudi Arabia has been run by Ibn Saud and his offspring since the 1920s and this is the case of the smaller emirates.

They are, as one diplomat described them, “tribes with flags.”

Afghanistan has been around since the days of Alexander the Great and he had a terrible time there. Every invading colonizing power that has ventured into Afghanistan has had a bad time. All eventually left.

We should, too.

Putting aside the likelihood that we can “win” a war of insurgency (Vietnam anyone?) there is one compelling reason why the U.S. should not waste its time, its treasure, and the lives of its brave troops there. The reason is oil. And Afghanistan does not have any.

In fact, about the only thing Afghanistan has are poppy fields for the purpose of producing heroin, its primary export.

Afghanistan does not have a stable government and what government it will have, no matter how many “elections” it holds, will be utterly and completely corrupt because that’s how business is conducted in a place that predates medieval Europe and most other nations.

The notion that the U.S. or NATO can or should engage in “nation building” in a place that’s been run by competing warlords and tribal chieftains ignores centuries of evidence to the contrary.

Though I do not credit Obama or the people around him with much intelligence, it could be they have looked at a map of the Middle East and concluded that Pakistan is the real problem. Only in recent months, despite having had billions of U.S. dollars poured into its coffers over the past decade, has Pakistan begun to marshal its military to attack the strongholds of al Qaeda and the Taliban in a frontier area adjacent to Afghanistan.

The reason for this is two-fold; the Pakistanis have been reluctant to venture into their frontier areas because it is full of fanatical Muslims and it is an area, like neighboring Afghanistan, in which it is difficult to conduct military operations.

Secondly and far more important to the Pakistanis is their belief that their other neighbor, India, is set to invade any minute of any day. They have believed this since becoming a nation specifically for Muslims in 1947, carved out of former Indian territory.

Did I mention there is no oil in Afghanistan? From the 1920s, following the demise of the Ottoman Empire that ruled the Middle East, the great powers, Russia, England, France and America, have butted heads over the region. The reason was oil.

While Afghanistan has been around forever, Iraq is a colonial invention of the British, as is Jordan. Syria and Lebanon were handed over to the French. The control of Iran, formerly Persia, changed hands between the British and Americans until the Islamic Revolution in 1979 turned it into a mad house run by mullahs.

So, President Obama is right to hesitate about sending more troops to Afghanistan and he will be right if he pulls out. It is doubtful the Russians will want to return any time soon.

After eight years in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American military, a force composed of volunteers, is very tired and is very much in need of a rest as well as replenishment of just about everything needed to wage war.

Since the end of World War Two, the U.S. no longer fights wars to win. The Korean peninsula is still a stalemate. We now have embassies in Vietnam instead of armies. And the peoples of the Middle East are sick of us, no less than of our allies too.

It is time to leave Afghanistan and it has been time to leave for a very long time. Come on, Mr. President, do just one thing right.

Pakistan Implodes

By Alan Caruba

The wars going on in the Middle East will soon be the entire world’s next war as the fanatic Islamists throughout the region threaten to take over Pakistan and Afghanistan while continuing to wage war in Iraq. If they’re successful, India will be dragged into the full scale battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Where it spreads from there is anyone’s guess.

It is a battle between the seventh century of Islam and the twenty-first century of the rest of the world. It is a battle between men who believe that Allah demands it and they are prepared to spend as much time as necessary to achieve victory.

It is a battle in which the United States has been an unwilling participant for a very long time. The jihadists drew blood in Beirut, Lebanon during the Reagan years in the 80s and again when they blew up two U.S. embassies in Africa during the Clinton years. Tellingly, it included an abortive effort to destroy the Twin Towers in 1993.

After September 11, 2001, Americans applauded the vigorous response of the Bush administration in Afghanistan, but in point of fact al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri easily moved across the border into Pakistan and intelligence services believe they have been there ever since.

This enemy senses serious weakness in the new President. Obama has chosen Afghanistan, the worst place to fight a war, as his new “front” while at the same time announcing he is withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. The increase of bombings in Iraq is no accident. It is an al Qaeda calling card. The worst of the news is the potential collapse of Pakistan as Taliban factions acquire more and more territory in what has always been a very poor excuse for a nation.

As Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper, Dawn, recently said in an editorial, “…the Taliban are no longer a threat, but a grotesque reality,” noting that “The writ of the government weakens by the hour, while the terrorists are steadily emboldened. Yet the state and its institutions—including the military—have so far shown an appalling lack of commitment or wherewithal to force back the swarm.”

This is a newspaper in a Muslim nation, written by Muslims, who call the Taliban “grotesque.” And they should know! The editorial warned that, “The time in which to turn back the tide is fast running out.”

One of the most brilliant analysts of Middle Eastern affairs is Walid Phares, the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “As the U.S. administration and its allies are devising a new strategy for the next steps in Afghanistan, the jihadists have already begun their next move—but this time it’s inside Pakistan.”

“If Washington and its allies fail to see the big picture in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda,” wrote Phares, “which unfortunately may be the case now, the rapidly deteriorating situation will soon exceed the northwestern provinces of Pakistan to spill over to both Afghanistan and India.”

Simply put, you cannot negotiate with the Taliban or al Qaeda. Their promises mean nothing because they operate under taqiyya, an Arab/Muslim term that terrorism expert, Douglas Farah tells us is “embraced by radical Islamists. It blesses the concept of disguising one’s beliefs, intentions, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions or strategies from the enemy and the infidel.”

“In practical terms,” says Farah, “it is manifested as dissimulation, lying, deceiving, vexing and confounding with the intention of deflecting attention, foiling or pre-emptive blocking.”

In an excellent Policy Analysis published by the Cato Institute on April 13, Malou Innocent shared her observations after having recently returned from a fact-finding trip to Pakistan.

Just how bad is the situation there? All of the seven tribal agencies administered by the Pakistan government are either under the de facto control or threatened by the Taliban movement. A recent truce between the government and the Taliban is of no real substance and should not be treated as such. As Ms. Innocent notes, “the military agreed not to launch operations without consulting tribal elders…(but) the army is more inclined to fight India, not a civil war within its borders.”

That is extremely bad news, but Pakistan has been a nation of extremes since it came into being after breaking away from the newly independent India in 1947 to become an Islamic state. The army—currently some 600,000 soldiers—has been the only stable element and has provided a number of presidents or rulers via coups.

Elements within the government such as its intelligence service have leaned favorably toward the Taliban and al Qaeda. Even so, “U.S. officials acknowledge, however, that the Pakistani government has captured more terrorists and committed more troops than almost any other nation in the ‘war on terror’.”

In its urban, modern cities and areas, there appears to be a genuine desire for real democracy, but the Taliban threatens to drag Pakistan back to the seventh century in its quest for a new caliphate. While the nation has remained focused on war with India since its founding, the real threat has always been the growth of fundamentalist Islam and it now poses the potential overthrow of the government.

Should that government fail, you will watch India go to full battle-ready status. Afghanistan’s government will likely fail despite the presence of U.S./NATO forces and the momentum to continue the jihad into all the nations of the region would pose a grave threat to the West. It could only be solved only by combat.

And the question everyone is wondering, if not asking, is whether Barack Obama will make the tough decisions necessary to keep Pakistan from falling to the Taliban or is willing, as George W. Bush was, to drive out a tyrannical regime?

Events Will Decide Obama Presidency

By Alan Caruba

A former British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was once asked what he feared most and his answer was, “Events.”

Leadership is tested by things that happen over which neither a Prime Minister, President, nor any other national leader has any control. Bush43, as are all Presidents, was warned daily of potential threats, but until 9/11 Bush was into a relatively standard first term feeling his way with Congress on a few legislative initiatives.

History will record that Bush43 was up to the moment. People forget that, not only had he attended and received degrees from both Yale and Harvard, but had served in the Texas Air National Guard and qualified as a fighter pilot. This is no small feat. Moreover, he had experience in the business sector before becoming Governor of Texas. So, when 9/11 occurred, he had a lot of experience, knowledge, and resources to draw upon, including a father who had been President!

Bush made a strategic decision to expand the initial success in Afghanistan against al Qaeda to include the removal of a threat to the entire Middle East when he invaded Iraq, along with the British and other allies. Saddam Hussein had previously conducted an eight year war against Iran and had later invaded Kuwait. In retrospect, it appears to have been a good idea to rid the region of this destabilizing entity.

What was not anticipated, however, was the even greater destabilizing factor of fundamentalist Islam as personified by al Qaeda and the Taliban. It currently threatens the government of Pakistan. Until the entire world takes the Islamic jihad seriously and takes steps to tamp it down, “events” in the Middle East and elsewhere are going to continue to challenge peace everywhere.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina wreaked so much destruction over such a wide swath of Gulf States that surely no President could have anticipated it and clearly the federal government encountered levels of incompetence in Louisiana that were unforgivable.

Occurring while the Iraq war gave little evidence of a successful outcome meant that these two events rendered blows to Bush’s presidency from which it would never fully recover. The coup de grace came late into the last weeks of his presidency when the sub-prime mortgage crisis was precipitated by a run on U.S. banks that has not been fully reported upon to this day.

At this point President Obama has not been tested except by the appearance of incompetence among those he has chosen for his cabinet and as his White House advisors. They are generally ideologues and often radical in their views. The most reputable among them and the most welcome is literally a holdover from the Bush administration, Robert Gates as the Secretary of Defense. Other than Gates, the Obama administration is a re-run of the Clinton administration with none other than the former First Lady as Secretary of State. How bizarre is that?

The President’s primary response to the banking/housing crisis, the problems facing elements of the U.S. auto industry, and even the outbreak of swine flu has been to literally throw billions of dollars at them.

No one, other than Republicans, appears to be asking where this money is going to come from without drastically raising taxes; the worst option in a recession or depression. That leaves borrowing and even China has voiced concerns about its continuing investment in U.S. treasury notes.

Beyond borrowing and spending money, there are the unknown, frequently unpredictable, and often grievous “events” that lie in wait for this President.

The fall of the Pakistani government to the Taliban could literally set off a third world war. Attacks on U.S. cities would create panic and demands for retaliation. A sudden surge of illegal immigration from Mexico if its government collapsed or was unable to cope with the flu outbreak has already initiated demands to close the 2,000 mile border. Some close observers already regard Mexico as a failed state.

The pressures on a Democrat administration that wants to reduce the investment in the nation’s military, that wants to create a more open border immigration and an amnesty policy, that has launched a charm offensive with enemies such as Iran, that wants to impose a nationalized healthcare system, all could and would be derailed by “events.”

History records that it was only World War II and the mobilization of America that finally got the nation out of a decade-long depression, despite and often because of every effort made by the Roosevelt administration.

President Obama will discover what his predecessors did. There is no way to prepare for events that change public opinion overnight. There are only the time tested responses. That requires pragmatism, not idealism.

This President is going to be tested and, if his past is any indication, when events occur the choices he will have to make will likely prove unpalatable.

Too Much, Too Deliberately, Too Dangerous

By Alan Caruba

If the first hundred days of the Obama administration have been a blur of legislation, controversy, embarrassing choices to fill top positions, and reversals of the previous administration’s policy, it may well have been too much for the public to absorb.

It was, in my view, very deliberate. The Democrats inside the beltway who held the majority in Congress, now had a Democrat President to advance their agenda. They moved swiftly and, in doing so, they foisted massive trillion-dollar amounts of debt on present and future generations.

Over at the Federal Reserve, they revved up the printing presses and made money out of mere paper. It appears that the government has given away billions of taxpayer’s money without any true accounting as to who received how much. Meanwhile, banks that received TARP money are desperate to return it.

Barack Obama was the most visible President ever in the weeks since the inauguration on January 20. He seemed to be everywhere because, in many ways, he was everywhere. As an Associated Press story put it, “In all, Obama took more trips outside Washington in his first month than any of his five immediate predecessors had in theirs.”

Among those trips was one to London for a G-20 Conference in which he was rebuffed on his request that other nations do more to stimulate their own economies. He attended a NATO conference but was unsuccessful in getting its members to send more troops to Afghanistan.

Another trip was to a conference on Latin and South American affairs where Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez was eager to be photographed with him, saying “I want to be your friend.” Perhaps Obama’s relaxation of restrictions on Communist Cuba might have encouraged him to believe he had already found a friend? He sat through a 50 minute tirade against America by the Nicaraguan president and refused or just failed to criticize him for it.

People dubbed these trips the Great American Apology Tour. It made a lot of Americans, including his supporters, uncomfortable. Others were more blunt, warning that he made himself and the nation look and sound weak.

It has been a flurry of activity that included the closure of Guantanamo Bay prison, an announced troop withdrawal from Iraq, the transfer of some troops to Afghanistan, the reversal of a ban on stem cell research, a program that extended health care coverage to millions of children, and the virtual takeover of General Motors that included a demand its president step down (he did),

All this was very deliberate. His White House advisors knew they would have a limited amount of time to fully exploit the new President’s popularity before some cruel realities set in.

Among those realities will be a dramatic rise in unemployment as the tipping point arrives for General Motors and Chrysler. No doubt bankruptcy will be tried, but it seems unlikely at this point that either will survive. As summer arrives and workers are idle for nine weeks instead of the usual two, union support will begin to vanish. If the two companies cease to exist, Obama will be blamed. At the same time, many others are entering the unemployed lists. None of that bodes well for Obama.

An even greater problem is Mexico that gives every appearance of being on the brink of collapse. The drug cartels seems to be far better organized and armed than the government which, up to now, tried to ignore them until they could no longer could. The Mexican oil industry that provides the vast bulk of government funding has been poorly managed and now the country has been identified as the locus of a potential global pandemic of swine flu.

If Mexicans in large numbers head north, nothing short of massed troops on our 2,000 mile southern border will stop them. They will more seriously destabilize life in American than they already have, requiring huge outlays of public funds to teach their children, tend to their healthcare, and deal with crime. Will a Democrat President and leader of a Democrat Party that has pushed hard for amnesty try to stop a vast flow of immigration from a failing nation?

Far away in the Middle East, Pakistan is on the verge of collapse at the hands of the Taliban and, if that happens, it poses an immediate peril to India, a nation that has been a total obsession with the Pakistanis since they broke away in 1947. Both are nuclear armed nations and that is a recipe for a war that would quickly go beyond the borders of those two nations, particularly since Afghanistan is also in play with the Taliban.

The question remains, therefore, can a new President who has never managed so much as a Seven-Eleven, is among the youngest elected to office, and arrived there without so much as a full term in the Senate, meet these challenges?

So far, the only thing we know he’s good at is reading a TelePrompter and running up the national debt.

That, in itself, is dangerous to the economy and to the future, but some very dangerous people around the world have been taking his measure. If they think he is weak, likely to vacillate until it’s too late, or fail to take any action, events will swiftly turn very ugly for him and the rest of us.

Into the Afghan Slaughterhouse

By Alan Caruba

It seems like hardly a week goes by without news of more troops to be sent to Afghanistan. This is going to prove to be a great U.S. military blunder, made worse by the failure to consider that the former Russian regime, the Soviet Union, tried this and failed.

The lesson the Russians took from this apparently was to only invade small, defenseless nations on their border. The Afghanistan fiasco brought down the Soviet regime, but invading Georgia managed to make all of Europe shudder and look for somewhere to hide.

A wonderful Tom Hanks movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War”, relates Hollywood-style how covert assistance to the Afghan tribes neutralized Russian air power and resulted in ultimately driving them out. It can be counted a CIA success story. Wilson was a U.S. Congressman who took up the cause and pushed to fund it.

In November, on my website for The National Anxiety Center, I posted a fairly detailed analysis of why putting more troops into Afghanistan is a bad idea.

I come back to the subject because the situation there and the solution—more military—is such a truly bad idea. It is one which was put forth as a key element of President-Elect Obama’s campaign and which remains a priority for his new administration. Obama, who based much of his campaign on his opposition to the Iraq war has since selected Sen. Hillary Clinton to be his Secretary of State even though she voted to fund it. He has retained Secretary of Defense Bob Gates who took over from the disastrous post-invasion conduct of the war by Don Rumsfeld. We’re all still waiting for the “change” Obama promised.

Since then Pakistan’s government continues to founder as various elements within that nation battle for power. All seem to be in agreement that the U.S. is to be resisted for its involvement with the former regime. The Pakis are not thrilled about our present policies regarding the Middle East. Pakistan is critical to any U.S. military effort in Afghanistan because two of the key routes to re-supply our troops there pass through Pakistan. Those supply lines are now being attacked on an almost daily basis. Most close observers of Pakistan regard it as a failed state. It has almost always been run by its military since it was established in the late 1940s.

Reports are that local warlords are charging $1,000 per military supply truck to allow them through and even then they are still under attack along the long route that passes through various tribal fiefdoms.

I don’t even pretend to understand Afghanistan’s strategic value to Middle East policy, but I do know that every single nation that invaded Afghanistan, dating back to Alexander the Great, has been defeated, often to the tune of thousands of soldiers. Alexander was desperate to get out of the place and, after a while, so were the Russians.

Though Osama bin Laden is said to be hiding out in Afghanistan or the border area of Pakistan, we have notably not heard much from him and the multi-million dollar reward to anyone willing to tell us where he is hasn’t worked.

Afghanistan is incredibly mountainous, has few roads, and if you want to know what life was like in the seventh century AD, all you have to do is plan your next vacation there. British and French generals have gone on record saying it is a terrible place in which to wage any kind of war.

Former National Security advisor to President Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinksi, is of the opinion that all we really have to do is pay off the local tribal leaders and let them get rid of the Taliban. The same goes for weaning Afghan farmers off of growing poppies for the production of heroin. Europe is a big market for the drug and the Europeans might be induced to kick in a few dollars to rid themselves of this problem. The crop accounts for most of Afghanistan’s economy.

Sending twenty or thirty thousand more U.S. troops to Afghanistan when the most modest assessment of troop strength for any hope of success is around 140 thousand will only feed the Afghan slaughterhouse.

It’s bad enough the Pentagon and White House are hell bent to ignore what happened to the Russians, but they seem to also be repeating all the errors of the Vietnam War. It took some seven years to extricate us from that Cold War blunder. We’re now five years into stabilizing Iraq. So far I have been hard pressed to find an explanation why we should continue efforts in Afghanistan.

If “change” is the theme of the Obama administration, extricating ourselves from Afghanistan would be a very good place to begin.

Pakistan as a Perennial Problem

By Alan Caruba

Pakistan is another way of spelling T-R-O-U-B-L-E. Just ask anyone living in Mumbai or anywhere else in India, Kashmir, or neighboring nations.

Pakistan shares a 5,000 year old history with India. In 1,500 BCE, Aryan invaders from the northwest founded a thousand year Vedic civilization, but Pakistan and India’s real troubles began in 712 CE when Arabs invaded, bringing with them Islam. What followed was the Mogul Empire from 1526 to 1857 when the British Empire took an interest in the vast subcontinent, bringing with it the benefits of a modern civilization such as trains for transport and the machinery of governance.

When the British withdrew after World War II, on August 14, 1947, all hell broke loose as millions of India’s Muslim population fled into the area now known as Pakistan and to the east, Bangladesh, separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory. The turmoil of the separation and establishment of Pakistan has been a source of enmity between it and India ever since. To put it mildly, Pakistan has never been able to achieve a status of modern self-government. This is in part because Islam does not recognize any separation of church and state.

Since the 1970’s, Pakistan has largely been governed by its military. In 1971, a war broke out between Pakistan and India, one result of which was that Bangladesh broke away and became an independent nation. Millions fled in all directions, some into India, others into Pakistan, repeating the history that accompanied the establishing of Pakistan. By December, Pakistan surrendered and on July 13, 1972, the two nations signed a pact agreeing to withdraw their troops and resolve their problems peaceably.

After India, to the astonishment of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, tested its first nuclear weapon, Pakistan followed suit in 1998. The U.S. applied sanctions to both nations, later removed, but has since wisely tilted toward India, an emerging world economic power.

During the Cold War Soviet Russia provided North Vietnam with the weapons and support it needed and, after the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. mounted a covert support of the Afghani tribes that resulted in Russian defeat and withdrawal. The route through which American weapons made their way to that front line was Pakistan. Similarly, after 9/11 Pakistan became a staging area to pursue the Taliban and support U.S. troops still stationed in Afghanistan. The result of this has been that U.S. billions have been pumped into Pakistan. Any continuation of a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan requires the cooperation of whoever is running Pakistan.

Despite being Islamic, there is evidence that Pakistanis do want a secular government and the benefits of modernization. Living under a military dictatorship makes this difficult.

There are vast areas of Pakistan over which even its military has been unable to exert any control. The Northwest Provinces and Waziristan, the likely home to Osama bin Laden, are impenetrable. Then there is the disputed territory of Kashmir between the two nations. The result is that “non-state actors” such as al Qaeda and Kashmiri separatists have been able to operate and to create havoc between the two nations and inflict their murderous campaign to impose a new caliphate on the world. These people need to be killed.

The Indian government has acted with admirable restraint following the Mumbai attacks, but how long that will last will depend on international action. We can rule out the United Nations as utterly useless in this and all other atrocious behavior by fanatical Muslims. Consider the UN’s failure in resolving the Darfur crisis in the Sudan or inability to deal with comparable problems on the continent of Africa, the northern area of which is dominated by Muslim nations.

Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has recommended that “it would be useful for the United States, Europe and other nations to begin establishing the principle that Pakistan and other states that harbor terrorists should not take their sovereignty for granted. In the 21st century, sovereign rights need to be earned.”

If this sounds a lot like the Bush Doctrine of preemption, you’re right.

The military who run Pakistan, along with its intelligence services, despite the appearance of a democratic governing body, a president, elections, et cetera, are not to be trusted. It is entirely likely they played a role in equipping and training the Mumbai terrorists.

Thus, we are now living in a world where the largest international institution, the United Nations, continues to demonstrate its impotence and inability to respond to the rise of “non-state actors”, but the U.S. is also engaged in two separate conflicts in which Pakistan is geographically critical to our objectives to bring democratic reform to both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Can you spell T-R-O-U-B-L-E? It’s currently spelled P-a-k-i-s-t-a-n; trouble for the United States, trouble for India, and trouble for the whole of the Middle East given its nuclear weapons. Do you wonder still why Iran wants them too?

It is doubtful that President-elect Obama or his designated Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, will be able to resolve this Islamic time bomb. It is doubtful, too, that an international military operation will be mounted to root out al Qaeda and other terrorist forces.

Our attention to the Middle East is likely to exist for a very long time and our efforts to introduce democratic reforms in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the region will require the same kind of patient containment the Cold War necessitated from the end of WWI until the fall of the Soviets in 1991.

In the meantime, we can all hope that the incoming administration and Congress will be able to do something about the financial crisis—international as well as national in scope—before conditions arise that make war look like a viable response to India’s problems with Pakistan.

Can you say “World War Three”?

Going Nuts in Waziristan

By Alan Caruba

Okay, so let’s pretend you were one of the sons of one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia. You were guaranteed a good job. You had a couple of wives. The problem was that you just didn’t feel fulfilled. You weren’t a member of the royal family of Saud, so you could never be king. You probably would not become president of the family business no matter how hard you worked or prayed. So, there you are, stuck with a couple of million, a family, and a lot of time on your hands.

What would you do? You’d leave all that behind and go to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet army! You would show everyone how brilliant you were and create an organization called al Qaeda. Then, after the war was successful, having nothing better to do, you would organize and fund a plan to destroy the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

You almost pulled it off, too, except for those Americans that fought your hand-picked terrorists…er, jihadists and brought down the fourth plane in a Pennsylvania field. No one was more surprised than you when both towers fell. The Pentagon suffered damage, but was repaired. A lot of people died, but they were mostly infidels.

What followed was the failed uprising in Iraq because your guy there managed to kill enough Iraqis to piss them off and turn them against al Qaeda. Someone snitched on him and he got blown to hell. Your other efforts to demonstrate your piety and love of Islam only seemed to turn more people against you.

So, here you are, going slowly nuts in some god forsaken wilderness in Waziristan on the northwest border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. No high definition television. No air conditioning. Everything is just one damned mountain after another. The nearest pizza parlor is a couple of hundred miles away.

Worse yet, none of the leaders of the Arab nations like you and the Iranians don’t either.

What is there left to do? You can send audio messages via al Jazeera. Your best buddy, Ayman al-Zawahri has been doing the same, but who cares what he says, eh? You’re Osama bin Laden, Mr. Islam Big Shot.

So that’s what Osama has been doing. First to denounce the 60th anniversary of Israel and again, last Sunday, to denounce Arab leaders for doing nothing to help the poor Palestinians who haven’t gotten the message that the Israelis have won every war waged against them and maybe peace is not such a bad idea.

“They have decided that peace with the Zionists is their strategic option, so damn their decision.”

Not satisfied with just getting the Arab leaders angry with him, Osama also found time to denounce the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, who is busy trying to take over Lebanon instead of attacking Israel. No word yet on his opinion of Hamas, but we can be pretty sure he thinks they haven’t had enough casualties to prove their bona fides.

It’s a sure sign that the end of the Palestinian resistance is near when Osama bin Laden picks up the cause. He’s the kind of guy that wants to run to the front of the parade.

So far Osama bin Laden has been run out of Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Afghanistan, and everywhere else in the region other than Waziristan, a place where starting a fire involves rubbing two sticks together and bathroom facilities are a hole in the ground behind a big rock.

You’ve got your face on T-shirts and you can get media coverage any time you open your yap and talk about anything on your mind, but your mind is slowly waving bye-bye to you.

Bhutto Mysteries

By Alan Caruba

By now there have been at least three different stories regarding the assassination, the last being the official government version that she bumped her head on some part of the van and that was what really killed here. Now, that is so absurd that only the chairman of the Committee to Re-Elect Pervez Musharraf is going to believe it. It was either a bullet, a bomb or a combination of both.

Who killed her? Well, the Islamo-fascists in Pakistan have been saying they wanted her dead for a long time and there was a recent previous effort when one of their bombs killed 140 or so people when she returned to her native land. When jihadists say they killed her, I am inclined to believe them.

The real mystery will always be Benazir Bhutto who seemed driven to clear the name of her father who was executed by one of the long line of dictators that ran the nation. He had been prime minister. She had been, too. Twice. Both times charges of corruption were leveled against here--generally believed to be false--and the second time she had to get out of Dodge to avoid being thrown in jail. She had already spent a few years in a Pakistani jail and leaving made a lot of sense. She was later cleared.

Why, though, return? Why as a Harvard and Oxford educated woman would she submit to an arranged marriage because it was "the Muslim thing to do"? Why return when she had three children that would surely be left motherless? Why do so when Pakistan is home to some of the most rabid jihadists to be found anywhere?

I wonder, too, about the full role in this tragedy that the U.S. may have played? Reportedly the State Department put a lot of pressure on Musharraf to let her return and run for office. Was the U.S. picking up the tab for her return and campaign? Did State think Bhutto would crack down on the Islamo-crazies more than Musharraf? We will never know.

Bhutto will remain in many ways a mystery, but now it is time for reality and fable to mix. She will became a lessor diety than Gandhi, but she is right up there in that pantheon.

That's the problem of being saintly. It tends to get you killed.

The Middle East is in Play

by Alan Caruba

Far from the stability the Bush Administration neocons thought they would bring to the Middle East by overthrowing Saddam Hussein, today the region is "in play" as various elements of it seek to secure power and/or territory or both.

Today martial law was imposed in Pakistan. While obstensibly a democracy with its own constitution, legislature and supreme court, the nation is a laboratory study of what happens when large portions of the population think al Qaeda would be preferable to democracy. Desperately trying to keep the nation in one piece while keeping himself in charge, President Musharref suspended the constitution. What happens next is anyone's guess. Miss Bhutto should probably grab the first plane out of Karachi.

Meanwhile, Turkey has 100,000 troops, backed by planes and tanks, on its border with the Mosul Province of Iraq where the Kurds live and where a Kurdish Communist group, the PPK, has been staging attacks on Turkey for years. Even Saddam turned a blind eye when Turkish troops came across the border in hot pursuit, but the only real power in Iraq these days is the U.S. and it lacks sufficient troop strength to allocate any to the northern border to deal with the PPK. Since Turkey has wanted the return of Mosul since the end of the Ottoman Empire, you can bet that some of its politicians are thinking this would be a good time to put troops in and make that a fait accompli.

Lebanon is relatively quiet these days but that could change overnight. The Syrians want it back under their control and they, along with their surrogates, Hezbollah, may be able to cause enough mayhem to make that happen. The only problem they face is the presense of so-called United Nations peace-keeping forces, but they could be withdrawn at the sound of the first shot fired. That would leave Israel with almost no option except to intervene for its own security. Been there. Done that.

And all the while, U.S. allies are quietly withdrawing their troops from Iraq. The British are leaving southern Iraq which, for all intents and purposes, is under the sway of Iran thanks to the fact that it is a stronghold of Shiite Muslims for whom Iran is not an enemy.

Ironically, the most stable nations in the area are Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates. Let's hope they stay that way.