They Hate Us, They Really Hate Us

So here’s the problem in a nutshell: Pakistan has a history of providing nuclear weapons know-how to Iran and North Korea. They claim the release of this information by the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program was inadvertent, but D. A.Q. Khan only got a short period of house arrest as total punishment for this “indiscretion.” Pakistan also holds at least one hundred nuclear warheads in their arsenal. While there are Taliban attacks almost daily against Pakistani targets in an effort to unseat the purported secular government, these attackers are vastly more popular that the Americans who are flying drone missions into the Western Tribal district striking Afghan Taliban seeking safe harbor there, inflicting lots of collateral casualties on innocent Pakistanis.

Former President Zia al Haq (killed in a suspicious plane crash in 1988) made an unholy alliance with Muslim militants giving them the right to organize and pressure on local college campuses – a status protected through to the current day – in exchange for a laissez-faire permission for the government to continue in power unchecked. Thousands of Madrassa (Muslim fundamentalist primary and secondary schools, one of which is pictured above) exist all over Pakistan, teaching anti-American vitriol as a basic philosophy.

The military is being trained with an anti-American bent: “A U.S. diplomatic cable said the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, found officers at the National Defense University (NDU) were ‘naive and biased’ against the United States, a key ally which gives Pakistan billions of dollars of aid to help fight Islamist militants… Pakistan's military also controls the country's nuclear arms, and a series of attacks against military installations has heightened fears about the safety of those weapons.

“‘The elite of this crop of colonels and brigadiers are receiving biased NDU training with no chance to hear alternative views of the U.S.,’ the Wikileaks cable…quoted Patterson as saying.” HuffingtonPost.com, May 25^th. But clearly, that same military appears to be totally incompetent when it comes to guarding those weapons. A May 22^nd – 23^rd attack by Taliban militants on a Pakistani naval base kept Pakistani forces occupied for 17 hours, and a number of the estimated 10-15 attackers managed to get away. At least four Pakistani forces were reported killed, but the attackers were well versed in the operation of the base and the location of strategic targets: “A team of heavily armed insurgents stormed a major Pakistani naval base in the southern city of Karachi late Sunday[the 22^nd] night, setting off a prolonged gun battle with Pakistani security forces and, by some accounts, destroying an American-made aircraft at the base.” New York Times, May 22^nd.

The local press also played out the unauthorized American incursion that took out Osama bin Laden as a violation of Pakistani territorial integrity. Televised reports showed wildly cheering Americans in the U.S., raising the local ire to burning. Clearly, no Pakistani politician could ever hold office by walking the straight anti-terrorism American line. Yet all that American aid, billions and billions of dollars worth, is vital to sustain the Pakistani military. No matter what strings American Congress men and women may want to put on that aid, no Pakistani leader could ever survive agreeing to those conditions. But… and here’s the big but… we also have to support that same Pakistani military because it is the only barrier between angry Muslim extremists who would love to take those nukes and deploy them against Israel and the U.S…. and us. Bottom line, when it comes to the Pakistani constituency and notwithstanding Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to patch things up, they hate us, they really hate us. It all really sucks, doesn’t it?

I’m Peter Dekom, and playing politics in a hostile world is really tricky business.