What everyone needs just about now is a collapse of the nuclear-armed Pakistani government, because our issues in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Israel, and Libya aren’t enough. We obviously need more chaos. Civilian planes getting shot out of the sky, reporters getting beheaded, and major outbreaks of the Ebola virus just haven’t created enough excitement. So, let’s see what happens when the government in Islamabad falls and we have to go searching for the pieces of their nuclear weapons program.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Who said today’s world isn’t challenging?
I’ve never lived in a world that wasn’t fundamentally shaped by Ronald Reagan, so for me, this is basically just a continuation of the premise that if you let sociopaths run everything, wealth will trickle down onto everyone else.
This thread is racist as fuck. Who are we to criticism, white men and women need to shut up and let matters take their own course, no matter the result.
Pakistan may have problems, but white power is not one of them. Let’s not make it one because there is nothing more vile on the face of the planet than white men.
Put down the bottle and go to sleep.
When Rand Paul suggested cutting aid to Pakistan last month, he used as reasoning the “persecution” of Christians–a theme that often arises when he talks foreign policy. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws often leads to mob persecution and stoning to death. Can’t bomb these f*ckers back to the Middle Ages as they still live in the Stone Age.
GUJRANWALA: Three female members of the Ahmadi community, including two minors, were killed and eight others were severely injured when an angry mob attacked and burnt five houses, a storage building and several vehicles over alleged blasphemy.
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Police have been deployed in the locality and no arrest has been made till the filing of this report. More videos.
Shahjiwana – SiDC
Your remark is ‘as racist as fuck’. There are also so black men and women in Washington and elsewhere in the world telling others what to do.
FU, racist!
wow, so much wonderful reviews and all of them are very interesting. I really like read other’s opinions.
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Collapse? No! That would be an arms control disaster, although it looks to me as if the government is pretty much in the hands of Al Queda already.
If we intervene, it must be with the full partnership of India as they are the front line state and I’m sure they understand Pakistan a whole lot more than we do. Not that India is in any way a friend, but in this matter our interests coincide. And if ground troops are needed, let them be Indian.
Actually I would speak with China about getting help to seize nukes.
No outside government or institutional body is going to seize Pakistan’s nukes. The people of that country take enormous pride in being a nuclear power. And they’re smart enough to realize that their nukes spare them from being invaded by other countries.
If the government collapses, someone will seize those nukes. Horrible as 9-11 was, imagine if a nuke had been used instead of two airplanes.
Why is everyone in such a panic these days? None of that stuff affects any of us.
Imagine if the US had aggressively pursued an alternate energy program, fiscally stimulated our own economy and curbed our appetite for foreign military interventions…right now we’d have an economy that would be far more effective in influencing world events than our military will ever be. In private letters to his friends President Eisenhower insisted that it was a strong US Economy that was our biggest strategic advantage not bombs.
To the rest of us he left this:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children.”
Until the Shining City on the Hill changes its priorities expect more of the same. Lead by example.
societal chaos in far-away lands doesn’t usually (directly) affect us.
Loose nukes might be another matter—and uncontrollable new viruses are a single plane ticket away….the earth has unfortunately gotten very small.
If the world has gotten very small, my suggestion is to make it larger again. Small isn’t working anymore.
You didn’t see this coming?
The US continues to kill civilians with drone strikes.
Imre Khan makes this the centerpiece of his political movement and wins a state government.
That state government stops a convoy of US supplies going into Afghanistan.
The Pakistani Taliban sets off bombs in Lahore.
India elects a nationalist BJP government.
Pakistan’s military, embarrassed after the killing of Osama bin Laden is chafing at the bit but divided as usual.
Opposition parties demonstrate and ask for the government to resign. The government refuses.
My prediction. Another strong military government just like the al-Sisi government in Egypt.
Remember these guys have nuclear weapons …and…reportedly a just-in-time delivery agreement for nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia.
And…Israel is stealing the most Palestinian land it has stolen in 30 years.
And you thought you only had a shaky Pakistan to worry about.
But John McCain still goes on Sunday talk shows to sing Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran.
Without the destruction of the Republican Party in Congress and legislatures in the fall, we are truly screwed. That isn’t cynicism. That’s telling the Democratic establishment that they better wake the hell up or both parties will be down the tubes…and a lot more.
Seen in retrospect, the Cold War period was actually quite a stable state, with both superpowers reinforcing the status quo in the standoff. That stability is long gone after our “victory”. Perhaps the achievement of (so far) evading a nuclear exchange was simply another (unrecognized) benefit of that stable state.
We have entered a new state of increasing global disequilibrium, both politically and economically. Much of it is driven by a faltering natural environment, with increasing scarce resources such as water. This creates ever more pressure on the already extremely wealth-unequal societies of the world. Of course, increasing wars for resources have been predicted for many years, and not just for oil, the resource we have already been warring over for decades.
This increasing global chaos will be interesting as a political issue for the blundering American Empire. Will we continue to think that the Imperial Sturmtruppen (properly deployed) and their new drone toy chest can continue to “stabilize” the world’s failing states and regions for the benefit of American capital and plutocrats, as John McStooge and the rest of the interventionist Repub party believe? Or will there be a party that openly states our universal military intervention is usually folly? That we actually can’t stabilize every conflict with our military?
Humans all over the world have decided that protection of the environment and its ecosystems and climate is not something they will sacrifice very much to save. The billions of carbon-burning humans now appear to be too much for the planet to bear, at least with their current extreme materialist mentality. Global warming is already constricting crop yields globally (both through droughts and extreme monsoon effects). Forests are burning everywhere. The coral reefs are dying, and the collapse of all ocean life (save things like jellyfish) is on the horizon.
Humans are aware of all this, yet forge ahead with shit like Jihad and “Liberty!” and luxury condos as a desired goal or “answer”. We have sowed the whirlwind….and the “collapse” of Pakistan would be just a small bump in the road we are on.
Mutually assured destruction focuses the mind most acutely and dampens internal partisan political conflicts.
Also creates its own kind of PTSD that starts with a mythology about Chamberlain and Munich bringing us to the Cold War and never going to do anything but unconditional surrender again.
And creates a military industrial complex with deep tentacles into Congress’s appropriations powers.
One more for your stack of “just what we need”. Courtesy of NATO searching for a reason for continued existence.
Guardian: NATO to create high-readiness force to counter Russian threat
A 4000-troop fast and furious force. Not big enough to be a deterrent; just big enough to be an incitement.
It is now the Vicky and Fogh show.
Warning Merkel on Russian `Invasion’ Intel | Consortiumnews
Not to worry — hasn’t that been the official western position wrt to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program for decades? Personally, I’d be less concerned if Iran had nukes and Pakistan didn’t. But wasn’t my call.
It’s 1990-2010 population growth rate of 55% also seems problematical.
You said it. Now Iran is our ‘firewall’ between the Daish and nuclear, Sunni Pakistan.