This Seems Familiar Somehow

As Jeff Huber points out today, our little illegal war with Pakistan is getting rather out of hand.

U.S. special forces attacked militants in a Pakistani village near the Afghan border on Wednesday, according to a September 3 New York Times article by Pir Zubair Shah, Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez. The militants undergo a remarkable transformation in the course of the story.

In the headline they're "Militants." In the lead sentence they're "Qaeda militants." Three paragraphs in the bad guys are "Taliban and Al Qaeda." Several paragraphs later they're just "Qaeda" again, then they become just "Taliban," then "Taliban and Qaeda." In the last three paragraphs they're plain old "Taliban" and "Taliban" and "Taliban."

I don't buy for a second that all this name changing is merely sloppy writing on the part of NYT reporters. It has all the earmarks of being part of the long term, ongoing information operation designed to give the American public the perception that everyone Mr. Bush attacks in his woebegone war on terror had something to do with 9/11. If "Qaeda" attacked New York and Washington and every A-rab and A-rab wannabe Persian from Iran who we don't like is part of "Qaeda," then every A-rab and A-rab wannabe we don't like is responsible for 9/11.

Propaganda catch phrase-wise, "Qaeda" is a convenient substitute for "Commie," and if you don't hate the Qaedas and the Islamofabulism they stand for, then you're a Qaeda sympathizer, you dirty low down haji hugger.

It's also apparent to me that this info operation originates in one of the Pentagon truth ministries that sprang from Donald Rumsfeld's short lived Office of Strategic Influence. I hope you find the idea of the Pentagon running a deception operation on the American public shocking, but that's not the most shocking thing covered in this Sept 3 NYT story.

More shocking is that the story discusses what amounts to the Department of Defense assuming the authority to declare war, and even more shocking than that is that nobody seems to realize they're doing it and/or they don't appear to care.

No, nobody does seem to give a damn. Nor does anyone seem to recall the irony of Barack Obama getting savaged in the press for saying a year ago that he might send troops into Pakistan when, lo and behold, we're sending troops into Pakistan.

Considering we know that Obama doesn't have a problem with starting a war with Pakistan, and McSame doesn't have a problem starting a war with ANYBODY, it seems like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates figured sending in troops and bombs was just getting a jump start on the inevitable declaration of hostilities in January.

But it's cool, we're buying them off with half a billion or so. The Paks aren't going to complain too loudly.

And neither is the American public.

[UPDATE]: Or maybe the Pakistani government will indeed make an issue of this.

In a major development, the federal government on Friday announced disconnection of supply lines to the allied forces stationed in Afghanistan through Pakistan in an apparent reaction to a ground attack on a border village in South Waziristan agency by the Nato forces.

Political authorities of the Khyber Agency claimed to have received verbal directives to immediately halt transportation of all kinds of goods meant for the US-led Nato forces in Afghanistan for an indefinite period.

Authorities claimed the decision was taken in the wake of the growing unrest in the Khyber Agency that provides for the only ground link of the country to the war-torn Afghanistan. "Until now, drivers of the vehicles carrying goods meant for the foreign forces in Afghanistan were directed to reach the tribal agency between 7am to 10am, which were then escorted to the border town of Torkhum by the Khassadar force," the authorities told The News.

The authorities claimed that due to repeated attacks on the personnel of the Khassadar forces during the last one week and abduction of a few personnel, it had become difficult for the security forces to provide foolproof security to the supply lines.

Those pesky US attacks are making it too dangerous to get supplies safely across Pakistan to Afghanistan.

Go figure.