Last Call For A War On The Board

Meanwhile, events in Kashmir have gotten so tense that India and Pakistan are all but in an open shooting war.

Tensions between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan escalated sharply on Wednesday, following conflicting claims by both of having shot down each other’s fighter aircraft in aerial ‘dogfights’ in the disputed Kashmir region.

A day after Indian Air Force (IAF) fighters attacked an alleged terrorist camp deep inside Pakistan, Islamabad said it had captured one Indian pilot after his aircraft was shot down in the first air-to-air engagement between the two forces since their last major war in 1971.

Pakistan military spokesman Maj Gen Asif Ghafoor said the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) had shot down two Indian fighters after they strayed into Pakistani air space and captured one pilot.

He told reporters in Islamabad that one of the IAF aircraft crashed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir while the second was hit and “limped” back to its base on the Indian side of the disputed principality.

He also displayed the seized pilot’s identity documents, in addition to publicising video clips of the trussed-up and bloodied pilot on social media outlets, in which he identifies himself and reveals only his service serial number.

India has called on Islamabad to treat the officer humanely and in accordance with the Geneva Convention. In a demarche to a senior Pakistani diplomat from its embassy in Delhi, India’s foreign ministry has demanded the pilot’s swift return.

An Indian foreign ministry official provided a different account of the events that led to the pilot’s capture. Raveesh Kumar claimed that Pakistan had responded to Tuesday’s attack by the IAF on a terrorist camp deep inside its territory by launching a retaliatory strike early the following morning against Indian military installations in Kashmir.

There's every indication that this is only going to get worse, and may I remind everyone, India and Pakistan are both nuclear powers.  Commercial flights to Pakistan have been suspended and Indian PM Modi has effective slipped the leash on India's military.

It's going to get bad most likely, and quickly.

Last Call For It's Too Early For This Nonsense

The rodent coitus is starting early for 2020, and I want nothing to do with the looming disaster that is Tulsi Gabbard.

Tulsi Gabbard is known — insofar as she is known — for bucking her party. She criticized President Barack Obama’s handling of ISIS. She was widely criticizedfor meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has been accused by the US government of using chemical weapons against his own people, when she traveled to Syria for a fact-finding visit in 2017. She rebuked the way the Democratic National Committee handled the 2016 presidential primary, and then publicly resigned as vice chair to endorse Bernie Sanders.

Now, nearly three years later, the Democratic member of Congress from Hawaii is poised to try to convince Democratic primary voters that they should turn the page not just on status quo politics, but on the Vermont senator whom she championed.

Gabbard has acknowledged that she is “seriously considering” a presidential bid. Her team is actively seeking to staff senior roles on a potential presidential campaign, according to a person briefed on the outreach, and has indicated that an announcement could come as soon as this week.

She’s in discussions with the Des Moines–based Asian and Latino Coalition about organizing an event with them sometime in the first two weeks of January. She did several events in New Hampshire earlier this month, on the heels of trips there before the 2018 election. She also made a trip to Nevada the week before the election to connect with “progressive” candidates and causes, and was set to hit early state bingo with a trip to South Carolina, but that trip was scotched due to plane trouble.

Even in a barely formed presidential field, Gabbard would enter the race as an underdog. She did not rate a mention in a Des Moines Register/CNN poll of the Democratic presidential field last week. House members have an inherently difficult time running for national office, as they are often little known outside their district. The last one to successfully do it was James Garfield — in 1880. In a field that could number more than two dozen candidates, Gabbard stands out as the only one to have met with Donald Trump, then the president-elect, to discuss her foreign policy views at a moment when she was reportedly being considered for a cabinet post in his administration. And for all her Sanders campaign bona fides, she has a much more conservative political history, and she would hardly be the only one to claim the progressive mantle — with Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Jeff Merkley, and Sanders himself considering bids.

But conventional political wisdom proved to be a poor guide in the last crowded presidential primary, when Trump upended the field of favorites to win the whole thing.

“The more progressives, the better,” said former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, a stalwart Sanders supporter who spent time on the 2016 campaign trail with Sanders and Gabbard, adding: “Hopefully then that means that we will get a real progressive elected to president.”

Let's get this out of the way right now.

Tulsi Gabbard is not a progressive in any way, shape, or form.

I didn't trust her in early 2016, and my hunch was correct.

So the same time this article drops,  Rep. Gabbard resigns from the DNC to back Bernie over Hillary's hawk positions, both dropping the day after Bernie gets cremated in SC by 45 points.

That's not a coincidence, considering Super Tuesday is in less than 72 hours.  Taken collectively, that bothers me.

It only got worse in 2017.

Democrats were silent on Thursday as Tulsi Gabbard, one of the party’s sitting lawmakers in Congress, announced that she had met with Bashar al-Assad during a trip to war-torn Syria and dismissed his entire opposition as “terrorists”.

Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, disclosed her meeting with the Syrian president on Wednesday, during what her office called a “fact-finding” mission in the region.

“Initially I hadn’t planned on meeting him,” Gabbard told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so, because I felt it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we could achieve peace. And that’s exactly what we talked about.”

Democratic leaders were mum on the decision by one of their sitting lawmakers to meet with a dictator whom the US government has dubbed a war criminal for his use of chemical weapons against civilians.

Gabbard’s trip raised alarms over a potential violation of the Logan Act, a federal statute barring unauthorized individuals from conferring with a foreign government involved in a dispute with the US. The US currently has no diplomatic relations with Syria.

It got even worse in 2018.

But a steady drumbeat of criticism from progressives claims that Gabbard also has sympathies with Steve Bannon–style nationalists on the hard right, whose foreign-policy view is also fundamentally anti-interventionist. Her detractors argue that her policy overlap with the hard right is consistent and substantive enough that it ought to undermine her credibility as someone who could represent consensus progressive values in the White House.

If “Gabbardism” is a foreign-policy school of thought, it is perhaps best captured by her own words. “In short, when it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a hawk,” Gabbard told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald in 2016. “When it comes to counterproductive wars of regime change, I’m a dove.” It’s a sentiment that wouldn’t be out of place in Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign — or in Pat Buchanan’s in 1992.

In Gabbard’s own telling, her non-interventionist views are the result of her seeing the cost paid by American soldiers while deployed in Iraq — the cost paid by the Iraqis themselves goes unmentioned. And according to her critics, Islamophobia underlies her hawkishness. Gabbard’s idiosyncratic foreign policy is an uneasy fit next to her orthodox economic populism, and suggests a deeper question: what are progressives’ foreign-policy priorities in the first place? America is still fighting the borderless and interminable War on Terror, launching surgical strikes and drone attacks in countries around the world with impunity — in such an environment, is it enough to be just against wars of regime change?

I don't trust her, I especially don't trust her relationship with India's Narendra Modi, particularly when it comes to Pakistan.  She's shown bad judgment when it comes to Syria as well.  She's way too close to the Ron Paul/Steve Bannon school of foreign policy, and that's bad news all around.

The New Strategy Is That There Is No New Strategy

Donald Trump's bold new plans for Afghanistan are that he doesn't really have any bold new plans for Afghanistan, but he can't really admit he's doing it the same way Bush and Obama did it.  He's fooling precisely no one, and the Democrats are calling him on it.

President Donald Trump's prime-time speech on his plan for Afghanistan split lawmakers along party lines, with Democrats criticizing the lack of real details and Republicans lauding the move away from arbitrary deadlines for drawing down troops. 

Democrats argued Trump was proposing an open-ended commitment with no exit strategy or ceiling on US troops there. 

"Tonight, the President said he knew what he was getting into and had a plan to go forward. Clearly, he did not," House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. "The President's announcement is low on details but raises serious questions."  

New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said Trump's speech was "terribly lacking" in details, substance and "a vision of what success in Afghanistan looks like." 

And Rep. Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat and Marine Corps veteran, accused Trump of "repeating the mistakes of previous administrations." 

"Tonight, the American people should have heard a detailed, realistic strategy with achievable objectives and measurable benchmarks," Gallego said. "Instead, we got only vague promises and wishful thinking." 

Functionally, Trump is going to be sending in about 4,000 more troops, most certainly special operations troops and their support staff, in order to lead more targeted strikes on Taliban leadership and ISIS targets of opportunity, and help Afghan forces secure territory while oh yeah, going across the border to Pakistan and keeping an eye on the mess there.  He can't actually say that, but that's what's coming and everyone knows it.

So he's going to pretend that continuing Obama's strategy is his own brilliant idea.

Leadership for a new era or something, whee.

Last Call For Christ-Mess Eve

Everything's fine as we head into the end of the year and the holidays. Everything is perfectly fine and there's no reason to panic at all.

A fake news article led to gunfire at a Washington pizzeria three weeks ago. Now it seems that another fake news story has prompted the defense minister of Pakistan to threaten to go nuclear.

The defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, wrote a saber-rattling Twitter post directed at Israel on Friday after a false report — which the minister apparently believed — that Israel had threatened Pakistan with nuclear weapons. Both countries have nuclear arsenals.

“Israeli def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming pak role in Syria against Daesh,” the minister wrote on his official Twitter account, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “Israel forgets Pakistan is a Nuclear state too.”

Mr. Asif appeared to be reacting to a fake news article published on awdnews.com.

That story, with the typo-laden headline “Israeli Defense Minister: If Pakistan send ground troops to Syria on any pretext, we will destroy this country with a nuclear attack,” appeared on the website on Dec. 20, alongside articles with headlines like “Clinton is staging a military coup against Trump.”

The fake story about Israel even misidentified the country’s defense minister, attributing quotations to a former minister, Moshe Yaalon. Israel’s current minister of defense is Avigdor Lieberman.

The Israeli Defense Ministry responded on Twitter to say the report was fictitious.

“The statement attributed to fmr Def Min Yaalon re Pakistan was never said,” the ministry wrote in Twitter post directed at Mr. Asif. The Israeli ministry added in a second post: "Reports referred to by the Pakistani Def Min are entirely false.”

Perhaps anticipating Donald Trump reacting to fake news about nuclear threats is the reason his chosen communications director bailed after just two days. 

Merry Christmas!

Last Call For The Burden Of Proof

Over the weekend Seymour Hersh unloaded accusations of a massive cover-up by the Obama administration over the events of the death of Osama bin Laden. Fair warning: it's a hefty read. but let me save you a lot  of trouble: his conclusion is that Pakistani intelligence (ISI) knew exactly where bin Laden was, the US knew the ISI knew, and everyone lied about it.

And the story is complete bullcrap, too.  First, Hersh's side:

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’ 

This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

Hersh lays out his theory, and cites a number of former intelligence sources for his work, nearly all of them anonymous sources.

That's where the problem comes in, as CNN's Peter Bergen dismantles Hersh pretty cleanly.

Hersh's account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense. 

Let's start with the claim that the only shots fired at the Abbottabad compound were the ones that killed bin Laden. That ignores the fact that two SEALs on the mission, Matt Bissonnette, author of "No Easy Day," and Robert O'Neill have publicly said that there were a number of other people killed that night, including bin Laden's two bodyguards, one of his sons and one of the bodyguard's wives. Their account is supplemented by many other U.S. officials who have spoken on the record to myself or to other journalists. 

I was the only outsider to visit the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden lived before the Pakistani military demolished it. The compound was trashed, littered almost everywhere with broken glass and several areas of it were sprayed with bullet holes where the SEALS had fired at members of bin Laden's entourage and family, or in one case exchanged fire with one of his bodyguards. The evidence at the compound showed that many bullets were fired the night of bin Laden's death. 

Common sense would tell you that the idea that Saudi Arabia was paying for bin Laden's expenses while he was living in Abbottabad is simply risible. Bin Laden's principal goal was the overthrow of the Saudi royal family as a result of which his Saudi citizenship was revoked as far back as 1994. 

Why would the Saudis pay for the upkeep of their most mortal enemy? Indeed, why wouldn't they get their close allies, the Pakistanis, to look the other way as they sent their assassins into Pakistan to finish him off? 

Common sense would also tell you that if the Pakistanis were holding bin Laden and the U.S. government had found out this fact, the easiest path for both countries would not be to launch a U.S. military raid into Pakistan but would have been to hand bin Laden over quietly to the Americans. 

Indeed, the Pakistanis have done this on several occasions with a number of other al Qaeda leaders such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of 9/11, who was handed over to U.S. custody after a raid in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi in 2003. So too was Abu Faraj al-Libi, another key al Qaeda leader who was similarly handed over by the Pakistanis to U.S. custody two years later.

Oh, and it gets much worse for Hersh's narrative.  Somebody fed Hersh the line he wanted, and he ran with it. Gergen makes much more sense.  This is a hit job on arguably President Obama's most powerful first-term foreign policy accomplishment, and it comes just as the 2016 campaign is picking up?

Max Fisher at Vox also has serious problems with Hersh's story.

Perhaps the most concerning problem with Hersh's story is not the sourcing but rather the internal contradictions in the narrative he constructs. 

Most blatant, Hersh's entire narrative turns on a secret deal, in which the US promised Pakistan increased military aid and a "freer hand in Afghanistan." In fact, the exact opposite of this occurred, with US military aid dropping and US-Pakistan cooperation in Afghanistan plummeting as both sides feuded bitterly for years after the raid. 

Hersh explains this seemingly fatal contradiction by suggesting the deal fell apart due to miscommunication between the Americans and Pakistanis. But it's strange to argue that the dozens of officials on both sides would be competent enough to secretly plan and execute a massive international ruse, and then to uphold their conspiracy for years after the fact, but would not be competent enough to get on the same page about aid delivery. 

And there are more contradictions. Why, for example, would the Pakistanis insist on a fake raid that would humiliate their country and the very military and intelligence leaders who supposedly instigated it? 

A simpler question: why would Pakistan bother with the ostentatious fake raid at all, when anyone can imagine a dozen simpler, lower-risk, lower-cost ways to do this?

Naah.  Sy Hersh can have a goddamn seat. Both Fisher and Bergen make mincemeat of him.

Social Media Branding 101

Next time you see some intern get a company into serious trouble with a botched "official" tweet, remind yourself that it could always be worse if the boss is a real killer.

An apparently errant tweet by the Taliban's spokesman in Afghanistan gave his location as being in neighboring Pakistan.

On Friday, a tweet by Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claiming an attack included geolocation information that suggested he sent the message from Sindh, Pakistan.

Mujahid later sent a tweet Saturday describing the location leak as an "enemy plot." He also offered his Afghan telephone number to confirm his identity and wrote: "With full confidence, I can say that I am in my own country."

Oops.  Hope he doesn't get, well, you know, fired.

Droning On And On

Joan Walsh on droooooooones and wrestling with her unbearable guilt of being Joan Walsh:

There are (at least) two issues here: The use of drones generally, and their use to kill American citizens. Some values should apply to both. No doubt drone warfare is sometimes preferable to traditional combat – but can’t we debate when, and why? Isn’t it possible that removing the risk of losing American lives by using unmanned predators will make it easier for decision-makers to risk the lives of those who aren’t Americans? Shouldn’t we know more about when and why drone strikes are launched, as well as who’s been killed, at the cost of how much collateral damage, most important, the number of “non-combatants” — innocent people – who are killed?

On the question of targeting U.S. citizens: I’m proud of the extraordinary rights we enjoy as Americans, and I don’t know why so many people shrug at the notion that the president can abrogate those rights if he decides, based on evidence (which he doesn’t have to share) that you’re a terrorist. When it comes to Anwar al-Awlaki, who renounced his citizenship and made many public commitments to al-Qaida, those questions don’t keep me awake at night. But don’t we want assurances that the evidence against every citizen who winds up on that list is just as clear? Don’t we want more oversight, even after the fact?

Did I miss the part where American military action only started killing non-combatants on January 21, 2009?  Did I also miss the part where IEDs keep blowing off arms and legs and shearing off chunks of our soldiers' skulls, creating a huge number of folks coming back home with truly awful injuries?  We've had this debate about people being killed in military action since this whole American experiment began, folks.  Here's the thing, if we're going to be over there doing this kind of thing, and right now that's the policy, I'd rather see drones than boots on the ground.  You can go on and on about targeted killings of US citizens at a coldly impersonal distance without due process, and yet we've got 300 million devices in the country called "firearms" that quite often end up doing just that.  Due process is not always exercised in those situations either, guys.  People where you live can get killed guns without warning.  Maybe there's an investigation, maybe there's even a trial.  But there are plenty of times where who pulled the trigger is never found, and the killer never brought to justice.

Where's your outrage over that?  Did I miss the part where Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was the only US teenager ever killed for bullshit reasons?  You know what else is a "targeted killing of American citizen?"  Any cops who draw their weapon on someone and pull the trigger, and guess what, they don't always shoot the right person.  There's oversight in those situations, but not always.  I'm a hell of a lot more worried about that than I am what's going on in Waziristan, people.  If you're going to perpetually scream "DROOOOOOOOONES YOU OBOT" at me, go to the nearest large metropolitan police department and make sure you personally solve every homicide that comes in the door.

Otherwise, have a darkened Superdome full of seats.

It is not endemic to the Obama administration, or Obama foreign policy.  Steve M. nails it:

But if you're especially outraged at targeted killings of American citizens, if you think they're more horrifying than everything else that's been done in the wars we've fought, that strikes me as a sense of non-combatant privilege. Many of us -- maybe only many white Americans? -- not only assume we're entitled to due process, we expect never to be on a battlefield. In other words, we expect never to be in a situation in which due process doesn't apply.

To me that's a sense of privilege. So I see what's wrong with the drone program, but it's a subset of what's wrong with war. Some Americans expect to be shielded from this sort of suffering at all times, and are shocked that a few Americans aren't.

War is hell.  The Pentagon is in the business of conducting said warfare in the most casualty-efficient way possible that still achieves the goal of ending the metabolic processes of The Bad Guys.  The problem isn't drones, the problem is the perpetual war machine that's predated this President for a very, very long time.  We're screaming about al-Awlaki's kid when My Lai, the bombing of Dresden, and Nagasaki and Hiroshima happened.  Let's face it, for America, that's effing progress.  We still need to move forward and I'd like to see drones not have to be used at all (because we weren't in Af-Pak at all anymore) but let's not pretend that President Obama somehow has the most blood on his hands of a US President, either, shall we?

Thanks.  Sorry to ruin your Sunday.

Last Call

More on New Hampshire tomorrow morning.  Meanwhile, in Pakistan the President's "pause" in using drones in the country came to a rather abrupt end today.

A suspected U.S. drone aircraft fired missiles at a house on the outskirts of the town of Miranshah in the North Waziristan tribal region on Wednesday, killing at least three militants, local intelligence officials said.

There was no independent confirmation of the incident. Militants often dispute official versions of such attacks and death tolls.

This is the first such strike since November 17 last year, and comes at a time when anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan is running high after a November 26 NATO cross-border air attack killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

Well, so much for that.  I may joke about DROOOOOOOOOONES IN MY ERRYWHERE but the reality is in Pakistan, they are very real.  And neither side at this point benefits from telling the truth about the body count.

StupidiNews Focus: Keep Your Friends Close, Keep Pakistan Closer

Pakistan is pretty pissed off right now as a NATO gunship assault on a border checkpoint near Afghanistan has resulted in at least 26 dead Pakistani soldiers so far.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has called an emergency meeting of military services chiefs to formulate his country's response, his spokesman said. The Defense Committee of the Cabinet will meet later Saturday.

In a statement, Gilani said he "strongly condemned the NATO/ISAF attack on the Pakistani" checkpoint.

The matter is being taken up by the Foreign Ministry "in the strongest possible terms" with NATO and the United States, the statement from his office said.

NATO's commander in Afghanistan said he is committed to a thorough investigation.

Yeah, this isn't good in any way.  Pakistan has already closed supply routes for NATO convoys through the country and that's just for starters, all this happening less than 48 hours or so after another NATO airstrike supposedly killed seven civilians in Afghanistan.  It looks like NATO troops were performing a cross-border raid from Afghanistan, chasing insurgents into Pakistan when the incident took place.  Pakistan's military is calling this an "unprovoked attack" on Pakistan's "sovereignty" and at this point it's still unclear just exactly what happened.  It's hard to imagine things getting too much worse:

"I think we should go to the United Nations Security Council against this," said retired Brigadier Mahmood Shah, former chief of security in the tribal areas. "So far, Pakistan is being blamed for all that is happening in Afghanistan, and Pakistan's point of view has not been shown in the international media."

Other analysts, including Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, said Pakistan would protest and close the supply lines for some time, but that ultimately "things will get back to normal."

Paul Beaver, a British security analyst, said relations were so bad that this incident might have no noticeable impact.

"I'm not sure U.S.-Pakistan relations could sink much lower than they are now," he said.

President Obama's foreign policy has been excellent so far, but this is going to require some kid gloves.  We'll see what the State Department has to say in response.

Realpolitik Is Pretty Fugly

Especially because we need Pakistan.

The United States has no choice but to keep up its alliance with Pakistan despite concerns over Islamabad's ties to Islamist militants, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Tuesday.

Panetta, speaking to an audience of military officers at the National Defense University, said relations with Pakistan were difficult because elements of the government had links with the Haqqani network, which is staging attacks on US-led troops in neighboring Afghanistan, and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), blamed for orchestrating attacks in India.

"What makes this complicated is that they have relationships with the Haqqanis, and the Haqqani tribe are going across the border and attacking our forces in Afghanistan," he said at the Washington insitution, which is tasked with providing training in national and international security for US and foreign officials.

"It's pretty clear that there's a relationship there," said Panetta, who appeared along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the event.

What Panetta doesn't say here is even more important:  somewhat unstable Middle East country with nuclear weapons that's the traditional enemy of one of our larger trading partners (India) is not somebody we can just put in the time out corner.

Better our friend so we can keep them close, than our enemy.  Despite all the GOP grumbling, or in fact especially because of it.   Probably why we're paying for their new dam project.

Even as U.S.-Pakistani cooperation on anti-terrorism programs is withering, the United States is considering backing the construction of a giant, $12 billion dam in Pakistan that would be the largest civilian aid project the U.S. has undertaken here in decades.


Supporters of a U.S. role in the project say American participation would mend the United States' tattered image, going a long way toward quieting widespread anti-Americanism amid criticism that the U.S. lavishes money on Pakistan's military while doing little for the country's civilian population.

And yes, it's a $12 billion bribe.  Like I said, fugly.

War Pigs Never Stop

If it's a slow news summer, it must mean it's time for a "report" saying Iran is just months away from a nuclear bomb and that WE MUST INVADE NOW or something.

Iran is only a matter of months from being able to create a nuclear weapon, according to experts.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 54, has long been pushing his country's nuclear capabilities, and at the current rate of uranium enrichment the first bomb could be eight weeks away.

Gregory S Jones, from RAND, published a report this week explaining the severity of the situation and to confirm the fears expressed by a United Nations watchdog.

Surprise, it's our old friends at the ultra right wing think tank The RAND Corporation, with a report sourced in a story in Rupert Murdoch's UK Daily Mail.  First bomb by August!  We must invade now or else millions will die AIYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE...

Oh wait, our liberal media is reporting that Iran already has nukes.



Sigh.  Yep, it's summer alright.  Isn't the far bigger problem Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, folks?

Pak-ed With Questions, Part 4

Needless to say with the death of OBL, Pakistan Islamists are not happy.

Two American officials were saved by their armored vehicle Friday when it was hit by a bomb in the northwestern city of Peshawar, in an apparent revenge attack for the killing of Osama bin Laden.


It was the first assault on American interests in Pakistan since the May 2nd U.S. special forces operation that found and killed bin Laden in a town in the north of the country.

The two U.S. government employees were on their way from home to work at the U.S. Consulate in Peshawar, at about 8:30 a.m., when the bomb exploded. There were different accounts on whether the bomb was carried on a motorbike, in a parked car or planted on the road, said U.S. embassy spokesman Alberto Rodriguez.

“The folks in the car saw a motorcycle drive up and then boom. But maybe this guy (on the bike) was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Rodriguez. “Right now, it’s not clear if the bomb was in a vehicle, on a body, or planted.”

I'm honestly surprised it took them this long to start going after American civilian personnel in Pakistan, but there's going to be a lot more of this, I should think.  I wouldn't exactly count on the Pakistan government to be very forthcoming in additional information on militants, either.  We're effectively on our own there for now.  Officials in Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, have already canceled US foreign aid contracts in protest of the operation to get OBL in Abbotabad and are calling on the entire country to follow suit.

"We have canceled six MOUs (memorandums of understanding) with the United States in the fields of health, education and solid waste management," said Rana Sanaullah, Law Minister of Punjab, the country's most populated province and its political nerve center.

"We have conveyed their concerned departments about our decision. This is our protest against the Abbottabad incident."

The Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) opposition party, which rules Punjab, has called for a review of the country's ties with Washington, urging the central government to reduce reliance on foreign aid.

Considering there are plenty of folks in Congress who agree that Pakistan should be getting less or no foreign aid, I'm thinking that a lot of contracts could get "reviewed" to death in short order here.  Keep an eye on this.

Pak-ed With Questions, Part 3

Things between the United States and Pakistan have gotten considerably worse since the raid May 1 that ended OBL, and Pakistan is delivering sharp warnings to President Obama to back off...or else.

Amid a deepening crisis between the two uneasy partners, Washington pressed for access to three of the dead Al-Qaeda chief's widows, who it believes may have valuable information on bin Laden's movements and on the terror group.

In a further sign of tension over last week's daring covert raid in Abbottabad, the New York Times meanwhile reported that Pakistani authorities had retaliated by leaking the name of the CIA chief in Islamabad to the media.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, under intense domestic pressure over his country's failure to detect the stealth US special forces raid, earlier hit out at American unilateralism and warned against future US action.

He also insisted Pakistan reserves the right to "retaliate with full force," although he stopped short of spelling out what, if anything, would be done if US President Barack Obama ordered another unilateral anti-terror raid.

But at the White House, spokesman Jay Carney said Obama was convinced he had done the right thing by sending in special forces at the dead of night in a raid in which bin Laden was killed in his Pakistani lair.

"We obviously take the statements and concerns of the Pakistani government seriously, but we also do not apologize for the action that we took, that this president took," Carney said.

Pakistan ratting out the CIA station chief in Islamabad should have been expected, but the rest of the chest beating is clearly a sign that Pakistan expects the status quo to continue, including the country receiving billions in foreign aid from the US as well as military aid.

On the other hand, that's going to be a tough sell unless Pakistan gives us somebody to blame for bin Laden hiding in the country for six years plus while calling us a valuable ally.  The negotiations on the price of the final bill will be interesting, but in the end I don't see how much will change between the US and Pakistan...co-dependent relationships are like that.

Pak-ed With Questions, Part 2

There's still a number of issues with our relationship with Pakistan right now that need to be answered, and those answers only lead to a ton of additional questions and a whole lot of people are asking them right now.

Amazingly enough, it's Hot Air's Allahpundit who raises a very good point on the "Pakistani Intelligence: Osama's Evil Accomplices or A Bunch Of Giant Morons?" question, arguing that the CIA's months-long safe house operation in Abottabad means the answer is the latter:

Kidding aside, this is the first evidence thus far that the Pakistani government wasn’t hiding Osama. If they knew the CIA team was in town and continued to let them operate, then either they were actively cooperating with us or they were double-dealing on Bin Laden by looking the other way at our spies. If they didn’t know the CIA team was in town, then it’s more plausible that they’re honest-to-goodness imbeciles who might have missed the fact that the world’s most wanted terrorist had been there for, um, five years. (If they were hiding him, wouldn’t they have been closely scrutinizing new arrivals in the neighborhood for fear that they were CIA?) Given the embarrassment OBL’s location has caused Pakistan, I assume there’s no way they would have willingly allowed us to take him out at the compound. Once they knew the CIA was there, either they would have spirited him away to a new location or they would have grabbed him and handed him over on the condition that we would say publicly that he was caught in the tribal areas, not a few blocks away from the national military academy.

Realistically, then, there’s no way that they knew the CIA was there. (In fact, according to a U.S. official, they’re reportedly “stunned” by the CIA’s penetration.) Which makes it slightly, but only slightly, more likely that they didn’t know Bin Laden was there either.

First of all, if the CIA was able to fool both bin Laden and Pakistan with this play, then these guys deserve a hell of a lot of credit.  (Or not, given Allahpundit's argument that the Pakistanis are pretty much the worst secret agents on the planet, maybe it wasn't all that difficult for the CIA to pull off after all)

Second, if we're dealing with morons here, that doesn't exactly fill me with confidence involving the integrity of Pakistan's nuclear program either.

On the other hand, considering Pakistan promptly rounded up a couple hundred people in Abottabad for the crime of knowing the AQ courier that led us to OBL this week, I'm betting we're not going to see any of these people again anytime soon based on what they know...and find out what Pakistan doesn't want us to know in turn.

Pak-ed With Questions

As more and more details about OBL's hideout are firming up, folks in the intel community and in Congress are starting to ask a lot of uncomfortable questions about our nominal "ally", Pakistan.  TPM's Benjy Sarlin:

"They've got a lot of explaining to do," Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters Monday.

Intelligence officials have long suspected that Pakistan's weak and fractured government may be host to rogue elements either disinterested in catching -- or actively sympathetic to -- anti-Western terrorists. But the presence of Bin Laden's heavily fortified compound in a garrison town near Islamabad magnified concerns that Al Qaeda had help from the inside in concealing its leader's location.

"It's very difficult for me to understand how this huge compound could be built in a city just an hour north of the capital of Pakistan in a city that contained military installations, including the Pakistani military academy, and that it did not arouse tremendous suspicion," Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, said at a press conference on Monday.

"It was not like a normal house in New Jersey, I can tell you that," Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), who has called for a new review of military and economic aid to Pakistan in light of the Bin Laden raid, told TPM.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, also told TPM that the operation raised red flags for her.

"I've had a growing concern that the Pakistani intelligence community is really walking both sides of the street and the question comes what to do about it," she said. "At some point I think there has to be an understanding."

Trying to get out ahead of the emerging attack on his government's credibility, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari published an op-ed Tuesday in the Washington Post claiming credit for helping root out Bin Laden and noting that attacks by Islamic extremists had cost his country thousands of lives, including his late wife and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

In briefings with the media, U.S. defense officials sought to tamp down speculation as to whether Bin Laden was operating with aid from inside the Pakistani government.

"We have no indications that the Pakistanis were aware that Osama Bin Laden was at the compound in Abbottabad," one senior official told reporters Monday.

But defense and intelligence officials indicated to reporters that the American military carried out a months-long casing of the compound and finally a complicated and dangerous raid all without ever informing their Pakistani counterparts of their interest in the target. "It should tell you a lot that we didn't trust them to help us" take out bin Laden, one U.S. official was quoted as telling the Wall Street Journal. "You think about where he was living, and we didn't want their help."

That last fact, that we completely kept Pakistan out of the loop on this, speaks volumes.  At best, Pakistan's government is so badly compromised with AQ and Taliban sympathizers that we now feel that anything we tell them will end up getting back to the bad guys.  Worst case scenario?  Large parts of Pakistan's controlling powers, namely the Army and elements of the Zardari government, worked to actively hide OBL for years.  As Rachel Maddow pointed out yesterday, it seems like whenever we make a bust of a major AQ/Taliban player, it's in one of Pakistan's larger cities and not the "lawless tribal regions" of North Waziristan or the mountainous Af-Pak border.  These guys aren't being found in caves, they are being found in large heavily guarded compounds in populated areas.

The notion that Pakistan's military or the ISI security service had no prior knowledge of OBL hanging out in this compound for 5+ years either makes Pakistan's leaders the biggest morons on the planet...or it makes us the biggest morons on the planet for being stupid enough to believe them all this time.  Either way, it's far past time to re-evaluate our relationship with the country.

Osama Been Gotten, The Morning After

Well.  That was a hell of a last nine hours or so.  More details have emerged overnight of the operation to take out Al Qaeda's shadowy leader.

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil, is dead -- almost 10 years after the attacks that killed about 3,000 people.

The founder and leader of al Qaeda was killed by U.S. forces Monday in a mansion in Abbottabad, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, U.S. officials said.

Four others in the compound were also killed. One of them was bin Laden's adult son, and another was a woman being used as a shield by a male combatant, the officials said.

Bin Laden's body was later buried at sea, an official said. Many Muslims adhere to the belief that bodies should be buried within one day.

The official did not release additional details about the burial, but said it was handled in keeping with Muslim customs. 

Spontaneous celebrations outside the White House and in Times Square in New York erupted late last night.  The President's speech last night was somber but forceful.

Over the last 10 years, thanks to the tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals, we've made great strides in that effort. We've disrupted terrorist attacks and strengthened our homeland defense. In Afghanistan, we removed the Taliban government, which had given bin Laden and al Qaeda safe haven and support. And around the globe, we worked with our friends and allies to capture or kill scores of al Qaeda terrorists, including several who were a part of the 9/11 plot.

Yet Osama bin Laden avoided capture and escaped across the Afghan border into Pakistan. Meanwhile, al Qaeda continued to operate from along that border and operate through its affiliates across the world.

And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.

Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

This is something I honestly thought would never happen.  After years of him taunting us, our guys finally found him and said hello.  In the short term this doesn't change much at all.  We still have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we're still neck deep in Libya.  Where this will go and what this will mean, I can't tell you.  I'm hoping it means we can get extremely serious about bringing home our troops in Afghanistan later this year.

They have earned their rest.  We'll see, but from here out things are going to be a bit different.

New tag:  Osama Been Gotten.  It's going to generate a lot of news, I predict.

[UPDATE] Taegan Goddard has the transcript of the White House conference call with reporters after the President's speech.  It's...very surreal.  Nothing but a spokesman and several "Senior Administration Officials" giving frank details of the operation.  Worth a definite read.

One Hell Of A Last Call

And one hell of a Last Call...for none other than Osama Bin Laden.  Multiple news outlets are reporting President Obama will address the nation tonight to inform the country and the world that the CIA nailed the world's most wanted terrorist.

Osama bin Laden is dead and his body has been recovered by U.S. authorities, U.S. officials said on Sunday night.

President Barack Obama was to make the announcement shortly that after searching in vain for bin Laden since he disappeared in Afghanistan in late 2001, the Saudi-born extremist is dead.

It is a major accomplishment for Obama and his national security team, having fulfilled the goal once voiced by Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, to bring to justice the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

More on this as details become available.

[UPDATE]  The President just confirmed that after a tip last August that OBL was in Pakistan, the President authorized the CIA to follow the lead for eight months...patiently confirming the truth.  And today, they struck.  Joint Special Operation Command led the way.  No US personnel were hurt, we recovered the body and confirmed the identity.  A growing crowd outside the White House.  Even Dubya weighed in congratulated the President.

One hell of a night.

Meanwhile In Baghdad...

Oh yes, ladies and gentlemen, the protests in Egypt have not gone unnoticed in Iraq.

Hundreds of Iraqis took part in scattered demonstrations on Sunday, calling for an improvement in basic services and the resignation of local government officials as unrest sweeps much of the Arab world.


In Baghdad, around 250 people gathered in the impoverished district of Bab al-Sham to protest against a lack of services. "It is a tragedy. Even during the Middle Ages, people were not living in this situation," said engineer Furat al-Janabi.

Some carried a coffin with the word "services" written across it, while others called for the resignation of all members of the local council in their area.

Almost eight years after the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq's infrastructure remains severely damaged. The country suffers a chronic water shortage, electricity supply is intermittent and sewage collects in the streets.

While public frustration is a challenge to the government as Iraq emerges from the sectarian war after the invasion, the country has already been freed from the autocratic rule that protesters in other countries such as Egypt are seeking to end.

In the oil city of Basra, 420 km south of Baghdad, around 100 protesters demanded the resignation of the governor and members of the city council, saying they were corrupt.

The demonstrators carried yellow cards symbolising the warning card a referee carries in a soccer match.

"I and my children depend totally on food rations, without it we will die. I find work for one day, and then nothing for 10 days after that," said 43-year-old Nuri Ghadhban, a day labourer in the construction industry and father of six.

"I have been looking for kerosene for a month and I cannot find it. We have had enough. What do they want? For us to burn ourselves until they think about us?"

As bad as things are, these protests have the potential to pretty much undo what little gains we have made in the region and delivering the country back into near civil war.  If ordinary Iraqis are starving on top of having no power, no jobs, and no hope of getting us out of their country, things are going to get ugly, fast.  But that's not the biggest problem.

The protests are moving eastward from Egypt to the Middle East.   If they continue on this trajectory, the next countries in line east of Iraq are Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and now we start getting into some serious international problems if those countries start protesting food prices, corruption, and despotism.  Pakistan's government is already fragile as hell.  Iraq and Afghanistan's governments are cardboard at best.  And if nuclear Pakistan goes into Egyptian-style turmoil, India isn't going to just sit around.

I mentioned last week that Saudi Arabia was the big domino at the end of this destabilization chain.  That's certainly true in the Middle East, but globally there are many worse places that could see chaos, and Pakistan has to be tops on that list.

A Major Diplomatic Blow: Amb. Richard Holbrooke Dead At 69

If the scurrying to put out the fires caused by WikiLeaks this month wasn't bad enough for the State Department, word is this evening that our top diplomat in Af-Pak, Richard Holbrooke, has passed away after complications from this weekend's surgery to repair his torn aorta.  CNN:

Richard C. Holbrooke, the high-octane diplomat who spearheaded the end of the Bosnian war and most recently served as the Obama administration's point man in the volatile Afghan-Pakistani war zone, has died, officials said.


The 69-year-old diplomat died Monday at George Washington University Hospital. He was admitted last Friday after feeling ill. Doctors performed surgery Saturday to repair a tear in his aorta.

One of the world's most recognizable diplomats, Holbrooke's career spanned from the Vietnam War-era to the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, coinciding with presidencies of the past five decades, from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama.

This man was a career civil service diplomat, one of the good ones.  I don't think he ever got the credit he deserved for the Dayton Accords during Clinton's term.

Holbrooke was best known for being "the chief architect of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement" that ended the Bosnian war -- the deadly ethnic conflict in the 1990s that erupted during the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Serving President Bill Clinton as assistant secretary of state for Europe from 1994 to 1996, Americans got a taste of Holbrooke's drive and intellect, as typified in this remark from "To End a War" -- his memoir of the Dayton negotiations.

"The negotiations were simultaneously cerebral and physical, abstract and personal, something like a combination of chess and mountain climbing," he wrote.

After President Obama took office in 2008, Holbrooke took one of the toughest diplomatic assignments -- U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the region Obama regards as center of the war on terrorism.

Holbrooke had worldwide respect.  Both the Afghan and the Pakistani President called him in his hospital room earlier today to wish him well.  Without him, America's diplomatic job just got a hell of a lot harder.

Those are tremendous shoes to fill.  This guy was a giant.  More on Holbrooke in his own words here at Foreign Policy mag.

Meanwhile In Pakistan

...It's still hell on earth.

Fresh flooding has sent a million people fleeing from their homes in the south in the past 48 hours, the United Nations said. 

The death toll from the floods, triggered by unusually heavy monsoon downpours over the upper Indus basin a month ago, was expected to rise significantly as more bodies were found while many people were missing, a disaster authority spokeswoman said.

Floodwaters are beginning to recede across most of the country as the water flows downstream, but high tides in the Arabian Sea meant they still posed a threat to towns in Sindh province such as Thatta, 70 km (45 miles) east of Karachi.

"Concern continues to be the south," U.N. spokeswoman Stacey Winston told a news conference. "In the last 48 hours nearly one million people have been displaced."
The U.N. earlier said the floods had forced about six million people from their homes.

Millions of people now homeless in a flood-ravaged country and more water coming in some parts, in a place where government is barely holding on...a government with nukes and a serious domestic terrorism problem.  This disaster has been going on for weeks now with no real end in sight.

This will come back to haunt us.  Guaranteed.