See these headlines:

"Over the past six years, the Bush administration has spent almost $100 million on a highly classified program to help Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, secure his country’s nuclear weapons, according to current and former senior administration officials" NYTimes has published this in Nov 17 on her website.

Then after about 20 days, the BBC said that : "Pakistan's army has said it has cleared most of the restive north-western Swat valley of pro-Taleban militants".

Also, the Al-Jazzeera international network confirmed the same saying that : "Pakistani security forces have driven fighters from all the towns in the northern Swat valley, killing almost 300 followers of religious leader Maulana Fazlullah, the military said".


All this was combined with the internal ciucumstances happening in Pakistan like postponing the elections and spreading the emergency rule and retirement of Pervez Musharraf form the military to be able to continue as a president with any more pressures...


Ok. But where is the United States from this?!!

1-Pakistan's geographical position is a treasure the US can't waste..How can US lose that position below Afghanistan (Pakistan played a very imprtant role in the war against the Soviet Union as a training base for 'Jihadists' against Soviet Union) and beside India (the growing economical power) and near the new giant China.

Put this beside the Pakistani's natural resource beside the need to keep the nuclear power of Pakistan under control and you will get a complete picture of what is going on..

2-The Pakistani's administration is cmpletely aware of that US is in bad need to get Pakistan beside it. So she is playing that game:
We will fight terrorism beside the US and you will help us.
We will give some contacts to the American corporations and US reduces the pressure made for spreading democracy and human rights.
We will facilitate the American mission in Afghanistan and they will let Musharraf continue as a president without any american secret help for opposition movements.

3-Also the US is completely aware of that poistion.So it's also playing that game:

US helps Pakistan with it's nuclear programm and Pakistan keep that programm under US 'remote control'.
US reduce the 'democratic pressure' and Pakistan reduces the Taleban and Al-Qaeda existence in northern Pakistan.
US may be also supprting the continuing tension state between Pakistan and India to ensure that they can destruct the Indian efforts when needed.

4-As we can see, this is a complicated relationship and this is how the things happens in the world of politics.





http://totalksome.blogspot.com/2008/01/us-pakistan-issues-between.html



Cer

Or then maybe Joe Galloway has a point?  Is this the point you are making Ahk?
Maybe for some worth a read on the issue? With a bit more of a historic view?

Commentary: Sins of omission and sins of commission haunt Bush in Pakistan
Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: January 02, 2008 03:36:46 PM

In the real world, there are consequences. For every action there’s a reaction, and often even inaction triggers a reaction.

The unfolding disaster in Pakistan in the wake of the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is in part a reaction to a series of inactions and actions by the Bush administration during the last six years.

Bush and Company took their eyes off the ball and became preoccupied with the sideshow of their own creation in Iraq as things went sideways and backward in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Then they outsourced much of the fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda to Pakistani Pres. Pervez Musharraf.

After the attacks on America on 9/11, President Bush quite rightly took aim at al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan that was sheltering the terrorist group responsible for those attacks.

A relatively small group of U.S. special operators rented enough tribal leaders and their armies and, backed by American air power, were able to topple the Taliban government and put al Qaeda on the run. A force of only 7,000 U.S. Army and Marine troops went in to chase the bad guys.

So far, so good, or so it seemed. But the administration declared victory prematurely — a bad habit it would repeat elsewhere — and turned many of its resources and most of its attention to invading Iraq while Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leadership escaped into Pakistan.

Benign neglect is a dangerous policy in the badlands along the Afghan-Pakistani border, where the bleached bones of invading armies litter the mountain passes and the inhospitable deserts. Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate of the British Indian Army, had this to say on the subject:

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut up your remains,

Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,

And go to your God like a soldier.”

Job One was Afghanistan, but it was left undone, too unimportant a backwater for the foreign policy amateurs, neo-conservative ideologues and military dilettantes advising the president. A preemptive invasion of Iraq and the toppling of a hated dictator in the heart of the Middle East — a cheap, easy and quick cakewalk — was what we needed.

Never mind that we'd chased a bunch of fanatical terrorists into a part of Pakistan that no central government has ever conquered or controlled. We'd just throw $10 billion to Pakistan's military dictator and get him to take care of our problem, as if he didn’t have enough problems of his own dealing with Islamist fanatics.

Now both Afghanistan and Pakistan are coming unraveled, and are likely to become two more disasters added to the growing list of “things to do” in the disaster department that President George W. Bush will hand to his unlucky successor in the White House a year from now.

Afghanistan is a mess. We installed a weak central government whose writ doesn’t run much beyond the city limits of Kabul and starved it of the aid needed to repair a nation ravaged by three decades of war and civil war. The Soviet Union sent 100,000 troops to wage unlimited and barbaric war and was defeated. By contrast, we have 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and we've browbeaten our reluctant NATO allies into sending another 50,000, many of whom are under orders from home not to take risks or get anyone killed.

The Taliban guerrillas, operating from safe havens in Pakistan’s rugged frontier province, are on the march. They’ve learned from the war in Iraq, and their IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and suicide bombers are taking a deadly toll. More American troops were killed in Afghanistan in 2007 than in any year since 2002.

In Pakistan, the radical madrassas are churning out recruits for the Taliban and al Qaeda faster than the allies and the Afghan army can kill them, and every time we've pushed Gen. Musharraf to send his soldiers in to clean out the sanctuaries, most of them have been killed or captured.

The administration's solution: Force Musharraf to take off his uniform and enter into an unholy alliance of sorts with the long-exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whose time in power was marked mainly by an explosion of corruption remarkable even in a country where corruption is endemic.

It’s no surprise that she was killed. She was buried next to her father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, another smooth talking, Western-educated darling of the foreigners, who was hanged by a previous military dictator.

All this might be of little interest if only Pakistan didn’t have a cellar full of nuclear warheads. Real nuclear weapons, unlike the imaginary nuclear weapons program our leaders brandished as a reason to invade Iraq or the one they trotted out to turn up the heat on Iran — until the intelligence community pulled the rug out from under that crusade.

All of it is so complicated it must make George W. Bush’s head hurt.

McClatchy Newspapers 2008

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/galloway/story/24095.html

I'd say even more: This article is full of hubbub from someone who dash together anything he has heard without even remotely know what he is talking about like "Taliban have learned from the war in Iraq"  .

So, yes, Afghanistan and Pakistan were not good target and Iraq and Iran are.
Why? Because Iraq and Iran are at the center of global oil production and oil rules the world.

Afghanistan and Pakistan have no oil. So why invest more than needed there? Afghanistan is interresting only to the extent that the cave of bin-Laden is believed to be there and Pakistan catch our attention just because they have nukes.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are going to be disasters ==> Not our problem. We just worry about the nukes in pakistan and that terrorist organisation could be based there. But what they do with their country is their problem and it's their fault if it goes wrong.
The nuke issue could become a global concern if Pakistan became dangerousely distabilized but it's still not the case now. And it was not the case 4 years ago.
Pakistan and Afghanistan have absolutely zero strategic importance. These countries are at the middle of nowhere. It's just boring to have to divert resources where there are only stones and goat keepers.

We don't send billions everyday to these countries in payment for oil. To Iraq and Iran and the other Gulf states, we do. That's the difference. That's a reality wannabe experts have to cope with.

The reality is also that the muslim world, muslim countries, are sinking into barbarism and fanaticism and there is nothing we can do. One day these barbarians will get their hands on nukes and they will blow them either by accident or by mass suicide. They are in the dark age and bound for still worse times ahead.
That would be none of our business at all without oil.
Unfortunately too much money is going there for us to ignore.

Interesting article, it's not new anyway- US always supported dictatorship for self-purposes, Pakistan and Egypt (where thousands of nationalists and islamists call for democracy) are one of the most beloved regims to the White House!!

Taliban was created by Paki intelligence under the supervision of Brezsenski (Former US Dt) during cold war; Washington's policy in Afghanistan was shaped by US President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and was continued by his successors. His plan went far beyond simply forcing Soviet troops to withdraw; rather it aimed to foster an international movement to spread Islamic fanaticism into the Muslim Central Asian Soviet republics to destabilise the Soviet Union.

A simple hypocrisy, like US support for Saddam when during 8o's


If Musharef would change his policy, like disturbing the US bases that may increase around Caspian sea, than he would called an evil dictatorship, therefore I don't wonder how US hide or collaborate in the nuclear program.

Cassandra,

I never tried to conceal my bias against radical islamism, or even against islamism simply.

So... The US support dictator Musharaff? Ho! the ugly ones!
It just happens that every muslim country is ruled by a dictatorship.
Only west africa have regimes which vaguely (but very vaguley) ressemble democracy.
Wherever you throw a dart at a map of muslim countries, and say "I want to support the governement there!", you will help a dictatorial regime.

Get rid of islamic fanaticism, and you get rid of 90% of terrorism and all the ensuing problems and you would have Buttho still alive.
But Pakistan is sinking into fanatism like Afghanistan 12 years ago. There will be more and more suicide martyrs.
Some are flagellating themseves, some are climbing hills on knees, then you have those who blow themselves up. That's only a difference of degree and school of ritual.

That the Bush administration goofed big time, no doubt abou that. That the Iraq war was not necessary, I was the first to say that. That american taxpayer money would be better spent elswere, absolutely.

But the life of the muslim nations doesn't depend exclusively on what a US president does or say.
I'm fed up to read blames on the US because the Taliban were so powerful or because Saddam used toxic gaz, or because Saoudis practice public beheading etc.

It's the society in this region (from Lebanon to Pakistan) which creates the condition to have such oppresors at the power. Not the West. And the US has to compose with them, like-it-or-not.
Yes, the US could say "we don't treat with poeple who don't respect human rights" but so they would never make any deal ever in this region of the world and sometimes things have to be done.

And it's not over:


source

Fredledingue


Are you really believing on what you said?!!- take Mubarek example  who love  or financially support him except american regim!


No, it's obvious for children that you are just moved by your hatred!