Quote:
“In a conversation with Holbrooke in 2010, I asked him why the United States did not cut its USD 1 billion a year in military aid to the Pakistan army. He said cutting aid was ‘off the table’ because it would only increase distrust of the United States. ‘This cannot be a transactional relationship’,” he told me.
Puck Fakistan.
Stupid stupid stupid
But I imagine increasing aid would increase trust. ...
So lets throw alot more money at them, so that they'll trust us a lot more.
Better yet, instead of money, lets exchange the money for nuclear warheads, and send them some nuclear warheads instead....
Then we won't have to worry about things like trust.
Hollebrook was a stupid, arrogant, man. He did major damage to our country.
The bottom line for Pakistan is that it is a cancerous tumor, yet one we have no choice but to deal with. This is why:
1) They are not a unified country, but a collection of enclaves dominated by factions. The government, whoever it is, is just the largest minority organization that wants political power. In no way does it have real control over most of the country.
2) Their population is approaching 200 million and they have nuclear weapons.
3) The vast majority of Sunni Muslim clergy in the world are trained in radical Wahhabi madrassas (schools) in Pakistan, then they disperse all over the world. Much or even most of the funding for these schools comes from Saudi Arabia. No matter how moderate the mosque, they will likely get a radical Imam as the only game in town.
4) When the military tried to run Pakistan, the US saw it as an opportunity to unify the place and put it under a far more orderly central government, under Musharraf. To his credit, he went about as far and as fast as he could go to achieve these ends. He purged the military and the secret police, the ISI, of a *lot*, if not all, of the insiders who were actively helping the al-Qaeda and Taliban fight the US.
However, he finally reached the point where he could do no more, but by staying president, he would make things worse, so he very wisely left office and the country.
5) The US did “carrot and stick” Pakistan a lot, but today, US aid is little more than chemotherapy to help keep Pakistan from metastasizing, because if it does, it will cost us far more treasure and blood to get it tamped down again.