There is no Pakistan.
There is no Saudi Arabia. There is no Iraq. There is no Afghanistan. There is the Ummah (the global Islamic community) and the Ummah is divided into a multitude of tribes, clans and factions. An "official" nation may contain a multitude of factions. Various factions may cooperate across "official" national borders. Things make more sense if you look at it this way.
Saudi money finances the multitude of madrassahs (Islamic boarding schools of Islam) in Pakistan. These madrassahs turn out hundreds of thousands of radicals, who serve to spread the message of the Global Jihad. Without Arab oil money, global Islamic radicalism would whither. Without foreign aid, the Palestinians would need to find work instead of spending their time fighting Israelis.
The 9/11 assault was to the financial benefit of Pakistan (which now has $billions going into their economy both in the form of direct aid, and in their cut of our military expenditures in their area. They can be assumed to have played a big part in it. But wealthy Saudis also played a big part: in finance, logistics, manpower, in other ways.
I think the neo-conservative tendency is to think of Muslim countries as the Garden of Eden until the Saudi serpent seduced them into a murderous intolerance of the infidel. I think that's a mistake. In reality, what Muslim countries are going through is a direct result of rising wealth (albeit from low levels) and literacy levels, thanks to their (limited) absorption of Western technologies and administrative methods (universal education, information and communications technology, logistics, et al). Because of these rising standards, Muslims are now able to learn about the genocidal exhortations of the Koran in the original Arabic instead of having relying on local imams (who tended to provide homilies and parables for day-to-day existence rather than calls to jihad) as their illiterate grandparents used to have to do just two generations ago. The modern era has brought widespread literacy to Muslim countries, which in turn has brought about a Reformation - a time in which Muslims have begun grasping the literal meaning of the Koran. The Christian Reformation was, of course, accompanied by religious wars that covered large parts of Europe and large-scale massacres. The Muslim Reformation is likely to result in major conflagrations across the globe until the embers of newly-discovered zealotry either consume the entire world or are extinguished by superior force.
I'd have to disagree. Cultures and languages don't go away just because of a common religious affiliation. Muslim kings have fought against each other for over a thousand years, occasionally allying with the infidel against fellow Muslim kings.
Bump.