Free Republic

One of the natural and negative consequences of political assassinations is that they personalize the general and simplify the complex. Policies formed in the aftermath of assassinations are rarely wise and tend to focus on secondary - personal - issues while ignoring larger strategic ones. It is fairly clear that this is what is happening in the international reaction to last Thursday's assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Bhutto's husband Asif Ali Zadawi and her teenage son have now taken charge of her political party in the interest of maintaining her "legacy." Backed by the Bush administration, they...

It’s tempting to rerun my column on Pakistan from a month ago. Not because I predicted the assassination of Benazir Bhutto or offered any other great insight, but rather for the opposite reason: “Everyone’s an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know everything: General Musharraf should do this, he shouldn’t have done that, the State Department should lean on him to do the other… Well, I dunno. It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate when offering advice to Islamabad.” Oh, well. In the stampede of instant experts unveiling their Pakistani solutions-in-a-box, some contributions are worthy...

Well, I dunno. It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate when offering advice to Islamabad. Gen. Musharraf is – as George S. Kaufman remarked when the Germans invaded Russia – shooting without a script. But that's because he presides over a country that defies the neatness of scripted narratives. In the days after 9/11, George W. Bush told the world that you're either with us or against us. Musharraf said he was with us, which was jolly decent of him considering that 99.9999 percent of his people are against us. In the teeth of that glum reality, he's...

The Last Youth Standing - What the West and Islam share are elites detached from their own demographic realities Mark Steyn - November 20, 2006 I was watching Mansbridge One on One the other day. Don't ask me why. May have been an "encore presentation." Or more likely an encore presentation of an encore presentation. For a 24/7 news network, there's an eerie timelessness about CBC Newsworld: one would be only mildly surprised to switch on and find Mansbridge One on One with Lester B. Pearson or Sir Charles Tupper. Anyway, this week, the one he was on was the...

IN JANUARY 2002 the world’s media received e-mails saying that the journalist Daniel Pearl had been kidnapped. Pearl, a citizen of both the United States and Israel, was the South Asia bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal. The ransom demands included the release and return to Pakistan of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.The e-mails also stated: “We assure Americans that they shall never be safe on the Muslim Land of Pakistan. And if our demands are not met this scene shall be repeated again and again.” I was incensed when I learnt of this, disgusted that these criminals were distorting...