We are worried , with good reason, about the witches brew being cooked up by the mullahs in Iran. The worry is about an Islamist government with the ability to launch a nuclear weapon. What is our plan if Pakistan falls under the control of any of the violent crazies rife in Pakistan? It is not an unlikely event.
Strike Brings Karachi Screeching to Halt
By Zarar Khan
The Associated Press
KARACHI, Pakistan -- A general strike paralyzed Karachi and closed businesses in other major Pakistani cities Monday as discontent grew over President Pervez Musharraf's ouster of the chief justice and a weekend of violence that left 41 people dead.
Shops were shut and traffic was thin on the roads in the southern port city, where security forces have authority to shoot rioters on sight, after the worst political violence in Pakistan in years broke out over the weekend.
Security forces Saturday took no action as rival groups demonstrating over an abortive visit to Karachi by suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry fought fierce clashes that also wounded more than 150 and caused widespread damage to property. Opposition parties blamed the government for the violence and called a nationwide protest strike Monday.
"There is a complete strike in Karachi," said Azhar Faruqi, the city police chief.
He reported that law and order was improving -- after the unrest took an ominous ethnic turn Sunday with clashes between Urdu-speaking Mohajirs linked to a pro-government party and Pashtuns, whose rivalry has caused bloodshed here in the past.
Officials said the strike was being observed in towns and cities across southern Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital. It was also observed, in varying degrees, in Islamabad and the capitals of Pakistan's other three provinces, Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta.
Many citizens appeared to support the strike call; others observed it out of fear of recrimination or unrest during pro-Chaudhry street demonstrations.
In Lahore, about 8,000 people, including lawyers, opposition party and human rights activists, chanted "Go Musharraf Go!" and "Death to Altaf Hussain." Hussain is leader of the pro-government Mutahida Qaumi Movement party blamed for much of the Karachi violence.
They burned two effigies of Musharraf and hundreds of protesters pushed through a police barricade.
The weekend's bloodshed marked a serious escalation in a crisis that began March 9 when Musharraf suspended Chaudhry, and has hardened opposition to plans for the general, a key U.S. ally, to extend his nearly eight-year rule, seeking another term this fall.
M 81 from Hubble, takes one's mind off worldly worries for a while.
ReplyDeleteHow can you have such a creation without the Creator?
ReplyDeleteBeats me, Deuce. I gave up really trying to figure it quite some time ago. I just go about my own business and am nice to my wife. I wonder what is going on there, in all those galaxies? There must be some kind of life one would think.
ReplyDeleteWho was that English writer who said, looking out at space, if it is inhabited(thinking about mankind) what a field for folly, and if it is not inhabited, what a lot of wasted space. Can't think of his name right now, he was one of the conservatives. Carlyle?
Maybe we really will meet up with em sometime, and what then?
Try to spread the Gospels I quess, as one of the Christian writers I was reading said, thinking along these lines. Johnson, an English catholic writer, can't think of his first name. He's an historian, his outlook is, Europe was a little better off for the coming of Christianity, but not much better off.
ReplyDeleteThe Europeans, what a race, a hard group to make behave, and be nice to one another!
Paul Johnson, "The History of Christianity"
ReplyDeleteNewt is going to run, it looks like.
ReplyDeleteThe republicans seem to have a lot of good candidates. But why anyone would want to have to deal with Iraq, Iran and Pakistan is a good question.
a good question indeed.
ReplyDelete"There was a time in recent memory, most notably while the so-called Vietnam Syndrome infected the American body politic, when Republican and Democratic administrations alike viewed with real trepidation the prospect of sending U.S. troops into action abroad. Since the advent of the new Wilsonianism, however, self-restraint regarding the use of force has all but disappeared. During the entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale U.S. military actions abroad totaled a scant six. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events. The brief period extending from 1989's Operation Just Cause (the overthrow of Manuel Noriega) to 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom (the overthrow of Saddam Hussein) featured nine major military interventions. And that count does not include innumerable lesser actions such as Bill Clinton's signature cruise missile attacks against obscure targets in obscure places, the almost daily bombing of Iraq throughout the late 1990s, or the quasi-combat missions that have seen GIs dispatched to Rwanda, Colombia, East Timor, and the Philippines. Altogether, the tempo of U.S. military interventionism has become nothing short of frenetic.
ReplyDelete"As this roster of incidents lengthened, Americans grew accustomed to -- perhaps even comfortable with -- reading in their morning newspapers the latest reports of U.S. soldiers responding to some crisis somewhere on the other side of the globe. As crisis became a seemingly permanent condition so too did war. The Bush administration has tacitly acknowledged as much in describing the global campaign against terror as a conflict likely to last decades and in promulgating -- and in Iraq implementing -- a doctrine of preventive war.
"In former times American policymakers treated (or at least pretended to treat) the use of force as evidence that diplomacy had failed. In our own time they have concluded (in the words of Vice President Dick Cheney) that force "makes your diplomacy more effective going forward, dealing with other problems." Policymakers have increasingly come to see coercion as a sort of all-purpose tool. Among American war planners, the assumption has now taken root that whenever and wherever U.S. forces next engage in hostilities, it will be the result of the United States consciously choosing to launch a war. As President Bush has remarked, the big lesson of 9/11 was that "this country must go on the offense and stay on the offense." The American public's ready acceptance of the prospect of war without foreseeable end and of a policy that abandons even the pretense of the United States fighting defensively or viewing war as a last resort shows clearly how far the process of militarization has advanced."
Andrew J. Bacevich
2005
Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. A graduate of West Point and a Vietnam veteran, he has a doctorate in history from Princeton and was a Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is the author of several books, including the just published The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War.
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NEWS RELEASES from the United States Department of Defense
No. 582-07 IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 14, 2007
Media Contact: (703) 697-5131/697-5132
Public/Industry(703) 428-0711
DoD Identifies Army Casualty
The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.
1st Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, 27, of Walpole, Mass., died May 13 in Balad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his unit during combat patrol operations in Salah Ad Din Province, Iraq.He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas.
Given the very brief mention here a few days ago of the general, decades-long drift in the nature of US military operations, perhaps it is time to consider whether promiscuous military intervention engenders over time an increasing, even inevitable, lack of seriousness in all military undertakings.
ReplyDeleteTrish, brilliant post.
ReplyDeleteIn an Op-Ed piece in today's Washington Post , retired U.S. Army colonel Andrew J. Bacevich dares to utter the virtually unspeakable: the emperor has no clothes! Dr. Bacevich, now a professor of international relations at Boston University and author of The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War among other texts, argues that with the loud chorus of criticism on the post-invasion conduct of the war in Iraq directed largely against President Bush, VP Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, and other civilian leaders in the administration, the uniformed military leadership has received an undeserved pass with respect to any responsibility or blame at all for the rapid deterioration of conditions that has occurred in Iraq following the successful overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime.
ReplyDeleteI knew Dr. Bacevich vaguely in the very early 1980s when we were both assigned to the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment; I as a brand new second lieutenant at the regimental headquarters in Nuremberg, Germany and he as a major serving as executive officer of one of our three tactical cavalry squadrons responsible for surveillance of the East German-Czechoslovakian/West German border area. When I was assigned as a strategic intelligence analyst almost ten years later with the Defense Intelligence Agency, he co-authored a study with three other Army lieutenant colonels on U.S. military strategy in small wars focusing on El Salvador, which caused a splash in the intelligence community. All this by way of saying that he is very well-known and respected in both military and academic circles as an authority on military history and security studies.
Dr. Bacevich argues that Secretary Rumsfeld's intention to nominate Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez for a fourth star is a flawed decision.
When Sanchez assumed command of U.S. and coalition ground forces in Iraq in June 2003, the insurgency was barely in its infancy. When he left Iraq a year later, it was raging all but out of control. By any measure -- estimated number of enemy fighters, frequency of attacks, Iraqi civilian casualties and U.S. troop losses sustained -- conditions in Iraq worsened appreciably during Sanchez's tenure in command. His task was to provide security; his efforts produced chaos.
He argues that a major reason for the present morass in Iraq is due to the failure of General Sanchez to develop a strategy for dealing with the challenges which would confront our troops in the aftermath of the initial invasion. Moreover, as the title of Dr. Bacevich's Op-Ed essay suggests, General Sanchez has got to be held responsible for the developments in the military situation on the ground that occurred on his watch, and to do otherwise will have deleterious consequences beyond those that are readily apparent:
The public knows Sanchez as the senior commander in Baghdad when the Abu Ghraib story broke last year. Since then several Pentagon investigations into the scandal have cleared him of any personal wrongdoing. Yet, if this conclusion insulates Sanchez as an individual from disciplinary action, it cannot acquit him of his accountability as a commander. On this point the code of officership is unambiguous: Commanders bear responsibility for all that happens on their watch. This tradition applies to those at the top no less than to lieutenants and captains. Given the egregiousness of Abu Ghraib, it cannot exempt Sanchez. On that score alone, his advancement would do untold damage to the military professional ethic.
I have made the point before in this blog that the senior uniformed military officers, particularly those at the Pentagon and running the Central Command, must be held accountable for their failure to adequately plan for the military occupation of Iraq. When the senior ranking Army officer at the time of the invasion of Iraq counseled vociferously that the troop numbers required for a sustained occupation of Iraq would be in the hundreds of thousands, not only was he dismissed as "wrong" by Mr. Rumsfeld and company, but the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Eric Shinseki, found no outward support from other senior officers in a position to back him up. Both General Tommy Franks, then Centcom commander, and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, repeatedly confirmed that no additional troops were necessary on the ground.
Dr. Bacevich does not make the argument that the debacle in Iraq is the result of a lack of boots on the ground so much as a failure in the performance of the uniformed leadership, particularly General Sanchez. His conclusion, with which I agree, is that we do not reward failure in our military. This is not a criticism of "our troops" performance, which is how it is usually perceived and reinterpreted by the administration and the pro-war hawks on the right. For this reason, Dr. Bacevich's criticisms are somewhat unique to find in print, since he uses terms that are generally regarded as verboten in the public discourse when discussing the war in Iraq, such as "quagmire" and "stalemate". This criticism is essential, and in the true best interests of our troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, as they're entitled to the best leadership this country can provide. Dr. Bacevich's conclusion is spot on:
There is no doubt that Sanchez, an honorable man, did his best under extraordinarily trying circumstances. But his best wasn't good enough. He did not get the job done. It's time to recognize that and to make way for leaders who can. American soldiers deserve no less.
Amen to that.
Addendum: Check out commentary and a link at Draft Zinni to a newly released CSIS study that chronicles the administration's flawed strategy and missteps in contingency planning for the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.
a Silent cacophony
This may be of interest to you Navy guys, not to mention, EVERYONE!
ReplyDeleteEl Bush is about to sign off on "L.O.S.T.", The Law of the Sea Treaty.
If America wishes to continue to press its power via the world's oceans, agreeing to this will be a gross mistake. Any action taken by the American Navy in International waters could be adjudicated and made null and void; including military action! It also gives more control over the oceans to world bodies, such as the U.N. There goes shipping and trade.
...incremental Transnat...
The U.N site, if you're interested in more.
ReplyDeleteTrish, you are up on next post.
ReplyDeleteI thought the PNAC people wanted democracy in the middle east. Musharraf is the leader of a military junta, and if he falls that's a good thing, right? Just like the fall of Saddam ushered in Vermont-style democracy in Iraq?
ReplyDeleteA powerful bomb blast in a hotel in the centre of the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar has killed at least 24 people, police and officials say.
ReplyDeletebobalharb: Newt is going to run, it looks like.
ReplyDeleteNewt should get two faces of himself carved at Mount Rushmore. On one hand he says he warned the Bush Administration was making a huge mistake in Iraq in the aftermath of the invasion, and on the other hand he's accusing the democrats of trying to "defeat us" by attempting to remedy that same mistake.
Newt: "First of all, we made an enormous mistake in June of 2003. I said so at the time and I said it publicly in December of 2003 when I said it on Meet the Press and Newsweek that we went off a cliff....
....We’re in a contest between the speed with which the Democrats in Congress can defeat us and the speed of which General Petraeus can win victory, and that’s a contest we currently have underway.
I think it's a big strike against Newt, dumping his first wife like he did.
ReplyDelete