alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

August 12, 2006

A Brief Note on Pakistan

by AltHippo @ 6:41 pm. Filed under Uncategorized, Life in D.C., foreign affairs

One of the great privileges of living in our Nation’s capitol is being able to bike through the downtown area. Today I took a long loop, down Porter Street out to the McMillan reservoir. Then down 7th St to U, down 11th St to the Capitol City Brewery, where I perused today’s papers and blog posts over a Hefeweizen.

I’ll pause here for a second to note that it’s thanks to my Palm T/X that I can do this. The Washington Post, NYT, Le Monde, TPM, Factesque, The Sideshow, Brad Delong’s blog, and much more are all at my fingertips. It deserves its own post, but I’ll just say now that the Palm T/X is an iPod for people who like to read.

If I had to single out the most important thing I read today, it would probably be an interview from Frontline’s archives on Pakistan.

I mention this for two reasons: first, we tend to neglect any discussion of Pakistan until something big like the plot uncovered by MI5 comes to light. Second, you might not be aware, I wasn’t until very recently, that Frontline will post material from its archives based on the events of the day. It’s a very handy resource. Check it out.

Back to Pakistan. Before the invasion of Iraq, Mary Anne Weaver, foreign correspond for the New Yorker presciently noted this:

Our war against terrorism is largely perceived in the Muslim world as a war against Islam. Al Qaeda gains strength every day when we seem to be coming closer and closer to war with Iraq, and I think that the day the first American bomb falls on Baghdad you’re going to see hundreds, if not thousands, of potential Osama bin Ladens joining militant Islamist movements across the Muslim world.

I found this significant, as there were reporters well in the mainstream that understood what would be the likely consequences of an Iraq invasion. While Bush, Cheney, Lieberman, et al might try to make the case that Iraq is the front of our War on Terrorism, too often the alternative hypothesis is dismissed. The pre-emptive invasion and continued occupation of Iraq is a principle cause of recent events.

There are older events vis-a-vis our relationship with Pakistan that bear significantly on what we call the “War on Terror” (I’m not a fan of that expression). Again from the Frontline interview:

And this is one of the ironies of the militant Islamist movement today, the fact that the vast majority of its leaders were funded, armed, and trained on the battlefields of Afghanistan 20 years ago by the United States. And now, in a sense, they’ve begun returning home. They were driven out of Afghanistan by the United States bombing campaign after Sept. 11, and they’ve come home to Pakistan. Of course, many of them have gone back to Saudi Arabia and Yemen, or to the West Bank and Gaza, or to Egypt, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia generally, but huge numbers have returned to Pakistan. Because this is where it all began.

And at this point, you have at least 128 military training camps dotting the mountains and valleys of Pakistan. More than 1,000 young men pass through them each year, joining the ranks of some 60,000 to 100,000 Islamic militants who have fought or trained in Afghanistan and then, well-armed, have returned home to Pakistan.

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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