You’re stupid.
Pakistan is estimated to have something in the neighborhood of 100 nuclear warheads, by the way.
OK, but there isn’t there some kind of sanity level between this and giving them 3 Billion dollars?
Maybe just 1 billion.
For coming up with this brilliant thought I could get a few million as an origination fee. I promise to spend some of it on some orphaned kittens and shit.
Assuming the arrests of these men are for retribution, I completely agree with the title of the thread, but not the content. I see no reason to care at all about India or Pakistan as military allies; their interests just aren’t ours.
That said, I hope the government is doing something realistic to get the people that helped us out of any possible danger. I wouldn’t mind any of them and their extended families being American citizens with pensions, free educations for themselves and their relatives, and maybe a quiet cabin on a lake. They helped us get OBL, the guy who masterminded the worst foreign attack on our soil since Pearl Harbor.
Hey, that’s my line.
Not that I disagree with your assessment, mind you.
Well, that’s more than the US is giving me.
Is there any benefit to letting Pakistan be the Palm Springs for terrorists? At least we know where to find them.
At any rate, I don’t feel like besties with either Pakistan or India, so if there’s a strong movement towards backing away from them, I don’t have a big problem with it.
I’ve always felt we should be BFFs with central and S. America. They are much more “us” than them, so to speak. Of course, we do give them lots of money too.
You don’t think the country which bills itself as the birthplace of modern democracy should be on good terms with the largest country to adopt its system of government?
No, there’s no benefit to letting terrorists have a free hand even if you have a vague idea where they are. Afghanistan was the Palm Springs for terrorists in the '90s. How did that work out?
While there are some people who want aid to Pakistan scaled way back - including some Pakistanis who think the country is subsisting on foreign aid instead of developing its economy - I don’t think there’s any real push for getting out of the region. I know the Obama administration feels the U.S. should be paying more attention to India, Pakistan, and South Asia and less to the Middle East, and that makes sense to me.
Are we seeing you actually critique Cold War policy, as followed even by the blessed St Ronnie? What happened to containment and roll back?
Strictly speaking, India has been closer to communism for much of its history than Pakistan. Communist politics still play a bigger role in India than just about any country that isn’t actually communist, in fact.
Minor quibble: Bangladesh is on the other side, not in the middle. The Country Formerly Known as East Pakistan split off in part because of its separation from (West) Pakistan.
Not that any nuclear fallout from a, well, nuclear fall-out between India and Pakistan won’t make Bangladeshis’ life miserable. More miserable.
I find it humorous when Americans use terms like “normal country” to suggest a stable nation-state where the law rules and what the government says goes. Such a place is hardly the norm.
If you’re trying to suggest that letting Pakistan and India fight is a dangerous thing to do, that analogy doesn’t strike me as a good one.
I’m not American. But even so, They are pretty much a nuclear theocracy on the edge of revolution. For a given value of “normal” they are far from it.
The poster I was replying to seemed happy to let Pakistan plus whoever fight it out as long as they were far away from the US. India probably wouldn’t work as a cat though. They are more of an elephant I suspect. But how would you get an elephant in bag? And would the cat want to fight it if you could?
I admit it breaks down under analysis but which analogy doesn’t?
And what do you do if Pakistan doesn’t feel the same way?
18 billion in Military and Economic aid in the last decade, with more promised.
I don’t think it’s necessarilly all bags of cash, some of it will be physical objects (say an F-16). I don’t know where to find an itemised list of this aid.
Like most Yanks, I’m from west of the Appalachians. If we assume a regionalist bias, some of us don’t care much about military strikes on American soil, because those strikes will focus on the eastern seaboard, & not reach the interior.
A Middle-American who would gladly see a bunch of South Asians dead because they mean nothing to him can rationally be expected to positively welcome any chance of seeing the resented cities of New York & D.C. burn. And any strikes against the USA from countries in the Eastern Hemisphere can reasonably be assumed to ignore the vast interior of the country & fall into the, “America Is New York,” stereotype.
I suspect the main reason that there aren’t more Americans working harder to get America nuked is as follows: The sort of person who’s well-traveled enough to know the, “America Is New York,” stereotype exists is probably xenophilic enough not to provoke mass murder in other countries, let alone world war.
Of course, most jingoistic types don’t think it through that far. They assume America will always win, & they identify the USA with themselves to some degree. But there is a sick logic to people from the provinces using US power to poke bears, if they hate the older/richer/less-conservative parts of the republic enough.
I accept the RealPolitik approach. It is, however, getting harder to believe that such a net gain actually exists. It is hard to see any gain at all honestly.
Let’s be real - the people of Pakistan hate us for supporting a corrupt regime and for the very fact that they rely on the money. The powers (or at least important elements of those powers) that be take the money and use it to line their own pockets, funnel some of it to terror groups, and protect the heads of terror groups while making superficial show of working with us. And they get away with it because they know we feel we need to support them. The only way giving money has influence is if you are willing to stop giving it if you do get reasonable behavior consistent with your self-interest in return. We have not gotten that from Pakistan and continuing to fund them as strongly without getting that in return will result in the aid having even less positive influence in the future.
Apologies, poorly phrased. “Caught in the middle” would give a better sense of how they’re likely to get dragged into it, rather than imply they are physically between the two.
We can all agree (everyone) this is the best thread in the world!!
Fucken Pakistani’s have never done anything other then terrorize people in the world.
They also killed 5 to 10 Chinese engineers recently.
I have never met a Pakistani I liked in my life.