The first step is always facing facts, and the fact is we are at war with the Pashtun tribes, not the Taliban. The Taliban is just a name for those Pashtun rejecting the Afghan government, which is just about all of them. The Pashtun don’t want any outside rule, and want to live by their own form of medieval Islam, which by itself is not really a problem. The problem is they support Al Qaeda and believe Al Qaeda should have safe haven in their areas. This we can’t accept.

Bribery is not an option. The Pashtun don’t get to decide whether they get to give Al Qaeda safe haven, and we aren’t obligated to convince them not to by building schools or irrigation projects or any other modern goodies. Once we get our heads around this- which is of course unlikely- then we can get on with the business.

And you needed wikileaks to help you realize this? It is also a wee bit more complicated than that. Pakistan is not one Borg mindset (although the current form of Islam being pushed there certainly is striving for that).

The money we spend in Pakistan is supposedly to buy influence. We know some of it will be diverted. But better to use the money to shore up friendies in the Pakistan military and government.

I am not sure that this is a good idea. I am not sure we are doing it competently. But I also understand not providing this money would have consequences too, perhaps worse than what we are dealing with now.

This is just the latest example of the self-defeating nature of this war — and of DC’s insane foreign policy in general.

How sensational and wildly inaccurate is it to say, on the basis of the leaked documents, that “For $1 billion a year, we’re paying for Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency to help kill our troops in Afghanistan”?

This is the sort of fact-free analysis I came to expect from the NYT under Pinch.

It’s been known for decades about the extremist infiltration of the ISI. Previous governments hoped to co-opt the radicals, but wanted to keep them out of the Army, where the real power was for most of Pakistan’s history. The ISI was the answer because their main concern was India, and from a government policy point of view their extremism wasn’t a problem in that regard. And their islamist street cred actually helped forge cooperation with the Taliban and other Afghan Pushtun rebels fighting the Soviets.

But it was never true they had “taken over” the ISI – the Army would never have permitted it, although there were rogue units operating outside their control for a long time, and some still able to. But the extra funding we’ve been giving the Pakistanis since 9/11 has been going to gradually identify and isolate or remove these elements and compared to the situation we began with a lot of progress has been made.

Now, certainly if the Taliban has heat-seeking missiles they probably were procured through these rogue ISI contacts. But the leaks reveal a grand total of ONE chopper taken down – either the missiles aren’t up to date, the Taliban are terrible shots, they don’t have very many of them, or all of the above.

The true villains here are the leakers and the publisher of the leaks. Contemporaneous communiques from an ongoing war could endanger our troops in ways we cannot imagine. This is a serious security breach which must be addressed immediately and with the full force of the law.

I think the WH is behind all this leaking.

The NYT had meetings with them before the story was printed.
This whole war is a waste of American lives, and we should get
out of there ASAP. Nuke their poppy fields, and go home.