The Taliban's Atomic Threat - WSJ.com »
Posted By pc25 7 months ago in NewsAt his press conference Wednesday evening, President Barack Obama endorsed Pakistan's official position that it has secure control over its nuclear-weapons arsenal. Mr. Obama said he was "gravely concerned" about the situation there, but "confident that the nuclear arsenal will remain out of militant hands."
His words are not reassuring in light of the Taliban's military and political gains throughout Pakistan. Our security, and that of friends and allies world-wide, depends critically on preventing more adversaries, especially ones with otherworldly ideologies, from acquiring nuclear weapons. Unless there is swift, decisive action against the Islamic radicals there, Pakistan faces two very worrisome scenarios.
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pc257 months ago
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FTA
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Moreover, we must strive to keep Indo-Pakistani relations stable, if not friendly, and pressure Islamabad to put nuclear-weapons proliferator and father of Pakistan's nuclear program A.Q. Khan back under house arrest. At the same time, we should contemplate whether and how to extract as many nuclear weapons as possible from Pakistan, thus somewhat mitigating the consequences of regime collapse.
President Obama's talks next week in Washington with the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan provide a clear opportunity to take the hard steps necessary to secure Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and defeat the Taliban. Failure to act decisively could well lead to strategic-
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hyperbola7 months ago
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Ah my, the israel-first propagandists are out in force again with another propaganda campaign hardly different from the run-up to the disastrous Iraq war. Time to clean the zionists out of both our political parties.
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The myth of Talibanistan
Apocalypse Now. Run for cover. The turbans are coming. This is the state of Pakistan today, according to the current hysteria disseminated by the Barack Obama administration and United States corporate media - from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to The New York Times. Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said on the record that Pakistani Talibanistan is a threat to the security of Britain.
But unlike St Petersburg in 1917 or Tehran in late 1978, Islamabad won't fall tomorrow to a turban revolution.
Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At least 55% of Pakistan's 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There's no evidence they are about to embrace Talibanistan; they are essentially Shi'ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis - faithful followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari's centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People's Party. Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces - amounting to 85% of Pakistan's population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class - are an infinitesimal minority.
The Pakistan-based Taliban - subdivided in roughly three major groups, amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles - are concentrated in the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab.
To believe this rag-tag band could rout the well-equipped, very professional 550,000-strong Pakistani army, the sixth-largest military in the world, which has already met the Indian colossus in battle, is a ludicrous proposition. -
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hyperbola7 months ago
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Ah my, PC preaching the same as the racist israeli foreign minister again. What else is new.
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Iran and the Israel Lobby's Frustration
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case
.... For years, and up until very recently, the Israelis have been saying that if the U.S. does not take care of the Iranian nuclear problem, they will take military action themselves. So Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman raised some eyebrows April 26 when he told the Austrian Kleine Zeitung that Israel would not attack Iran. “We are not talking about a military attack. Israel cannot resolve militarily the entire world’s problem. I propose that the United States, as the largest power in the world, take responsibility for resolving the Iranian question.” Earlier he’d told a Russian paper that Israel’s main strategic threat was now Pakistan anyway. (That, I could have told you, is the one Muslim country with nuclear weapons.) Isn’t it odd how that resembles Obama’s view of the world?...
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp05012009.html
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Dionys7 months ago
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"If things continue their present course in Pakistan we may very well witness a nuclear war between Taliban Pakistan and India. The Obama administration seems powerless to do anything but testify to congress"
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More BS from the Wolfie, PC circle-jerk.
The administration already has plans in place to take the nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Pakistani military if the government should fall into the hands of the Taliban. Just because they don't tell YOU about it, doesn't mean their plans don't exist.
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hyperbola7 months ago
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Well, you are marching right in lockstep with the propaganda fed to us by israel-first traitors to America.
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Avigdor Lieberman injects truth into Israeli foreign policy
... Now, suddenly, he has relegated Iran to second place, instead promoting "Afpak" -- Afghanistan and Pakistan -- to first place. "Pakistan is nuclear and unstable, and Afghanistan is faced with a potential Taliban takeover," he told Alexander Rosensaft, the Israeli correspondent of Moskovskiy Komsomolets, "and the combination form a contiguous area of radicalism ruled in the spirit of bin Laden.
"I do not think this makes anyone in China, Russia or the US happy," Lieberman continued... "These countries [Pakistan and Afghanistan] are a threat not only to Israel, but to the global order as a whole."
This is hogwash, because neither Pakistan nor Afghanistan is currently "ruled in the spirit of bin Laden." Afghanistan is governed by President Hamid Karzai, chosen for the job by the United States after the 2001 invasion (although much of the Pashtun-populated south and south-east is controlled by the Taliban-led insurgency) Pakistan has a democratically elected civilian government (although the war in Afghanistan has radicalised the Pashtun-majority regions of Pakistan as well, and Pakistan's government is making highly controversial concessions to the "Pakistani Taliban.")
...It is doubly interesting because it tells us what Israeli strategists are thinking. Why has Avigdor Lieberman just changed his position on the most important strategic threat to Israel? Because he has just become foreign minister, and had all the strategic briefings that incoming foreign ministers get. So now he knows what the general staff and the professional diplomats really think.....
http://www.straight.com/article-216140/gwynne-dyer...
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Dionys7 months ago
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So which is it, Klarissa? Has Obama, so far, not had a say in anything as you assert here, or is he to blame for everything, as you assert elsewhere? You can't claim both without being a hypocrite.. but then that's sort of the seal of approval for being GOP supporter, isn't it?
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