KINDLY SNEERING AT PAKISTAN

Over the weekend, militants from groups founded, trained, and armed, by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (I.S.I.), graduated at the top of their class, and demonstrated heartfelt appreciation for their tutors, by attacking Karachi's international airport.

Oh sure, you could argue that there is little present evidence of ISI being in any way directly responsible for this attack; unlike the assault on Bombay a few years ago, when it turned out the fanatics had been prepped for months by elements of Pakistan's security establishment.
But the tactics and weaponry clearly indicate that it is so. All the known hallmarks of previous ISI-sponsored or implicated actions were there. And the ISI has, for over a generation, been involved in every reprehensible occurrence in that poxy hellhole of a country.
As well as the purportedly Islamicist insurrections in Afghanistan, the former Soviet Central Asia, and Chinese Turkestan.

Now the devil has come home to roost.


TALIBAN PEACE TALKS

One might think that this spells the end of the peace talks with the nutballs (whether that term applies to the jihadis OR the vakils and babus of the civilian government is a matter of interpretation), but reason dictates that in fact this changes nothing.

A nation that standardly imprisons people for not paying protection money to powerful politicians and Sindhi landlords, blows up leaders of political parties who have the temerity to challenge the status quo, lauds assassins as heroes, lynches religious dissidents, and sponsors training camps for murderers and psychopaths, is without a doubt both reality-blind enough and insane enough to continue sitting across a conference table with drug-dealers, rapists, and blinkered retrogrades.
And in truth, those Talibanis are their brothers.
Spiritual and moral kinfolk in every way.

[Link to article about treatment of religious dissidents: Shia pilgrims killed in Pakistan. Link to Wikipedia entry for assasinated defender of the right to religiously dissent: Salman Taseer. Link to a Wikipedic detailing of training for murder and psychopathy: Lal Masjid. Genug.]


Pakistan is a failed state and a terminally sick society. The individuals who while knowing that it is so continue to do the right thing, and fight against the rot -- soldiers, civilians, journalists, intellectuals, and good people among the masses -- are, perhaps, the true crazies. To hold out any hope of improvement despite the overwhelming drang nach unten, to think that the ansturm von wahnsinn can be reversed, is to be completely divorced from any sense of reality.

There is no hope of that repulsive place ever getting better.
Or becoming a civilized democratic country.
Nor even any reason for it to exist.

Except as a playground for foreign royals.
I hear that the falconry is stellar.
Also the camel races.



Pakistan, sacha-me dalala aur chura ke rashtra hai.




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