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Posted on 11/11/2007, 2:07:24 PM by sukhoi-30mki
FRIEND OR FOE?
Washington hails Musharraf as an ally in the war on terror, but critics make a case that Pakistani leader is a terrorist
Adrian Levy,Catherine Scott-Clark
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Although an epicenter for global instability for many decades, Pakistan has in recent days been anointed "the most dangerous place on Earth."
Some point to an unfortunate trick of geography, with Pakistan bordering Iran, Afghanistan and its perennial enemy, India. Others blame the country's explosive social topography: The nation straddles many racial and religious fault lines, with the impoverished majority Sunni population rubbing up against a minority of wealthy Shiites.
Whatever the case, the Islamic republic has spawned thousands of unregulated religious seminaries whose graduates have gone on to fight across South Asia, Chechnya and the Philippines, and most recently planned attacks in Madrid, London and Frankfurt, Germany. To top things off, there is Pakistan's unsecured nuclear weapons program........
Musharraf likes to be seen as a firefighter, and has portrayed himself as a bridgehead between the West and the badlands of Islamic South Asia, where our own spooks and soldiers are rarely able to tread. He has worked hard to finesse his special relationship with Washington, familiarly known inside Pakistan as "Mush and Bush," and it has paid off with Pakistan receiving billions of dollars in U.S. aid.
Underpinning this deal are Musharraf's published credentials. He has always given the impression that he and his troops are Western-leaning moderates. However, the real Musharraf is far more complicated, and a good deal of the time we have paid the general to stand by us, he has been cosseting the forces that are bent on undermining the West, as part of a policy of defiance that stretches back two decades.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Neither. It’s better not to think of friends and foes.
Things are never this black and white unless you have an agenda. What’s the agenda for the ladies writing the article?
Neither friend nor foe, but the usual Third World, oligarchical, militician-kleptocrat. See most nation’s UN delegations for many more examples.
Maybe,they had woken up & smelt the coffee that things about Musharraf and his army are not as black & white as is believed to be.
If so, then why do they want to draw such a well defined line in the sand?
Trust President Bush. He has the information that permits him to see way down the road. I wouldn’t be surprised if he engineered this “crisis” as a step towards a desirable outcome that we regular people cannot see.
Maybe they seem to have connected all the dots which they gathered about the Paki army’s deeds & misdeedscome to such a conclusion.We’d need to read their book to know for sure!!
I trusted Bush after Sept.11.Wholeheartedly-no questions asked.Right now,I am cynical-not necessarily about the man’s integrity,but whether he can see this through to any degree.Pakistan has gone from bad to worse in the ensuing period-if US forces still face some trouble in Afghanistan-it comes from Pakistan.
Of course, but he can't talk about reality in public. No President ever can whether he is Bush or Musharraf.
He doesn’t have lot of time left for it,then.
We hope our leaders can keep a lid on the situation for a while longer. Hope is all that’s left since we can’t do a thing about it ourselves.
He is the closest thing we have to a “friend’ in Pakistan. Ally is a better word. An ally is not necessarily a friend.
He is definitely “foe” to the editors of MSM papers and networks because he is an ally of America.
He’s the closest thing to a friend we’re gonna get out of Pakistan. The MSM hates him of course, because he’s an ally of America. Yet they don’t say a word about Chavez, Putin, Ahmadinejad, etc. who are sworn enemies of America with developing nuke programs or try to extend their terms not to quell Islamofascist violence, but to turn their country either back to or further into communism.
Are leftists the only ones with an agenda?everyone in the media has an agenda-it’s left to us to decide to buy into it or not-Ignoring the common sense evident in some articles because they are written by people you don’t like is to close your mind to sound reason.
Musharraf on the other hand is an individual who is not our friend and does not share our interests.
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