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Cutting Military Aid to Pakistan Is a Good Start, but It’s Not Enough

Jan. 15 2018

Earlier this month, the White House announced a decision to suspend all military aid to Pakistan—such aid has amounted to billions of dollars—for its active support for the Taliban and affiliates of al-Qaeda. The editors of the Weekly Standard applaud the decision:

Pakistan zealously backs our enemies even as it takes our money. . . . Pakistan supplies the Taliban with arms and with territory for training camps. We know this because Taliban commanders have freely said so. Pakistan arms the al-Qaeda-affiliated Haqqani network, responsible for many deadly attacks in Afghanistan. Although the Haqqani headquarters in Waziristan [an area of Pakistan that borders on Afghanistan] is well known, and although the Pakistani military has conducted antiterrorist operations there many times, the group remains unmolested. . . .

Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for appalling terrorist attacks in both India and Afghanistan, openly operates recruitment centers throughout Pakistan. It was Lashkar-e-Taiba that carried out the 2008 suicide attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people over the course of three days, [including a Chabad rabbi and his pregnant wife]. As for al-Qaeda itself, it’s no coincidence that Osama bin Laden’s compound was in Abbottabad—the home of Pakistan’s military academy. . . .

But withholding money, however sensible, isn’t enough. We will have to impose other and more severe penalties. This begins with naming and sanctioning Pakistani government officials and entities who support jihadist groups. Depending on the behavior of the Pakistani government, it might include a more fundamental change: formally designating Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism. . . .

Such a step might lead Pakistan to deny the United States use of its territory for Afghan operations, which will require our forces to use the Russian-influenced territories to the north as bases of operation. But the region will not cease to be the globe’s jihadism nerve center until Pakistan ceases to see [jihadism] as a tool of the state. Just as our weakness and naïveté encouraged the country flagrantly to disregard American interests in the first place, a progressively tougher stance toward Pakistan’s terrorism backers will produce geopolitical benefits elsewhere, We may not be able to pry Pakistan from its paranoid dependency on jihadism, but we don’t have to fund it, either.

Read more at Weekly Standard

More about: Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Pakistan, Politics & Current Affairs, U.S. Foreign policy, War on Terror

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic