Wednesday, October 28, 2009

The War on Terror

I am officially the most naive person on the planet.

I walked over to the school where I teach to pick up my backlog of mail and with it a few back issues of Maclean's magazine. The Sept. 7th issue has an article about Pakistan and its relationship with al-Qaeda et al. (Is Pakistan Winning? by Michael Petrou.)

I got as far as paragraph two when my brain came to a standstill.

"In November 2001, as the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and their American allies closed a net around the collapsing Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Pakistani planes flew into the Taliban stronghold of Kunduz and evacuated hundreds of Pakistani intelligence officers, Taliban commanders and al-Qaeda personel.

"This was after then-Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf had pledged support for American's efforts to destroy al-Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban. The United States knew about the airlift and allowed it to happen. Reasoning that it was better to maintain the fiction that Pakistan was wholly on its side and to cajole whatever assistance it could from Islamabad, Washington declined even to monitor who disembarked from the plane when it landed safely in Pakistan. 'It is believed that more foreign terrorists escaped from Kunduz than made their escape later from Tora Bora,' writes Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in his 2008 book Descent Into Chaos, referring to Osama bin Laden's mountain stronghold from which he safely fled in December 2001."

I know that I am going to appear to be pretty stupid, but WTF?

And we have men and women dying over there and killing innocents?

It's not like I thought Pakistan was an ally. We all know that they take US aid in one hand and support extremists with the other. But that this happens with US endorsement is mind-fucking-boggling.

Though things in Pakistan seem to be changing of late, how is it that those who decide to through away the lives of soldiers and civilians can allow the "evil" to escape?

I just don't get it.

Colleen

2 comments:

  1. hmmm.....we are living in a age where the worth of a human life is less then every thing....
    u got good insight...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Heavenly Muse: You know I don't think that has changed. I don't think it is a new age. The small thing that gives me hope is that in today's age we have ways of finding things out. Fifty or one hundred years ago, that would likely not have been the case. Now, if we could DO something about it... Thank you for dropping by.

    ReplyDelete