CapitalistImperialistPig

Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding, Nov 5, 2013 by Husain Haqqani is a detailed description of the relations between Pakistan and the US from the birth of Pakistan in 1947 to nearly the present. There are plenty of delusions, to be sure, but I'm not so sure that they are magnificent - more like delusions of magnificence. From its founding, Pakistan sold itself to the US as a bulwark against Communism, but in fact spent nearly all of the aid the US has lavished on it - some $67 billion in 2011 dollars - on an expensive military aimed almost exclusively at India. Pakistan was founded so that Indian Muslims could be independent of Hindu rule, and its primary tool in unifying its own diverse cultures has always been fanning the flames of Muslim fanaticism and anti-India rage. One pretext for that rage was the fact that in the partition India managed to grab Jammu and Kashmir, a region with a large Muslim population that Paki...

To the extent that we remember at all, Americans have only a dim idea how we got first got involved in Afghanistan. Something about the Soviet invasion, followed by the CIA and "Charlie Wilson's War." Husain Haqqani tells some more of the story in "Magnificent Delusions." After Army Chief Zia-ul-Hac overthrew the elected government of Pakistan and murdered the elected President, he faced rebellions in some provinces. When the British divied up the subcontinent, they had deliberately divided the Pashtun peoples, placing some of them in Pakistan and the rest in Afghanistan. This resulted in persistent demands for a united "Pashtunistan." Meanwhile, a somewhat leftist government had been elected in Afghanistan and adopted policies (land reform, rights for women) that offended large landowners and Islamic fundamentalists. Zia responded by training, funding, and supplying Islamist insurgents, creating an Afghan civil war. This war probably played a...

For various reasons, nearly all of them bad, the US clung to its alliance with the Pakistani generals despite repeated demonstrations that they were unreliable and frequently treacherous allies. This was much more dramatic during the Eisenhower and Nixon years than during the Kennedy administration, mostly because Nixon, like Dulles and Kissinger saw the world thru Manichean glasses. Relatively stable and progressive India, by pursuing socialist ideas and hewing to a neutralist line in the cold war became a "Soviet stooge" for them. Meanwhile, the repressive and incompetent but Sandhurst educated Pakistani generals spoke a language that they could appreciate, even when their double dealings were repeatedly exposed. In their conversations (as revealed by Nixon's tapes) Indira Gandhi was dismissed as a "bitch" and an "old witch". Nixon did have one relatively good reason for hanging onto the Pakistani generals: Yahya Khan was his pipeline to the Chi...

An ally, in one perhaps cynical definition, is someone you can't trust enough to call a friend. Pakistan has been that ally since it's inception. Pakistan was largely the creation of one man, Muhammed Ali Jinnah , and its rationale for existence was to prevent Muslims from having to live in a country with a Hindu majority. In that respect, as in many, it has failed, with the Muslim population of the subcontinent now divided among three countries: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, with with Pakistan having roughly 2/5 of the total. Husain Haqqani, scholar, journalist, and former Pakistani ambassador to the US, has written an history of US Pakistan relations, and its title could also be its summary: Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding Both the US and Pakistan have been seriously deluded in what they have expected from each other, but Pakistan probably takes the bigger hit in the early going. Margaret Bourke-White, the ...

The Scots, having wisely (IMHO) decided to cast their lot with union, I decided to look at the general problem of secession. The argument for secession is essentially always the same: the people (or nation, religion, ethnicity, language, etc.) cannot endure being ruled by the people of Y. When the rule is imperial and historically imposed by force rather than democratic there is some logic to the argument. Since most large nations were the fruits of empire, it's an argument that is frequently available. When we are talking democracy, though, and nations with a long established unity, I think secession is almost always nuts. And why is that idiot Cameron still running the joint? A very few examples of peaceful and otherwise amicable national divorces exist, but they are vastly outnumbered by those that resulted in war, calamity and catastrophe. India-Pakistan, Yugoslavia, a vast catalog of Africa, numerous examples in the Americas, the American Civil War, and so on. One of t...

On Thursday, Scotch voters will vote on independence from Britain, and if the polls are right, and human stupidity triumphs as usual, there is a good chance they will chose secession. I guess I've already hinted that I think this is a bad idea. I can't think of another occasion on which a nation, united in language and culture for hundreds of years, has decided to tear itself apart on such a flimsy pretext - essentially, so far as I can see, because Scots watched one too many Mel Gibson movies. The partition of India was much better motivated, but equally idiotic and certainly more catastrophic, at least in the short run. Pakistan was essentially the creation of one man, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. His rationale was that it would be intolerable for Muslims to live in a democratic nation where they would be outnumbered and outvoted by Hindus. The idea of partition was disliked by many thoughtful British, essentially all Americans, and many others. Britain agreed to it, I imagine...

At the end of the Fifteenth Century, Europe began its colonization of the world. A few centuries later, nearly every part of the world had fallen under the sway of Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands. These empires eventually crumbled, the last of them in the second half of the twentieth century, but the world had been transformed. North America, Australia, and New Zealand were irrevocably Anglicized. South and Central America were Latinized. Africa too, was utterly transformed. Only the Ancient civilizations of the Near and Far East retained much cultural integrity. I would argue that even that is largely illusory. Cultures, like any evolutionary product, resist destruction and replacement. After all, they would never have emerged or endured without some self-preserving traits. When the European empires fell, the newly independent nations rushed to reclaim their respective cultural heritages. For the nations where the indigenous cultures had been most thoroughly exti...