More on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, including his time planning the 9/11 attacks while in Karachi, Pakistan: newyorker.com/magazine/2010/…
On Osama Bin Laden’s years in Abbottabad, Pakistan, living a few hundred metres from the gates of the Pakistan Military Academy: google.ca/amp/s/www.wsj.…
On ISI’s role in Pakistan’s 2021 invasion of Afghanistan:
1. Reading these remarks has been an acutely painful experience for me. The falsehoods, the callous inhumanity, the pusillanimity of this ham-fisted bid to dress up disaster as 'necessary unpleasantness' are truly shocking, presaging new calamities.
2. At bottom, this ill-tempered screed is a new manifesto for isolationism. For @JoeBiden, the US has not role 'remaking' other countries. It won't defend the basic principles of the UN Charter. Democracy isn't even mentioned. This is Trumpism re-branded for WaPo/NYT readers.
3. It's also a reprise of the 2011 @benrhodes doctrine, eagerly championed by VP Biden, that threw Syria to the wolves, hoping Putin would choke on the carcass. Instead we got escalating genocide, invasion, proxy wars, polarization, refugee crises & the retreat of democracy.
Having now read the full article, I have two major comments. First, fear took the US to war in 1941 as well, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. That did not prevent the ensuing gargantuan US & allied effort from producing flourishing democracies in Asia, Europe & elsewhere. 1/10
The issue was never fear or even rage as motivating factors, nor 'nation-building' as either deliberate or incidental goals, but rather war strategy: we had a plan to fight 'Taliban' in Afghanistan, but never a strategy to deter or defeat the actual aggressor, Pakistan. 2/10
The US was in fact re-joining a war that had been underway for nearly three decades, as Pakistan's generals sought strategic depth in Afghanistan to compensate for the loss of East Pakistan/Bangladesh in 1971, & increasingly turned to global jihad in pursuit of this goal. 3/10
Ten years' ago Osama Bin Laden was killed in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan -- a stone's throw from the Pakistan Military Academy, their version of West Point. The statement below mentions Afghanistan three times; Pakistan not once. Why? 1/4 whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…
By May 2011 Bin Laden had been living in Pakistan for over nine years. He founded Al Qaida at Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1988 in response to a previous US withdrawal from the region. The terrorist group responsible for 9/11 & countless other attacks is still based in Pakistan. 2/4
The whole world was shocked to learn Bin Laden had lived comfortably for so long as a guest of Pakistan's military, whose proxy war in Afghanistan through Al Qaida, the Haqqanis & Taliban has cost the lives of over 3,500 NATO & coalition soldiers -- 2/3 of them American. 3/4
A first-rate opinion piece outlining the strategy we should all pursue in relations with China: "Our goal should not be to dictate to China how it is governed, but to embolden & enable those Chinese who want change to achieve it."
"(...) the Communist regime is not authoritarian, but totalitarian. Historian Robert Conquest defined a totalitarian state as one that recognizes no limits to its authority in any sphere of public or private life, & extends that authority to whatever length feasible."
"(...) this totalitarian regime is outwardly strong but inwardly weak,& (...) much of the Chinese elite is deeply opposed to the course to which Mr. Xi is committed. They recognize that economic reform without political change has created problems that damage China (...)."