Demonically Paranoid
That a country like Pakistan is so demonically paranoid about its neighbour India to mount continual offensives, both through militias assigned to commit terrorist acts on India's soil, and through officially mounted 'wars' of attrition, speaks to its hysterical lack of intelligence. Afghanistan has been perilously unstable thanks in large part to Pakistan's interference. Pakistan has been concerned to ensure that India does not acquire too great influence in Afghanistan.And because Pakistan is determined to have the influence that it will not allow India to have in Afghanistan, it set about instituting a program of complete destabilization in its neighbour. To train, fund, and equip the Taliban became an institutionalized production of the government in Islamabad. Where its military and its intelligence agency both became intimately involved in the training and support of the Afghan Taliban.
In the process it continued to support and arm the Taliban while assuring NATO, the U.S. and the U.N. it was firmly involved in the 'war on terror'. This was a war that found in fact, its breeding ground in Pakistan, starting in the Saudi-funded Wahhabist madrassas encouraging young Muslims to think of themselves as jihadists, holy fighters for the cause of Islam.
Tribal Pakistan and tribal Afghanistan made for ready adherents prepared to sacrifice themselves as martyrs, so esteemed in tradition, so anxious to become part of the pantheon of Islamist heroes celebrated and envied for their opportunity to ascend to the heavens and receive the warm attention of waiting virgins.
Ignorance and poverty, traditional misanthropy and xenophobia, and the plight of enslaved women describe these countries.
So passionate is Pakistan about its dread of India gaining in any manner over its own aspirations that it will go to any lengths to prove its belligerent adversity toward that country. India, where millions of Muslims live protected by state law. As opposed to Pakistan and Afghanistan where minority religions and Christians cannot be assured safety against laws that oppress and threaten them.
The mutual antagonism that has resulted from Pakistan's unstinting adversity toward India has resulted in both countries having installed between ten thousand and twenty thousand troops stationed in the mountains of the Himalaya, around the disputed area of Kashmir. It is impossible for most people to even imagine being forced to mount the Karakoram mountain range, to impossible altitudes of 4,500 metres and more.
Exercise-hardy adventurers, explorers and ultra-athletes force themselves to ascend such steep mountains with all the dangers inherent in adverse weather conditions at those altitudes, and dangerous geological formations threatening, along with the everpresent ice and snow, one's very life and limb. Yet this is where military troops are stationed to ensure that neither one country or the other has the advantage.
Pakistan has mounted a rescue mission in the wake of a catastrophic avalanche up to 25 metres deep over an area a kilometre wide that buried over one hundred of its garrisoned soldiers. The mission, complete with dogs trained to sniff out survivors, will find no one to rescue. They are dead, smothered to death. The area where the men were stationed is 6,100 metres above sea level.
The avalanche-prone area has claimed, say military experts, more lives as a result of its inhospitable climate and unpredictable natural events, than has gunfire between the opposing armies. The Siachen Glacier has been aptly described as the world's highest battlefield, where Pakistani and Indian troops have fought at altitudes over 6,100 metres in height, at temperatures of -60-degrees Celsius.
This is markedly insane. And this, perhaps more than most anything else, marks the mad ambition of Pakistan, a shudderingly-miserable nuclear-arms-owning country of pathological psychopathy.
Labels: Afghanistan, Conflict, Islamism, Pakistan, Political Realities
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, April 10, 2012
<< Home