| Long piece (3144 words) In the Sydney Morning Herald pulling together many of the stories we've seen here at Rantburg, and adding further details. The author's conclusion: despair, agony, probable doom. The problem is, the alternative to fighting the jihadis is surrender... It will be interesting to see how General Petraeus' move to the CIA and the new man in his spot in the DoD change things -- a CIA quietly concentrating on finding and killing bad guys coupled with a beefed-up JSOC quietly concentrating on hunting down and killing bad guys, while the regular forces shape the battlefield, clear and hold, and get the headlines. |
Search for a firm footing in Pakistan and there is none - all is quicksand ... strategically, politically, morally.
Here in south Asia, strategically sandwiched between failing Afghanistan and the China and India powerhouses, is a country in which journalists are abducted in the night by agents of the state and murdered; in which the only advance after a decade in which Washington has tried to buy friendship with cheques for more than $20 billion, is the expansion of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal - which is on the verge of surpassing Britain's as the fifth biggest in the world.