Does this mean that you'll stop ridiculing me for saying that the Sunni insurgency is over?
Nope. It is way too early to say this. Don't you remember all the "tipping points" you've announced in the past? This may or may not be the "real" tipping point, but honestly, I doubt it. Unless the taste of civil war that both Sunnis and Shia have gotten over the past couple of years was indeed enough to frighten them into real negotiations. It's possible. I'm not prescient enough to say whether it's probable or not.
We'll just have to wait and see.
Your credibility would be enhanced by just presenting your POV as your POV rather than as oracular. You may not feel like your pronouncements are like that, but that is how they come across. On the other hand, you are also far better than most of the BushBackers on this thread, who can be so completely absurd that I don't even bother to read them anymore. They are hopeless.
Oh man, I can just imagine how much support you would have given to a Bush-led American invasion of nuclear-armed Pakistan! Al Qaeda is married into Waziristan (literally); nobody has good answers, certainly not Musharref, who has made a good living off us by pretending to deal with them.
Look, I agree part of this here--"nobody has good answers" to this. The geography of the land and the indigenous culture is heaven-sent for a movement like Al Qaeda. But sending our military into Iraq was definitely not part of the answer to the problem. I know, I know, we've been through this before, and, frankly, I don't want to rehash it. I will say this though--Musharref has in many ways an even more difficult problem that we have. He is there. His life is on the line. There is plenty of support for Al Qaeda in Pakistan, including in the ISI and in the military. At least, as far as I can gather. I'm not pretending to be an expert on it, I've only read some articles and one book (the one by Steve Coll, I forget its title offhand). Your assumption though than an invasion of Pakistan would be an answer is wrong. No invasion a la Iraq could have worked. I still maintain that the Al Qaeda problem is one that should have been addressed by intelligence, policing and special forces, not by a full scale invasion. Well, it may be that putting 100,000 American soldiers plus another 100,000 soldiers from other countries in Afghanistan back in '02-03 would have done some good.
But I have too much to do to speculate any further on that now. I'll just repeat what has already been said 00s possible 000s of times on this and other threads, that the focus from the beginning should have been on Afghanistan/Pakistan, not Iraq. That isn't to say that Iraq should have been ignored, but we shouldn't have invaded. It was a stupid mistake. All JMHO, of course. |
