Boy, wouldn't you love to be a fly on the wall as W. sits down to dinner with Pervez Musharrif and Hamid Karzai? [No food fights boys!] What on earth are they going to talk about? Musharraf's new book? Perhaps not. Musharrif has already caused a stir by saying that former US undersecretary of State, Richard Armitage, told him the US would bomb Pakistan into the Stone Age unless he got onboard with the WOT. That was bad enough, but now the press has taken W.'s advice and 'bought the book’ -- though they probably got comped for it -- and more is coming out about what went on in those early days of the WOT. Musharrif says the US paid Pakistan millions of dollars in bounties to round up suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda types. (One presumes that whether they were actually guilty of anything wasn't all that important.)
Just this one little tidbit of information ought to give W. some indigestion over dinner. Here's he's on the verge of getting cart blanc to do whatever he pleases at Gitmo from Congress and now this comes out! It won't be too much of a stretch for W.'s detractors to draw a direct line between those bounties and the hundreds of "enemy combants" being held at Gitmo who were all supposedly 'captured on the battlefield' and who have never been charged with anything. [Laura, where's the BC power?] Musharrif also writes that the US, Pakistan and the Saudis created an "Islamic Monster" by aiding the Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Seriously, does this guy have a death wish? I can already see Rummy and Cheney fitting Musharrif for a Fred Flintstone suit right now. I don't know what Musharrif is up to, but you've got to figure he's not the vice-president's favorite dictator nowadays.
As I've written before, though, I'm guessing he doesn't care that much about what W. or Karzai has to say about these revelations or his turning a blind eye to the Taliban setting up shop in his country. He's gambling the US has too much on its plate to doing anything about it. And if we were to go for regime change in Pakistan, right now, we'd be looking at the Pakistani version of Mullah Omar replacing him. Better to forget about Musharrif and his Taliban for now and focus on the real threat.
We'll deal with him later, because, if -- I mean, when -- we launch "Operation Second Coming" against Ahamdinejad & Co. we're going to need Musharrif onboard and in charge in Pakistan. We're tilting to India presently, but if they give us any guff over messing up their business plans in Iran, we can just tilt right back towards Pakistan in the blink of an eye. [Keep that in mind Macaca] Although it’s completely insane, you can imagine the Brains Trust in the vice president's War Bunker calculating that if everything goes according to plan -- which naturally it will -- we can then roll up the Taliban in a matter of weeks, solving that problem once and for all. After we set up a democratic regime in Tehran, India will calm down once they see who'll they'll be doing business from now on and we have Musharrif sitting on their eastern border just in case.
It's all so perfect. Sure there may have been some hiccups along the way in Iraq, but once we get Iran squared away, everything will fall into place. If it doesn't, well you know what W. says about history; we're all going to be dead anyway, so who cares?
