Pakistan and the Truth!
If you follow K Street and the conservative think tanks, it is hard not to come away with the impression that Bush still defines the world through his own myopic lens. This is the lens that attempts to bend light to reflect a very different reality.

For the most part, we acknowledge that the smoke and mirrors fabricated by those great K Street conjurers does an excellent job of shielding the media from having to look to deeply into their own motivations.

Take the Middle East.

We hear great news about the Surge from time to time with an occasional road side bomb tossed in but, mostly, the news is Pollyannaish and defracted by commentary to appear as if we are on the verge of some great victory..

But prey a little deeper and it becomes clear that these sleight of hand image makers are concentrating on those few good spots in Iraq that seem to be out of sync with what is happening in the rest of the Middle East.

Let me cite an example.

In Afghanistan, it is hardly a secret that the Tailiban have regrouped and moved out of North West Pakistan and have retaken villages and communities in Southeastern Afghanistan. Moreover, bin Laden’s forces and the Tailiban are working together with other incipient terrorist organizations to retake vital parts of the country for their own. Their undying threat: To wipe out the foreigner from Afghanistan. And since we were distracted by an unnecessary war in an unnecessary place, they have strengthened their hand and gained more importantly the leverage needed to fight back against the government successfully.

All of this is either played down or ignored one might suspect by edict.

This was partially etched in stone the other day with a major suicide bombing that killed and wounded civilians and NATO forces. There was very little talk about it but it brought to the fore one of the leading Tailiban leaders who was thought to have been dead or wounded. Clearly, he is not.

Surprisingly, there was virtually no coverage.

Secondly, at about the same time, we see that our ally, Pakistan, may not be the ally we had hoped for despite our pumping billions of dollars into their economy to keep it afloat. Many suspect it wound up in the hands of the corrupt military that at least part of it was used to pay off the militants in the northwest. If so, it was one of our worst investments.

But what might be of even greater concern is the fact that while the Pakistani who developed their nuclear weaponry has been surrounded and we were told, isolated, it has been discovered that aides of his in Europe have been peddling information on nuclear weapons to pseudo-terrorists around the world. Also, that he, himself, might be freed in the coming weeks as an accommodation to all those nativists who see him as a national hero!

This is very unsettling.

As it turns out, Pakistan has traditionally played both sides against the middle.

And, increasingly, we are seen as the middle.

It is not good news for either us or the rest of the world.

Yet, the media obediently stays away from the truth like the good little obsequious creatures that they are.

It is a very sad time for the truth.

And without the truth, we are nowhere.




The Armchair Curmudgeon

Les Aaron

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