[The 'idea' of] Pakistan was always a bad idea.

[rodeodance]

http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2007/11/05/pakistan-was-a-bad-idea/
Pakistan Was a Bad Idea

By Patrick L. Lang on November 5, 2007 at 9:17 PM in Pakistan


Yahoo News: “Let’s not be delusional about the U.S. government’s influence. This is a huge, complex country, and most everything is going to happen outside of our play,” said Rick Barton, a Pakistan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But we can be a leader here.”

.......

Another hopeful scenario in the U.S. view is that Pakistan’s emergency states ends fast — a setback, but not a devastating one. Democracy is still the path that Pakistanis want, Johndroe said. “This is a slight detour,” he said. “But I think they will get back on it. And we will strongly encourage them to do so.”

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Pakistan was always a bad idea. It is an artificial state created out of the flanks of the equally artificial British Indian empire, a state summoned into being on the basis of Muslim aversion to a shared existence with the Hindu kuffar. British weariness and exhaustion after the trauma and bleeding of the two world wars set the stage for the creation of a country based on an IDEAL of religious communal exclusivity. The place once had two halves but revolt in East Pakistan (Bangla Desh) severed that relationship long ago and left the remnant of Pakistan to simmer in a broth of communal hatred directed toward India, a country which still has a huge Muslim population, a functioning democracy (no military governments there) and an economy that is one of the world’s marvels.

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In places like Pakistan where the veneer of Tom Friedman’s flat world is mighty thin, meddling in the local social order carries a high risk of de-stabilizing society and releasing forces that we have no ability to manage.

Our pressure for “Democracy” in Pakistan has been incompatible with our willingness to engage an already Islamist state like Pakistan as an ally. We have wrecked the status quo in Pakistan. Now we will all pay a price. pl

[BridgeTheGap]

1. State building can take so long and you can never be assured that it will "take."

What to do with a nuclear power state and the hord of fundamentalists wanting control?

[yurbud]

2. a state founded on religious exclusivity? How could we support something like that? Except in....

Israel...