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Will History Repeat Itself in Pakistan?
Itâs a good article. Canât really summarize, you need to read the entire article.âIt was recognized from the first that a campaign of genocide would be necessary to eradicate the threat: "Kill three million of them," said President (general) Yahya Khan at the February conference, "and the rest will eat out of our hands". On March 25 (1971) the genocide was launched. The university in Dacca was attacked and students exterminated in their hundreds. Death squads roamed the streets of Dacca, killing some 7,000 people in a single night. It was only the beginning. "Within a week, half the population of Dacca had fled, and at least 30,000 people had been killed. Chittagong, too, had lost half its population. All over East Pakistan people were taking flight, and it was estimated that in April some thirty million people were wandering helplessly across East Pakistan to escape the grasp of the military." â Robert Payne, Massacre [1972] Paraphrasing Christopher Hitchens, every decade or so, the US writes a blank check to some obscure dictator in Pakistan, and the Pakistani army happily uses this free ride to perpetrate genocide in its neighborhood. In the 70âs, we turned a blind eye while Gen. Yahya killed millions in Bangladesh, with a kill rate that would put Hitler to shame. Even after the US congress cried foul and the US ambassador to Bangladesh declared âgenocide in Bangladeshâ, Nixon and Kissinger praised Yahya and sent him arms to aid in the killing. In the nineties, after the Russians had left Afghanistan, the Pakistani army happily armed, fed, financed and trained a band of jihadi hoodlums, now known to us as the Taliban; of course, the Taliban directly caused the death of hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians in the nineties. While the cleansing continued unabated, oil executives busily negotiated oil-pipelines with the Taliban, with nary a consequence for the Pakistanis. After 911, writing blank checks to the Pakistanis seems to have come back in vogue. The only question that remains unanswered is â where will the genocide be, this time? Posted by: rg117 2003-07-20 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=16723 |