#1
Hardly takes a Garry Kasparov to figure this one out. Putin knows the Champ will back the Broederbond either directly or indirectly. The perfect vacuum is then created. The Russian moves, we lose. I might have done the same thing.
#2
Garry Kasparov, yes I have not heard that name in years. Putin is many things but he is a strong leader. He has energy, new wife, great wealth and strong mind. Such a vast country with so many different peoples. His people do not want war. They want consumer goods. Money and good living standards. They will always fear the cold Russia of the past. If he can do those things he will win over many in his country to pursue his goals.
You can fault him on many things but he is a much better leader that the one. The only people Obama can push around are his own countrymen and I still don't think of him as one of us.
#7
O outstupided everyone, so Pooty won by default.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
08/22/2013 10:06 Comments ||
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#8
This country seems so afraid of an alpha male. I still say Romney should have sent a gift of a fine horse to Putin. What a strong signal to be sent. The Russians love their horses. A sportsman or woman like Sara Palin scares the socks off the left. They want he-she's or she-he's with an emphasis on the she part. Confused and weak people to run the country. Back stabbers the lot of them. Can you see a vision for this country?. Do you see us leading in anything?. This is why I call the left regressive progressives. They talk of a third party. Now is time. Both parties have abandoned the people. Pander to minorities. There are many in both parties disenfranchised. The democrats will run out of other peoples money as is happening now. Minorities will not pay the bills.
#10
There are dung beatles in the Egyptian desert which could outsmart Obama. All Putipoot had to do was sit back and wait for Champ to f*#k it up. Not even a long wait.
#11
To be fair, Putin is picking up the pieces from the Obama team's screw-up. That just takes a certain amount of cunning and an ability to recognize opportunity.
[Dawn] THE dust raised by the Abbottabad ... A pleasant city located only 30 convenient miles from Islamabad. The city is noted for its nice weather and good schools. It is the site of Pakistain's military academy, which was within comfortable walking distance of the residence of the late Osama bin Laden.... Commission's report took long to settle. Each time it seemed the matter was settled, some new issue would emerge to stir ripples of excitement.
Now it is time to sit back and reflect calmly on what happened. The fact that the report was leaked and Al Jazeera posted it on its website is nothing unusual in this age of whistleblowers and hackers. After WikiLeaks, Abbottabad seemed child's play in this context.
Since it has been claimed that the leaked draft is not the final and authentic one, I shall not go into the nitty-gritty of who was responsible for the intelligence failure in not detecting the late Osama bin Laden ... who doesn't live anywhere anymore... 's presence in Abbottabad and not stopping the American helicopters' incursion into Pak territory in May 2011. The leaked version of the report calls on the country's leadership -- "political, military intelligence and bureaucratic" -- to formally apologise to the people of Pakistain for "their dereliction of duty". This in all probability must have been retained in one form or another in the final version.
This is like asking for the moon. The words 'I'm sorry' are the most difficult in our official lexicon. To apologise is something no one at the helm has ever done in Pakistain. What right does a commission -- even a judicial one -- have to make such demands? The easy response has been to classify embarrassing reports and stack them away on some obscure shelf to gather dust.
But to the public it makes no sense to spend millions on establishing commissions and getting them to have lengthy hearings and then spend hours over writing reports only to hide them. In that respect, the Abbottabad Commission fared better as its findings became public some months after they were finalised. In contrast, the Hamoodur Rahman Commission that investigated our army's debacle in East Pakistain was more tightfisted. The report surfaced nearly three decades after the event after all the key players were dead. Again it was the foreign media -- an Indian news magazine -- that spilled the beans forcing Islamabad to come clean on the issue.
Why are our leaders so sensitive to a public mea culpa? I remember at a seminar where I was the rapporteur, a retired general managing the written questions quietly suppressed a question from the audience asking how the army lost the war in East Pakistain when millions were spent on it.
Worse still, I remember how a question at the discussion in a seminar in Islamabad earned me a sound rap on the knuckles from my host, a retired army general. I had 'naively' asked the foreign policy adviser to Gen Musharraf who was singing paeans about Pakistain's love for India how he would explain Kargil ... three months of unprovoked Pak aggression, over 4000 dead Paks, another victory for India ... in the light of what he had said.
With democracy making so much headway, it is time all those in positions of power -- civil and military -- learnt to accept transparency and accountability. Whatever the reasons of their perceived failures, it is time an open discussion was allowed on strategic issues -- especially those which involve no breach of security.
If there is public anger and resentment against the performance of the defence establishment it is not hard to see why it exists. First there is the size of the defence budget. This has been a controversial subject for long. In budget 2013-14 defence spending has been jacked up by 10pc. Today the government spends 2.4pc of GDP on defence and only 0.9pc on education. According to one calculation the defence spending is 125pc of the education and health budgets.
One can only marvel at this lopsided division of resources between defence and the social sector that is basically concerned with human needs of the population. In the absence of a balanced and well-rounded social and economic growth, a country cannot defend itself with sophisticated and costly weapons. Even nuclear warheads do not help. We are learning quite belatedly how impossible it is to defend a country inhabited by people who are divided, in poor health, have little or no education, and no jobs to give them a stake in the country. They become the breeding ground for militancy and extremism.
These are signs of a country heading for implosion. The fact is that the nature of warfare has changed totally. Gone are the days when a country that could defend its borders felt safe. Now the enemy lives within its borders and guns cannot hold it together. However powerful might be a country's arsenal, it may actually be a handicap as it siphons off funds that could have gone into building up a strong and united citizenry which is the best defence a country can have. No army anywhere in the world can defend a people against internal enemies. That calls for a political strategy that seeks to create social capital.
We have numerous examples of countries imploding from within. The most quoted example is that of the USSR which collapsed in 1991 after it had lost the Afghan war. It was not the defeat in Afghanistan that led to the Soviet Union's break-up. It was its huge defence budget that caused a bust up of its economy when the political structure could no longer hold.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/22/2013 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
#1
I remember reading there is no terrorist attacks in Abbottabad because a lot of militant families are based there.
Posted by: Paul D ||
08/22/2013 9:14 Comments ||
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#6
Well, evidently there was a Lebanese Golden Age, which as far as I can gather lasted from the first time they went batshit until the second time they went batshit which evolved into the civil war. During this time Beirut was the Paris Texas of the ME without the carbbq. I see renewed fighting over what was the Holiday Inn and now is gawd knows what, recoiless rifles, strife, sectarian, madness, Druze, Wally with ear to the ground, the Army sitting quitely and JOOOOOOOOO watching from the south, with Booms for all.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
