Comments on Belmont Club "Beyond the Khyber"

I have earned the right to say this.
I told you so! I told you so!
God that felt good, now I need to shower.
Cannoneer No. 4 and I have been beating this drum for months.

We need to find workable Pakistanis and sit down with them and the Indians and decide what the future will look like. Be as Imperialist Sykes-Picot and manipulative as we can be but take responsibility and get the job done. Implement the Marine motto “We can be your best friend or your worst enemy.” Implement real local self empowerment COIN where we can but leave no doubt that we can and will kill anyone who stands in our path. Either way we will be offering them respect, which is what they want anyway. As for Pushtunistan, it was an old Soviet front gambit to destabilize Western proxies. We could consider adopting the idea under the turnabout is fair play principle.

Remember the Islamization of many of these valleys along the Hindu Kush is a fairly recent (100 to 300 year) event. That is one reason why they are so chest thumping militant. We could threaten to reverse the process if they allow their territory to be used as the base for launching ghazi raids on the West. Those are what the 9-11 attacks were.

The fact is that Islam suffers from a paucity of failures in the eyes of its adherents. They do not measure success in terms of wealth generated or creative content generated but solely on terms of acreage controlled and souls submitting. The fact is that during the last 20 years Bethlehem has gone from a Christian community to a Moslem one. The fact is that over the last 60 years Iraq has gone from 25% Christian or Jewish to 2% Christian and essentially zero Jews. The fact is that non-Islamic communities are disappearing in Egypt and are threatened in Lebanon. Why should they change when they are doing so well?