Given half an opportunity, Pakistanis can be some of the most paranoid people on the planet. They tend to fear that India -- or sometimes the United States -- is behind every single bad thing that happens to them. If a Pakistani stubs his toe it was probably an Indian spy who snuck in and made that crack in the sidewalk. Lou Dobbs would be a big hit in Pakistan; maybe he should do a show there rather than running for president in 2012. Ahmed Rashid has a good article up on the BBC News website on conspiracy theories in Pakistan. Some people in Pakistan probably should be paranoid. President Zardari should be paranoid; people really are plotting against him, which is understandable given the job he is doing.
I've heard other crazy theories from Pakistanis ranging from the idea that all U.S. technology, especially nuclear technology, contains a secret "off" switch, so that when our Indian overlords give the order we can secretly send out a radio signal and make all Pakistani military equipment cease to work. Or that the militant bombings in Peshawar and elsewhere are not the work of the Taliban, but instead are the work of Blackwater.
The last thing you would want to do is give any kind of credibility to those rumors, right? Imagine how crazy Dobbs and the FreeRepublic folks would go if President Obama accidentally mentioned something about going "home" to Kenya, or said something about going to a mosque.
So who's bright idea was it to hire Blackwater Xe Total Intelligence Solutions (TIS) to work doing "snatch-and-grabs" based in Karachi, Pakistan? Apparently since we officially can't have our military operating in Pakistan, we'll just outsource it to civilians. Let's just hope none of them are of Indian descent.
Categorize this one as "stupid power."
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Robin,
ReplyDeleteI would treat Scahill's article with the same kind of withering analysis that you use for Sy Hersh's.
Just a thought,
Tim