Like me you probably paid no attention to much of the blather that came out of the mouth of Donald Trump during the three-ring circus that was his pretend exploration of a run for president of the United States.
Yet there’s no denying the truth of at least one of Trump’s talking points; namely, that the U.S. allows far too many allies to play it for a sucker and a fool. Here’s a case in point:
Virtually everyone in Washington reacted with shock and indignation yesterday to reports that Pakistan allowed China to scavenge amidst the remnants of the stealth helicopter the Navy Seals flew in to get Osama bin Laden before deigning to grant the U.S. permission to retrieve them.
Access to a super-secret stealth helicopter that could evade Pakistani (and thus Chinese) airspace and sovereignty would be an extraordinary boon to the People’s Liberation Army and China’s state-owned military-industrial complex.
(CNN, August 15, 2011)
Adding insult to this perfidy, while it was allowing China free reign to exploit this sensitive technology, Pakistan was denying the U.S. access to merely interview bin Laden’s wives and children.
But I was not shocked in the least by these reports. For here is how I presaged them within days after the Pentagon admitted that the Seals were forced to leave remnants of this stealth helicopter behind:
Nothing demonstrates [why allies play the U.S. for a sucker and a fool] quite like the U.S. lauding Pakistan for finally returning a critical part of the stealth helicopter that crashed landed during the raid on bin Laden’s compound. After all, it seems clear to me that Pakistan delayed this return to allow China, which is fast becoming its most-favored superpower patron, to reverse engineer all of the helicopter’s top-secret features.
Not to mention the tail-wagging-the-dog spectacle of the U.S. thanking Pakistan for finally granting CIA agents access to the compound weeks after their counterparts (ISI agents) had already combed through it for all incriminating evidence — not just against al-Qaeda, but also against Pakistan.
(Arrest of Ratko Mladic, The iPINIONS Journal, May 31, 2011)
Frankly, given the way it has been treating the U.S. lately one could be forgiven for thinking that Pakistan is one of America’s few remaining sworn enemies (like Cuba) instead of a long-standing ally that receives over $1.5 billion a year in U.S. assistance. It’s quite understandable that Pakistan would nurture ties with the Taliban as an existential necessity; it’s simply unforgivable that it would betray the U.S. in this fashion merely to curry political and economic favor with China.
After winning the Cold War, you’d think the last thing the U.S. needs to learn is that, in foreign relations, it’s often better to be feared and respected than cheered and exploited. But this is the lesson Pakistan has been trying to teach it for years….
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Arrest of Mladic…