Pakistan jails doctor who helped CIA find Osama bin Laden - 33 year sentence

[chessdev]

http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/23/11827022-pakistan-jails-doctor-who-helped-cia-find-osama-bin-laden?lite

Updated at 8:18 a.m. ET: PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- A Pakistani doctor accused of helping the CIA find Osama bin Laden was convicted of high treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison on Wednesday.

Shakil Afridi ran a vaccination

Comments

[danalwyn]

Our relationship is simple. We pay them money, they give us access to Afghanistan. It gives the US the benefit of having an easy supply route, and lets Pakistan send the more troublesome of their ISI affiliates out into the wilderness with a bunch of American soldiers where they will kill each other off and diminish long-term American influence. Both sides benefit, although on different time scales.

We're not allies. We're business partners. But you don't have to like the people you do business with, a fact that Pakistan is only too keen to remind us of every once in a while.

[underlankers]

Um, we are allies and have been since the Cold War. Have people forgotten things like the US Navy moving a carrier fleet into the Indian Ocean to help our allies carry out a genocidal war against Bengalis?

[danalwyn]

Just because you do something for someone doesn't mean that you're allies. It may mean that one partner, or even both, would like to be allies, but simply because one wishes it to happen doesn't mean that it does.

And the 70s were pretty much a long time ago. In the 70s the US was firm allies with Iran - that doesn't mean we're allies now. We're no longer really allied with China against Russia. Pakistan is not so much an ally these days, regardless of what the official line is. Both of our countries have experienced shifting strategic objectives - and are drifting in different directions. Pakistan opens its supply routes because we pay them - that makes them a business partner. A shared goal would make us allies, and I don't think that we really have that, regardless of what the official line out of Islamabad is.

[underlankers]

The 70s were just the most brutal example. We would not have had anywhere so easy a time giving the USSR its own Vietnam if we were not allies with Zia Ul-Haq, while the GWOT offered a new means to strengthen the alliance. But I get it that Americans have the memory of a goldfish.

[danalwyn]

Everyone has short memories. Zia Ul-Haq has been dead for a long time by the standards of memory - and a lot of people don't remember him that fondly. Moreover, we had a personal relationship with him, not with his country. That's one of the problems with allying with dictators, you're allying with a person more than a country, and once they're gone, you have to start again from scratch. At the time we were allies of a sense with Pakistan (allies with wildly opposite long-term goals), but that was based on a nearby Soviet presence and a small group of elites. Both those factors are now gone. On the same timescale we were basically allies with China against a mutually disliked Soviet Union, and that alliance did not long outlive the USSR itself.

History is valuable, but don't get too caught up in it. People are more interested with what's happening right now than what happened even thirty years ago, and right now the people of Pakistan would like the US gone, not allied.

[underlankers]

Um, you're missing my point entirely and I'm starting to think it's a deliberate process from refusal to listen: Pakistan always has been and will always be a crucial element of the American Empire. Denial of this does not make it true. We were not allies of convenience but of mutual will, allies of convenience do not send aircraft carrier fleets to aid their ally committing genocide. The people of Pakistan have no choice in what their rulers want, the people of Pakistan IMHO don't even think of themselves as Pakistanis except insofar as it keeps the dictators from shooting them.

[danalwyn]

Repeatedly saying something doesn't make it true either. The reality is that the leaders of Pakistan, and their current governing elite, have one goal, staying in power. They're not interested in what the United States is interested in, or any of the western powers. The US is increasingly moving towards wanting long-term stability in the region, and that means that at some point they're going to make the ISI put away their toys. The ISI and the governing powers of Pakistan aren't interesting in retirement, no matter how cushy their embezzlement paychecks make it. Pakistan's China signaling isn't just them trying to get the US's attention (although it does do that from time to time), it's a search of a country for a new long-term patron

[underlankers]

1) A lesson that might serve well when one party in a discussion is able to list specific examples and the other relies on vague platitudes and generic nostra that mean nothing.

2) Then the USA should learn that provoking prolonged guerrilla insurgencies against an occupying force bolstering a weak and incompetent government s a piss-poor way to build stability and if anything is a long-term guarantee of a dystopian nightmare.

3) The claim the USA is seeking stability in the region needs a lot of evidence to bolster it, especially in the wake of current US policies that are achieving directly opposite ends.

4) The USA and Pakistan are still allies now, the claim that they are not rests on vague generalities about Pakistani mindsets and precious little arguments grounded in actual events.

[danalwyn]

The only evidence that has presented in favor of Pakistan and the US being allies is that thirty years ago Pakistan let the US use their territory to transport supplies to fight the USSR, and that forty years ago the US moved a carrier group around the Indian ocean. The exit of the USSR from that theater basically puts both of those on hold. China and Vietnam were allies right up until the Americans moved out - it only took them about five years to start a war between themselves. The US and Iraq went crossroads in about three years

[danalwyn]

3) The US has grown increasingly tired of hoping that Pakistan can secure its own country. Normally the US is perfectly happy to let military-run countries handle their own affairs, but after so many years of that behind-the-scenes and open rule in Pakistan, the place is still a mess. The US has begun signaling their dissatisfaction by warning about aid cutoffs. They might not pull the trigger, but the wording of the accountability portion of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act is a pretty openly worded message. They have already threatened to withdraw troops from their own border regions, where they claim they are carrying on a critical fight, if the US doesn't pay up (and repeated this several times). HR 2583 follows up, as does the attempted enforcement of the EPPA. The US wants results out of Pakistan and they're not seeing them. For now, nothing serious is in the offing, but the US is sending clear signals that it wants some accountability out of Pakistan, and that it wants Pakistan to use non-military funding

[danalwyn]

In the interests of coming to a conclusion (since we both seem to have radically different opinions), let's look for some examples. The United States has several outstanding strategic interests in the Af-Pak region, namely the dismantling of the Central Asian network of violent non-state actors (sudden terrorist attacks during an election year are bad news), the long-term stability of Pakistan both in terms of its nuclear arsenal and its potential for causing trouble in the region, and the countering of increasing Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean. I believe that Pakistan has no inclination to side with the US in these, her key objectives. However, I could be persuaded differently if we could find evidence that Pakistan is, of its own volition and not in response to US pressure, taking these three steps