Pakistan

If you read any link that I have posted in a blog to a news story, read this one:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/25/INSJ176CI1.DTL


This story is truly disturbing to me, and what makes it worse is the seeming lack of news coverage or importance. It was not a single front page story on any of the sites I went to, and wasn't even a lead off story on NBC Nightly News, just a 23 second brush over. This despite the enormous impact that this has on the future of the country as well as the rest of the world.

For the last ten years, terrorism has been one of the biggest threats to the world, and yet it seems we now stand on the brink. For all of the talk of keeping nuclear and biological weapons out of the hands of Al-Qaeda, it now seems that we are close to failing on the nuclear side of things.

If you didn't read the article, please do, the Taliban is slowly taking control over Pakistan, and could very well succeed in their efforts. The foremost and gravest issue with this developing situation is Pakistan's nuclear aresenal. I fear that if Pakistan doesn't wake up and take back their own country, that it will only be a matter of time before a mushroom cloud will be over a major Western city or Israel.

The worst part to me is that the US may have had a chance to prevent this altogether, but the Bush Administration literally fucked up. Call me a Bush-bashing liberal all you want, but its true. When you use the bulk of your military forced to invade Iraq, a country that had NO LINKS to Sept. 11, instead of using that same force to drastically increase the odds of eliminating Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan; you really did drop the ball! Even though we have the best military in the world, it is impossible to win a war in Afghanistan with a force that is SMALLER than the force used to invade and stablize Iraq which is a SMALLER country!

I'm afraid that all we can do now is to try and keep Pakistan from falling as best we can. I just hope that we succeed and that the Pakistani people can push out the Taliban and regain their country.

If it fails, however, I can think of only one way to keep most, if not all, of Pakistan's nuclear weapons out of Al-Qaeda and Taliban hands. The US will have to bomb the hell out of all of Pakistan's nuclear installations. Even then, it would be hard to know if we destroyed every single one of their nuclear bombs. But its better to destroy as many as possible than the alternative. . . .