Jungibaaz
RETIRED MOD
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- Jul 4, 2010
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On the case of how long you ask, Waz is right on his short term approach. As much as the US might think they suffer a border with Mexico, any country that shares a border with Afghanistan knows what a curse that is. Just ask the Iranians who like us suffer the Afghanistan's finest exports, hash and heroin, and sometimes Afghans show us their ingenuity by combining both where one is laced with the other.
We've always had a terrible time with Afghanistan, everything you think you suffer from Pakistan, increase that by some magnitude and imagine that situation along a border unmanned. Since its creating Pakistan was not accepted as a state by the Afghans, as early as the 1950s Afghans conspired to wage insurgencies in bordering regions. Daoud Khan made it his policy to push for unrest in Balochistan as well as support Pashtun nationalism in the form of pro-Afghanistan insurgency. Their efforts in NWFP came to nill after a climax in the 1960s. Their efforts on Balochistan continued in to the 1970s. And just when you think Soviet Invasion may have given us a break, we instead took in millions of Afghans, assumed the duty to fight that war with them, thus incurring the wrath of the Soviets and the unwavering love of the Americans.
Here's where we made some terrible mistakes, Zia allowed millions of people in and provided them little, as only a poor country could afford. Afghan refugees that had no prospects whatsoever, no schooling were sent to madrassas instead, courtesy of funding and ideology by the Saudis, facilitated by our state and the whole show was orchestrated with the CIA and guys like Zbigniew Brzezinski. We allowed our own country to become poisoned by fundamentalism, drugs, guns. A lot of the policies trialed on refugees, didn't stop there, they were expanded to the public of Pakistan.
Pakistan additionally suffers the attention of the occasional superpower that has a bone to pick with the Afghans, the wars that start there spill over to our lands thanks to a number of unfortunate factors. For that we take in millions of refugees, which I assure you, perhaps not you, but most Indians aren't aware of this fact. A country with tens of millions of poor people accommodating millions of refugees, yet they were welcomed with open arms.
Today, ignoring the rest of this war on terror, Afghanistan has vast swathes of land that aren't controlled by the state, the state itself is made up of war lords, drug lords, former northern alliance leaders who have nothing but hate for Pakistan, and they too are sectarian bastards willing to burn both their country and ours. And these are the people the US empowered in its ill-conceived war.
We've beaten the taliban, and are dealing with many religious fundamentalists, you can talk all you like about 'good vs bad taliban', Pakistan's state and army are going after religious fundamentalists in our own society, believe me, being a mod on this forum alone has allowed me enough insight in to that. Yet the terrorists who fled our efforts reside unchallenged in Afghanistan move cash in and terrorists/weapons out of Afghanistan unchallenged. All Pakistan's protests fall on deaf ears, and Uncle Sam and our own government's inaction causes us to suffer needlessly.
Therefore, the calls to shut the border down are very, very sane. I would say even billions invested on throttling the border with Afghanistan is money well spent and probably pays for itself for all the headache it saves us down the line. We cut down on movement of drug smugglers who sustain an epidemic in our society, while also seriously disrupting terrorist activities. The next step would be target them and rain hell down on them in their sanctuaries (with the blessing of Uncle Sam). And internal security measures need to be stepped up.
And you are right that this is only a short term set of solutions. These are half measures, if left with no extended effort beyond a certain period of time. It ought to be followed up by a number of prolonged efforts to rid us of our problems of extremism. That would include things like registering every clergyman in the country, every preacher, every teacher. Regulate or shut down any religious school that doesn't follow standards, and come down hard on any preaching any form of extremism. Pakistan also needs massive education reform. The fact is, as I've argued at great length in the Senior's cafe, extremism has not just seeped into but has taken root deep in Pakistani society. We have generations who have grown up with their own extremist inclinations or at least exposure to such inclinations even in their schools and societies. To cure that evil takes time and a whole lot of nurture, it may even require phasing out of the mindset that has infected current generations to make way for new less poisoned ones.
