It is extremely important to keep in mind that the U.S., Pakistan and Afghanistan have all been impacted by terrorism. We are fighting a common war, and therefore, it serves us no good to get pulled into the blame game. We’re approaching a crucial phase in the WOT, and it is important for us to coordinate and communicate, and address our shared concerns for the sake of achieving our shared objectives in the region. The cross border attacks have been an area of concern, and it is no secret that the terrorists have been targeting our forces and civilians on both sides of the border. That’s one of the main reasons we’ve been emphasizing cross border coordination between the regional partners. We need to remain unified and move forward with a common plan against our common enemies. At the same time, it must be noted that we are making every effort to coordinate and communicate with the regional partners. And there is no reason for one to view our shared concerns as a rift. We will continue to fulfill our commitment to the region by working closely with our regional partners.
Ali Khan
DET, United States Central Command
U.S. Central Command
Thank you, mr Khan, for your continued commitment to regional stability and with that a reduction in violence levels around the globe. While I am of the opinion that the WOT must be fought, for we can not allow terror training camps anywhere in the world basically, I also wonder sometimes if we can keep this level of counter-terrorism up, with the recent troubles that are brewing in Africa.. Military campaigns of even the size that saw common Iraqis and Afghans and now Pakistanis suffer because of what I believed to be a lack of enough troops on the ground in that region (caused no doubt by monetary and recruitment concerns), are so expensive they tax the entire world economy. And food on the table is one of the things that encourages peace and stability.
Some of the things I've always been concerned about are:
- fostering too much opportunity for terror recruitment by not projecting enough force (measured in numbers of friendly boots on the ground, not by calliber size) in a humane way onto a region for long enough
- the lack of organisation towards securing stable political leaderships for the countries we're stabilizing with an invasion. if my guess is right, then those politicians like Karzai are basically for sale to whomever can finance their political campaign for them. They seem to always have their own best interests at heart, rather than their people's. If we could find countries like Afghanistan and Iraq (and Egypt, and Mali, the list goes on)
leaderships who will spread the wealth to the people, then you'd have a much more content local populace. Right now they are displeased with their 'american-puppet regime', right? They won't be when they're all enjoying (locally produced?) western luxuries and locally made entertainment.
- training too many bombmakers by western intelligence agencies teaching anti-terror tactics to just about any recruit, that can later (when the situation gets difficult for whatever reason) be converted back to taliban or even alQuada affiliations, where, with the very bomb-disarming and -detection skills we taught them, they can build new designs of actual bombs to be used against humans without armor. At least make the security forces of Afghanistan and Iraq *totally* depended on bomb-disposal-technology and bomb-sniffing-dogs (or rather; dog-training tools and dog trainers) supplied by our forces, rather than "bomb-disarming techniques". That's because we just can't trust Afghan and Iraqi native new forces to stay loyal to a democratic government and the principles of non-violent political argument.
Good luck and God's speed, mr Khan.
PS Please, let no-one say I'm trying to rob honest soldiers of a career by using too much flame-retardant here. There are plenty of fires to put out elsewhere in the world (for a while), and we can always enjoy a stable war-free world, for a while, until the space aliens get too pissed off because of our telepathic long range curiosity for instance!, and put the entire world's military industrial complex in a morphing state towards becoming space miners (capable of defending themselves! <grin>).
While in that morphing state you can occasionally display some pictures of excersises of military hardware used to defend the home world in case bad aliens do show up. This would be a piece of cake with a series of popular earth-invaded-by-space-alien movies. It's important that we keep producing said type of movies, because I and many others like me *would* like to see humans evolve to a script as in this little PS, within our lifetimes if that's at all possible, please.