Musharraf: It's Not Acceptable That You Entered Pakistan To Kill The Man We Were Protecting

He didn't say that last part. It's just implied.

"American troops coming across the border and taking action in one of our towns, that is Abbottabad, is not acceptable to the people of Pakistan. It is a violation of our sovereignty," Mr. Musharraf told CNN-IBN, an Indian news channel."...

I think the proper response here is Go F*** Yourself To Death.

Mr. Musharraf said the "lack of trust is very bad."

"If two organizations [are] conducting an operation against a common enemy, there has to be trust and confidence in each other," he said.

The common enemy of the US and Pakistan is Pakistan.

I'll add in a possible narrative here in favor of Pakistan.

We know, for a fact, that the US claims that foreign countries are not involved in anti-terrorist missions even though they are. Or at least gave permission.

We know this from WikiLeaks. We know that the president of Yemen actually blessed several anti-Al-Qaeda operations but our country lied about that, at the President of Yemen's request, because of course Al Qaeda is popular in the Muslim world and Muslims have a big chip on their shoulder about "respect" and therefore sovereignty issues.

They are very insistent that everyone pretend their third-world tribal ungovernably primitive hellholes are real countries or something.

So it's in the US's interest to lie if Pakistan were actually helpful here. It's of course in Pakistan's interest that we should lie.

It is therefore possible that Pakistan was rather helpful here, but the US is putting out all this information that Pakistan's actually the bad guy, and was probably protecting bin Ladin, because that's exactly how Pakistan wishes it to be played.

Counting against that theory is bin Ladin's actual location in an army town.

Still, I suppose, it's possible.

But even with my narrative it still suggests that Pakistan is a rotten, terrorist state, because even if the government was helpful, Al Qaeda remains so wildly popular with its increasingly monstrous, verminous population that the government is compelled to lie about it and put out the word that we were actually protecting the terrorist monster.

This will not end well. For anyone, but especially for Pakistan.

Thanks to Hollowpoint.

By the Way: It is a longstanding principle of international law that to the extent a nation cannot patrol itself for bandits and pirates operating within it, its sovereignty is diminished.

If it doesn't have sovereignty -- control -- in fact, it also loses sovereignty as far as the law.

When Pancho Villa was raiding America, Mexico's sovereignty didn't stop us from mounting the Punitive Expedition.

Maybe the pirates of the Barbary Coast were semi-independent actors, but if so, that means the state was incapable of stamping down lawlessness in its own borders, and that gave us the green light to storm the Shores of Tripoli.

Pakistan either won't or can't act strongly against the terrorists -- murderous bandits and pirates -- within it. Its sovereignty is therefore partly a fiction which does not have to be pretended to be real in law.

Not that that line of argument would persuade them. But that's the way it is. And that's the way it's always been.

posted by Ace at 01:20 PM

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