Jophiel wrote:
I'm not justifying it; I think it was a terrible mistake on the part of the Pakistani government and am continually amused (sadly, not in a ha-ha way) at how stridently the Right defends Pakistan and glosses over incidents such as this.
Sure. Because the Right thought it was such a great idea to hand over control of this region to the Taliban in Pakistan. Can we please just acknowledge that pretty much everyone on both sides in the US thought this was a dumb idea, but that it was a decision made by the Pakistan government and we kinda just had to grin and go along with it?
Quote:
But that's neither here nor there regarding the fact that the MSNBC headline you're crying about is entirely accurate in its implication that Pakistan is launching military strikes into a region that is no longer really under the control of the Pakistani government but rather is under the control of a "legitimate" government Pakistan allowed to take root.
Except that the majority of the fighting over the last 6 months has occurred in areas outside that granted to the Taliban's control. It's more than a little strange to label the conflict as one of Pakistan attacking the Taliban when the battle lines seem to keep moving south out of the mountains and deeper into Pakistan rather than the other way around. When you look at the whole historical pattern of this conflict, it's pretty clear that it's the Taliban pushing their control farther into Pakistan and not the other way around. Attacks into the SWAT valley by Pakistani forces are only part of a larger conflict which has mostly included attacks by Taliban forces to uproot and control villages south of the region they were supposed to stay in.
It's more than a little misleading to write only about the Pakistan army attacks into that one region, while ignoring the full context of the conflict.
