Defense Secretary Gates raked over the coals in recent visit to Pakistan

$3 billion dollars in military aid in the last year, plus all the other aid
we have given Ragastan,  Pakistsan one would think they would be
a a bit more hospitable to Defense Secretary Gates. This was certainly
not the case on his most recent trip to our ally(?) who shares a nasty,
unruled border with Afghanistan. Pakistan consistently denies the
presence or links to Al-Qaeda with Muslim Islamic terrorist groups.
This is an outright lie. No other words for it, or at least ones that I can
write here as not to offend anyone. With all the aid we have given
'this ally' of ours, the treatment and comments made to Gates, maybe
it is time to see how they do without so much aid from us. India would
most likley find that an appealing turnabout for the region. We should
have secured Ragistan's, Pakistan's nuclear weapons long ago. The
government is so unstable and there have already been too many
close calls. The struggle between India and Ragistan Pakistan for
control of the region will continue to be a major distraction, allow
Muslim Islamic terrorist groups to rain havoc and death upon both
countries. When you get right down to it we have no trustworthy
allies in any Islamic country. I would hesitate to call any Islamic
country our ally, period. We should tell them all to go to Hell.


New York Times
Elisabeth Bumiller


As the No. 2 official at the C.I.A. in the 1980s, Mr. Gates helped channel Reagan-era covert aid and weapons through Pakistan’s spy agency to the American allies at the time: Islamic fundamentalists fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Many of those fundamentalists regrouped as the Taliban, who gave sanctuary to Al Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and now threaten Pakistan.


In meetings on Thursday, Pakistani leaders repeatedly asked Mr. Gates to give them their own armed drones to go after the militants, not just a dozen smaller, unarmed ones that Mr. Gates announced as gifts meant to placate Pakistan and induce its cooperation.

Pakistani journalists asked Mr. Gates if the United States had plans to take over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons (Mr. Gates said no) and whether the United States would expand the drone strikes farther south into Baluchistan, as is under discussion. Mr. Gates did not answer.

At the same time, the Pakistani Army’s chief spokesman told American reporters at the army headquarters in Rawalpindi on Thursday that the military had no immediate plans to launch an offensive against extremists in the tribal region of North Waziristan, as American officials have repeatedly urged.

And the spokesman, Maj. Gen Athar Abbas, rejected Mr. Gates’s assertion that Al Qaeda had links to militant groups on Pakistan’s border. Asked why the United States would have such a view, the spokesman, General Abbas, curtly replied, “Ask the United States.”

General Abbas’s comments, made only hours after Mr. Gates arrived in Islamabad, were an affront to an American ally that gave Pakistan $3 billion in military aid last year. But American officials, trying to put a positive face on the general’s remarks and laying out what they described as military reality, said that the Pakistani Army was stretched thin from offensives against militants in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan and probably did not have the troops.

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