President Obama’s revelation that he has asked Iran nicely to hand back the super secret US drone is an embarrassing climb down, but we are not dealing with sane people. The attack on the sleeping Pakistani soldiers was meant to soften up the Pakistanis, and it had predictably the opposite effect. The civilian government is holding the hand of the military, who have ordered all aircraft penetrating their borders to be shot down. The chances that Pakistan would renege on China, its main support, with whom it has a border, to switch allegiance to the crumbling US were always zero. But we are not dealing with sane people here.
That the drone program had a self replicating worm affecting it is fairly old news, (See http://wahyusamputra.blogspot.com/2011/11/roughbeast.html comment posted at Hallowe’en) and that’s without counting the fifty or so countries working on their own drone programs, by theft, gift, or imitation; Pakistan is merely the first to install a drone station on one of its naval vessels. That the worm is, as feared, capable of allowing the drone itself to be controlled by others than those sending it is the new news that has now been illustrated beyond argument.
It does blow a large and visible hole in the attempts to box in Iran, however. Any day now the news will leak out to the US press that the Pathans (Pashtuns) are the largest tribal group on earth, artificially obstructed from any presence in the military, half of whom live in Pakistan, and half in Afghanistan. The border between them, the Durand line, drawn by a nineteenth century British administrator, which runs through the infamous Khyber Pass and some of the toughest terrain on the planet, has never been of the slightest interest to them; they have always ignored it.
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On a recent trip to the United States, Barack Obama took David Cameron to a Native Indian American gathering.
He spoke for almost an hour on his plans for a Carbon Trading Tax for the UK, America and Europe.
At the conclusion of his speech, the crowd presented him with a plaque inscribed with his new Indian name –
Walking Eagle.
A very chuffed David Cameron then departed in his motorcade, waving to the crowds.
A news reporter later asked the traditional Chief of the Indians how they came to select the new name given to the P.M.
He explained that Walking Eagle is the name given to a bird so full of shit it can no longer fly.
The U.S.-Pakistan relationship has reached "the nadir of absurdity," wrote Wired.com, after a December report in The Atlantic revealed that Pakistan "secures" its tactical nuclear weapons by moving them around the country in ordinary unmarked vans ("without noticeable defenses").
It supposedly uses the "Econolines of Doom," "hidden" in plain sight on the country's highways, because it fears the U.S. (its "ally") would steal the bombs if it knew where they were.
Dizzyingly, wrote Wired, the U.S. funds Pakistan yet regularly invades it, though desperately needing Pakistan's help in Afghanistan, even as Pakistani soldiers fight alongside Afghan insurgents against the U.S.
[The Atlantic, December 2011; Wired.com, 11-4-2011]
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