Also, I believe that Indians should help the Pakis out as much as they can. This is a shared disaster for all humanity. Finally, the Pakis tend to blame everything on the Mossad, British/Americans, and Indians, and many of them are blaming the Indians for this crisis!

The presence of this ammunition among the dead in the Korangal Valley, an area of often fierce fighting near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, strongly suggests that munitions procured by the Pentagon have leaked from Afghan forces for use against American troops. The scope of that diversion remains unknown, and the 30 magazines represented a single sampling of fewer than 1,000 cartridges. But military officials, arms analysts and dealers say it points to a worrisome possibility: With only spotty American and Afghan controls on the vast inventory of weapons and ammunition sent into Afghanistan during an eight-year conflict, poor discipline and outright corruption among Afghan forces may have helped insurgents stay supplied. Source

i believe that the nyt believes that bangladesh today is an independent country, not east pakistan. i will correct them on this front.

You do not hear people say that the US owes these countries anything. If anything you will hear calls for the US to Nuke these countries.

you hear calls for the us to nuke everything that moves or doesn’t. that doesn’t make it right in the least.

Taliban was Pak funded /trained. The Taliban came well after the US had lost interest in Afghanistan (The Mujahedeen were US funded).

it is well established fact that the taliban was funded through zia’s isi which funneled us arms to it during reagan’s presidency. in fact, even robin cook, blair’s secretary of state for foreign affairs, has explicitly mentioned the fact that osama was funded through us supplies and this was a very bad miscalculation. this is not some conspiracy theory, rather it is evidence from many different independent sources.

Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally “the database”, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden’s organisation would turn its attention to the west.

and this was followed by george w bush’s addled response to 9/11 by taking the fight from an insecure afghanistan to an irrelevant iraq. if the us was manipulated by musharraf, george bush has as much to do with it as musharraf for going along with the malfeasance even in the light of events such as kargil. my point is not the pakistani people do not bear responsibility, but the biggest reason for the success of military dictatorships, the strengthing of the army and the isi, and the overthrow of multiple democratically elected govts is tacit and overt support by the us establishment, without which the army and the isi would not have the force they have in pakistani politics today. and islamicization under zia was explicitly endorsed by reagan as a way to fight the ussr in afghanistan.

You do know that Bangladesh in 1971 was East Pakistan, don’t you?

Since you consider NYT to be a worthwhile source of news, feel free to write to the NYT corrections. 1971 migration was several millions — see the link I sent. in my previous comment.

(P.S. the commentator I responded to made an incorrect statement which I took at face value, since no article was linked to. It is just amusing that you took offense to it without realizing either that or the fact that the NYT was still wrong!)

huh? who funded the Taliban and the islamicization of Pakistan under Zia?

Taliban was Pak funded /trained. The Taliban came well after the US had lost interest in Afghanistan (The Mujahedeen were US funded).

Anyway, if your point is that historical US policies have contributed to make Pak what it is today – I agree.

But you can say that about just about any country. the US impacted other countries — Iran, Cuba, Chile, Guatemala, Haiti, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc far more than Pak. You do not hear people say that the US owes these countries anything. If anything you will hear calls for the US to Nuke these countries.

Also, Pak govts have manipulated the US far more than the other way. Musharaff was certainly shunned by the US, when he came to power — but he had the support of the Pak People. And Zia was not the prefernce of the US either — he got support from the most morally oriented govt in the history of the US (Carter’s). Bhutto was elected by the people.

Ultimately thew Pak people are responsible for the state of Pak, and the US by now knows it has been manipulated, so

If US helped create the Monster Pak, the main contributor was still the people of Pak, and they have taken US for a ride ever since 9/11. If anything what the US owes pakistan now, figuratively speaking, is a silver bullet between the eyes.

no the pakistan army was reluctant to launch an offensive because (a) they are conflicted about how much these people should be deterred, and (b) preparing to fight a non-existent war with india is far less risky than actually fighting a difficult real war with militants.

i dont know what this means – “stock that taliban comes from”, but the obama administration is being smart about the humanitarian aid, directing it specifically through the un and international relief orgs and NOT the pakistani govt.

this war could not have happened if the ltte was (a) a recognized state, and (b) nuclear armed. also the pakistani state is nowhere near as bad for the pakistanis as the ltte was for the tamils – even if you wanted to go with trying to justify the willy nilly massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians and their relief structures in pursuit of military aims.