Haider Mullick is a Senior Fellow at the US Joint Special Operations University and a research fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding.
The Diplomat speaks with South Asia analyst Haider Mullick about Pakistan’s counter-insurgency efforts, conspiracy theories and the prospects for stability in Afghanistan.
You’ve recently returned from a trip to India and Pakistan. How have perceptions of the United States settled since US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited?
You’ve written recently about how the US needs to market itself in Pakistan. In a nutshell, what does it need to be doing differently?
Clinton was critical of Pakistan’s failure to capture top al-Qaeda leaders. Broadly speaking, how do you rate Pakistan’s counter-insurgency efforts?
How effective has the Pakistani leadership been in rallying public support for its counter-insurgency efforts?
Looking across the border at Afghanistan, what do you make of the recent US announcement to send 30,000 more troops. Was President Barack Obama right to set out a timeline for withdrawal?
Are you optimistic about the prospects for long-term stability in Afghanistan?
In what passes for corporate journalism in America, this concept has taken the form of, “If we don’t report on it, it didn’t happen.”
That certainly was the case for the emergency protest organized by a coalition of anti-war organizations under the banner EndUSWars.org, which saw over 1000 people gather on short notice in the bitter cold on Lafayette Park opposite the White House to protest President Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan on Saturday, Dec. 12.
Not a word about this impromptu protest, which included many people who had supported the election of President Obama only a year ago, appeared in the New York Times. Nor did the Washington Post bother to mention the protest in its own back yard, not even in its Metro section pages. The other national newspaper, USA Today, likewise blacked out news of the protest.
Phi Beta Iota: WIRED Magazine has put together a number of questions that ably illustrate the confusion in the public mind over why we are in Afghanistan and what that has to do with Pakistan. Based on the history of the Cold War, which appears to have been a Fity Year Wound, In Search of Enemies, or as General Smedley Butler, USMC (Ret) put it, War is a Racket, we have to wonder. When one combines the scandals associated with health care (50% waste according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers), the economy (a fraudulent Federal Reserve and phantom wealth leveraged by Wall Street to the detriment of the commonwealth), and all of the other pressing problems facing America, the larger question is not really about Afghanistan or Pakistan but rather about process. Is America a democracy? Is our policy process reasoned and informed? Is the public interest being served? Does the White House really understand The True Cost of Conflict/Seven Recent Wars and Their Effects on Society?
Phi Beta Iota: BBC reporting on Copenhagen and Climate Change has been consistently dishonest. We have urgent questions about how BBC is funded and how it does quality assurance. The core failing of Copenhagen, apart from its being based on fraudulent politicized science that is beneath contempt, is the fact that there is no Strategic Analytic Model and there is no attention being paid to the much wiser and more useful findings of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenge, & Change. Poverty causes more environmental damange than corporations–poverty and infectious disease are both more important than Environmental Degradation BUT Envrionmental Degradation in ALL its forms is more important than everything else. It's time for a massive audit of the BBC, they are not serving the British or global public as well as they could or should.
Phi Beta Iota: ClimateGate has outraged us for two reasons–first, the lack of integrity among the scientists and the selected United Nations officials concerned; and second, the naivete, ignorance, or corruption of government officials all too eager to create a new Global Warming Complex that profits from carbon trades (another form of phantom wealth) while imposing severe social costs on the five billion poor. ENOUGH. Below the fold are the original comments of Contributing Editor Chuck Spinney, relating past Pentagon data manipulation with the data manipulation that charactizes the Climate Change movement. It is our view that the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should be disbanded, while the UN High Level Panel and the UN Environmental Program, both of which kept their integrity intact, are asked to create a World Brain with embedded EarthGame that can address all ten high level threats (environmental degradation is third, after poverty and infectious disease) by providing the world with information that allows the harmonization of spending across all twelve core policy areas in a manner attractive to the eight demographic challengers (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards such as the Congo, Malaysia, and Turkey).
Full-body scanner blind to bomb parts: Todger, yes. Combustibles, no (The Register)
Shadow Elite': Information Is Power And Who's Controlling Our Information? (Huffington Post)
