When you combine hairy neanderthal freaks with nuclear weapons, what do you get? Trouble, that’s what. The country-busting, anarchy-breeding, panic-button kind.
Because while Hope ‘n Change and his MoveOn buddies are trying to figure out how to prosecute the Bushies, the Taliban are on the verge of taking Pakistan all the way down. And Pakistan, you’ll recall, has the Bomb. From Peter Goodspeed at Canada’s National Post:
Pakistan tottered on the edge of a precipice this week as the Taliban made a concerted push into mountain districts overlooking Islamabad.
Near-panic seized Pakistan’s allies, as masked and heavily armed Taliban terrorists invaded the Buner district, 115 kilometres northwest of the capital Islamabad, overran government offices, looted foreign aid agencies and established makeshift sharia courts that banned everything from music to shaving.
The strategic consequences of the invasion are immense.
It exposed far more than Pakistan’s fragility or Islamabad’s vulnerability. It thrust the worst possible scenario to centre stage.
The Taliban, backed by al-Qaeda, are now established in a district that straddles two crucial targets.
Just 50 km southeast of Buner lies the Tarbela Dam, the largest earth-filled dam in the world. It provides central Pakistan with most of its electricity and the country’s farmers with most of their water.
Thirty km further on is the Wah Cantonment, an army ordinance complex that produces almost all Pakistan’s weapons and military supplies – including nuclear weapons – in 14 massive factories employing up to 40,000 people.
According to some reports, Wah is the chief storage and maintenance site for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal. It may also house a uranium enrichment plant built in the 1990s with assistance from China.
As I discussed in an earlier post, India has the most direct stake in this matter. And Goodspeed recognizes the geopolitical reality:
Yesterday, Pakistani newspapers reported security personnel at the Tarbela Dam were put on alert after the invasion of Buner.
More significant perhaps is the fact that last month Indian security services issued a similar alert — only they feared Pakistani terrorists were poised to bomb two large Indian dams, the Bhakra and Nangal, in Himachal Pradesh.
India’s Intelligence Bureau and Research and Analysis Wing are said to have intercepted a cellphone conversation discussing the proposed dam attacks between members of Lashkar-e-Taiba (The Army of the Pure), a radical Islamist group allied to the Taliban that is believed responsible for last November’s suicide guerrilla attacks on Mumbai.
Can India afford not to intervene in a neighboring country that’s beginning to look a lot like Somalia? And isn’t that the type of question that should be occupying our political class?
Just so we’re all clear as to who and what the Taliban are, here’s a Sky News report about the Swat Valley, once a tourist destination and now a Taliban ‘statelet’. Is anyone in Congress or the White House paying attention?
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