Pakistani politics (catch all)

[Dayuhan]

Can't don't have nothin' to do with it. Won't does.

You assume control, and capacity.

And they haven't done anything except lie to us for years and years.

Of course. Do you expect them to announce to our faces that their perception of their interests is inconsistent with our perception of our interests? These are things we figure out for ourselves, ideally.

Would that we had the moxie to tell them to stuff it and stop their money. But that will probably never happen, because if we did come close to doing that, they would whisper something about "nukes" and we would get the vapors and it would start all over again.

Again I think you miss a major point. The nukes are an issue of course, but the elephant in the drawing room is our presence in Afghanistan, which is a situation of our design, not theirs. That presence and the need to use Pakistani territory to support that presence is what constrains our options. Without that presence there would be a lot more options for pressuring the Pakistanis to do what we want... of course without that presence we wouldn't care nearly as much.

Again, we chose to put ourselves in a position where a government that does not share our interests has leverage over us... do we blame the outcome of that decision exclusively on them? Granted they are acting in accordance with their perceived interests rather than ours, but what did we expect?