The land where rape is not a crime but a punishment

by charvaka Wed Jun 08, 2011 1:29 pm

A brilliant article by Christopher Hitchens on Pakistan. http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/07/osama-bin-laden-201107

From Abbottabad to Worse

Hating the United
States—which funds Islamabad’s army and nuclear program to the
humiliating tune of $3 billion a year—Pakistan takes its twisted,
cowardly revenge by harboring the likes of the late Osama bin Laden. But
the hypocrisy is mutual, and the shame should be shared.

There’s absolutely no mystery to the “Why do they hate us?” question, at
least as it arises in Pakistan. They hate us because they owe us, and
are dependent upon us. The two main symbols of Pakistan’s pride—its army
and its nuclear program—are wholly parasitic on American indulgence and
patronage. But, as I wrote for Vanity Fair in late 2001, in a long report
from this degraded country, that army and those nukes are intended to be
reserved for war against the neighboring democracy of India. Our
bought-and-paid-for pretense that they have any other true purpose has
led to a rancid, resentful official hypocrisy, and to a state policy of
revenge, large and petty, on the big, rich, dumb Americans who foot the
bill.

If the Pakistani authorities had admitted what
they were doing, and claimed the right to offer safe haven to al-Qaeda
and the Taliban on their own soil, then the boast of “sovereignty” might
at least have had some grotesque validity to it. But they were too
cowardly and duplicitous for that. And they also wanted to be paid,
lavishly and regularly, for pretending to fight against those very
forces. Has any state ever been, in the strict sense of the term, more
shameless? ... But our blatant manipulation by Pakistan is the most diseased and rotten
thing in which the United States has ever involved itself.

Perfectly symbolic of the underhanded duality between the mercenary and
the sycophant was the decision of the Pakistani intelligence services,
in revenge for the Abbottabad raid, to disclose the name of the C.I.A.
station chief in Islamabad.

Again to quote myself from 2001, if Pakistan were a person, he (and it
would have to be a he) would have to be completely humorless, paranoid,
insecure, eager to take offense, and suffering from self-righteousness,
self-pity, and self-hatred. That last triptych of vices is intimately
connected. The self-righteousness comes from the claim to represent a
religion: the very name “Pakistan” is an acronym of Punjab, Afghanistan,
Kashmir, and so forth, the resulting word in the Urdu language meaning
“Land of the Pure.” The self-pity derives from the sad fact that the
country has almost nothing else to be proud of: virtually barren of
achievements and historically based on the amputation and mutilation of
India in 1947 and its own self-mutilation in Bangladesh. The self-hatred
is the consequence of being pathetically, permanently mendicant: an
abject begging-bowl country that is nonetheless run by a super-rich and
hyper-corrupt Punjabi elite.

If we ever ceased to swallow our pride, so I am
incessantly told in Washington, then the Pakistani oligarchy might
behave even more abysmally than it already does, and the situation
deteriorate even further. This stale and superficial argument ignores
the awful historical fact that, each time the Pakistani leadership did
get worse, or behave worse, it was handsomely rewarded by the United
States. We have been the enablers of every stage of that wretched
state’s counter-evolution, to the point where it is a serious regional
menace and an undisguised ally of our worst enemy, as well as the sworn
enemy of some of our best allies. How could it be “worse” if we shifted
our alliance and instead embraced India, our only rival in scale as a
multi-ethnic and multi-religious democracy, and a nation that contains
nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan? How could it be “worse” if we
listened to the brave Afghans, like their former intelligence chief
Amrullah Saleh, who have been telling us for years that we are fighting
the war in the wrong country?

by Propagandhi711 Wed Jun 08, 2011 2:23 pm

he doesnt mince any words does he? I wonder when the fatwa will come from an aggrevied mullah or they dont read vanity fair and slate?

The land where rape is not a crime but a punishment

The land where rape is not a crime but a punishment

Re: The land where rape is not a crime but a punishment