Secretary Doomsday and the Empathy GapThe Everyday Extremism of Washington
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch: A front-page New York Times headline last week put the matter politely indeed: 'In Pakistan, US Courts Leader of Opposition.' And nobody thought it was strange at all...
It's just the norm on a planet on which it's assumed that American civilian and military leaders can issue pronunciamentos about what other countries must do; publicly demand various actions of ruling groups; opt for specific leaders, and then, when they disappoint, attempt to replace them; and use what was once called 'foreign aid,' now taxpayer dollars largely funneled through the Pentagon, to bribe those who are hard to convince...
We now live in a thoroughly ramped-up atmosphere in which 'American national security' -- defined to include just about anything unsettling that occurs anywhere on Earth -- is the eternal preoccupation of a vast national security bureaucracy...
The US government has been embroiled with Pakistan for at least 40 years and for just that long, its top officials have regularly come to the same policy conclusions -- to support Pakistani military dictatorships or, in periods when civilian rule returns, pour yet more money (and support) into the Pakistani military...
The situation is unnerving -- certainly for the Pakistanis, the large majority of whom have not the slightest love for the Taliban, have opted for democracy and against military dictatorship with a passion, and yet strongly oppose the destabilizing American air war in their borderlands. It could even result in the fall of the elected government or of democracy itself...
[US national security managers] are, it seems, incapable of seeing the situations they deal through the eyes of those being dealt with. They take it for granted that America's destiny is to 'engineer' the fates of peoples half a world away and are incapable of imagining that the United States could, in almost any situation, be part of the problem...
The decisions to be made in future panicky 'crisis' meetings in Washington, when 'American security' once again faces a 'mortal threat,' are already being predetermined in the Mojave desert and elsewhere. In the Pentagon's eternal arms race of one.
