Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, told a meeting here this week that Pakistan believed terrorism could only end through the use of force tempered with “winning hearts and minds and mainstreaming the misguided”.
| I don't think the "hearts and minds" wheeze has ever worked. "Grab them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow" does seem to work. The article adjacent to this one features the Pak Talibs torturing and chopping the heads off their fellow countrymen. When Mr. Ambassador can come up with a method of winning those guys' hearts and minds maybe somebody outside a college will listen to him. |
Speaking at the George Washington University, he said lack of education and poverty are primarily responsible for the rise of extremism and terrorism.
| The 9-11 hijackers were middle class to upper middle class, many of them engineering students. The most recent plot in Britain featured physicians, one of whom managed to roast himself. Binny, with a fortune reported at one time at $320 million, hasn't seen many welfare checks. Ayman's a physician. The Wazoo headchoppers do feature a fair number of the impoverished and ignorant, but that's because Wazoo is both tribal and deeply Muslim. The poverty is a side effect of the ignorance which the locals consider a virtue. The guys doing the actual leading of the head choppers aren't the poor, however. They're the local holy men, like Mullah Omar, waxing fat off the contributions of the poor and ignorant. |
He said Pakistan was investing in those two areas with US support, adding Pakistan would spend $100 million every year for the next 10 years to uplift the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
Durrani denied terrorist “safe havens” on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border but conceded that Al Qaeda and Taliban might be present in the region. He said Afghanistan should improve its governance, reduce the hold of warlords, eliminate corruption and uproot the drug mafia to effectively combat terrorism with Pakistan’s support. Speaking about last week’s US-Pakistan dialogue in Islamabad, he said both countries had agreed to “expand and strengthen our relationship to a point where it can withstand the occasional shock which comes our way”. |