Internal Threats

Aryn Baker writes in the May 25 issue of Time that Pakistan, with its obsession with a perceived threat from India, failed to recognize the seriousness of the threat within Pakistan from the Taliban. The "people throwing acid in girls' faces are Pakistani," Baker quotes Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid.

Has America failed to recognize threats from within? The Republican party had no answer for ACORN, the dedicated radical group funded by the Democratic Congress that organized huge Obama turnouts in inner cities across America. While Republicans were campaigning as moderately and traditionally as possible, ACORN was going door-to-door, in the streets, on the sidewalks, in front of supermarkets, loading people onto buses to go to the polls or to vote absentee.

So, Pakistan blames India. Whom do the Republicans blame? Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh (my dream ticket in 2012)!

Baker asserts that the rapid withdrawal of U.S. Troops at the end of the Soviet war in Aghanistan left Pakistan in chaos (just as our rapid withdrawal did to the people of South Vietnam?) Of course our media, led by Walter Cronkite, played a huge role in that rapid pullout. Is the media today focussing on the Taliban's floggings, beheadings, and burning of girls' schools, like it did with our soldiers in Vietnam? No! The cameras brought the Vietnam war into our living rooms every night,

Pakistan's 170 million people need to recognize the internal threats to its existence. so do the 300 million people of the United States.