How Pakistan makes US pay for Afghan war

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/ND19Df02.html

The following ingredients should go a long way to produce a political thriller. Mr M, a jihadi in an Asian state, has emerged as the mastermind of a terrorist attack in a neighboring country, which killed six Americans. After sifting through a vast cache of intelligence and obtaining a legal clearance, the State Department announces a $10 million bounty for information leading to his arrest and conviction. Mr M promptly appears at a press conference and says, "I am here. America should give that reward money to me."

A State Department spokesperson explains lamely that the reward is meant for incriminating evidence against Mr M that would stand up in court. The prime minister of M's home state condemns foreign interference in his country's internal affairs. In the midst of this imbroglio, the US decides to release $1.18 billion in aid to the cash-strapped government of the defiant prime minister to persuade him to reopen supply lines for US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces bogged down in the hapless neighboring Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

Alarmingly, this is anything but fiction or a plot for an upcoming international sitcom. It is a brief summary of the latest development in the fraught relations between the US and Pakistan, two countries locked into an uneasy embrace since September 12, 2001.



*** i don't think we are an 'unwilling victim'.

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1. People seem to be confronting the bully more.

And ridicule is the right response to offering "rewards" of that sort, a very old and debased habit of ours.

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2. ...