Friday, August 20, 2010

Tunku Varadajan's Great Reporting on Pakistan

As you might remember (particularly whoever called me an idiot in the comments), I usually disapprove of Tunku Varadajan's right wing regalement often tied up as news.
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But with regards to the terrible devastation in Pakistan, and the Untied States' anemic response to it, he is exactly correct (he is .. "right on" - to pun).
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He explains excellently why they aren't getting as much aid as other disasters - for example it is partly because Christian Relief organizations are the best organized on the ground and Pakistan doesn't let them in, and also due to the Pakistan's own silly decisions like turning down Aid from India for Propaganda reasons.
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But one real problem is that America looks like death mongers here. And We Aren't!
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We send $100,000,000,000.00 (that is $100 BILLION) dollars to kill their neighbors and relatives, but less than 1% of that to save the people. As for the Terrorists (and they ARE terrorists). Let me quote, " As many have written, we ignore Pakistan’s floods at our peril. Given the ramshackle, and venal, condition of the Pakistani state, the earliest aid to reach most flood victims came not from the government but from Islamic relief organizations. These, as Marisa Porges wrote on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, include Falah-e-Insaniyat, the “charitable arm” of the group (Lashkar-e-Taiba) that carried out the murderous assault on Mumbai in 2008. The disastrous floods, one can be certain, will reap for the Islamist terrorists a fresh crop of recruits, men who are grateful to the radical groups for help in their time of need (a time at which the Pakistani state was missing in action), and who will also emerge from the floods with nothing material or temporal to live for: perfect material for suicide-jihadis. "