Free Shakil Afridi

[Kevin]

I wont lie, I don't stay "on top" of foreign policy news, I keep up enough to know what is going on, but not enough to know every detail. But from what I've seen it fees like the current US government is trying really hard to not embroil the country in what could become another military action with Pakistan. It's almost as if there is a real aversion to it. Be it economic spending pressures, the current election year political climate, or whatever, there really seems to be an aversion to getting "too hard nosed" about things with Pakistan. The policy towards Pakistan has been confusing at best, spineless at worst.

Could there be some regional influence in play? Could getting too heavy handed with Pakistan further destabalize an already volatile area?

My basic take is this. We have pretty solid relations with India. Pakistan and India hate each other. Before the whole Afghanistan mess we didn't get along that well with Pakistan. We still don't. It's not adversarial, but it's not friendly. So we make concessions to just get them to allow us to have troops on their soil, which we need to be able to supply and support the Afghan efforts. If we get too pushy, they will kick us out. There have already been accusations that we are gathering Intel for India as is. There is a history of when we share Intel with them on ops in Afghanistan that this info tends to always get leaked. Pakistan is still pissed we shut them out of the Bin Laden kill operation. Arresting Shkil Afridi to me feels like it's partly retaliation for this.

Pakistan also still has some strong regional differences. Imagine the US today if Instead of most states being at most 60-40 splits between dem/repbulican that say the south and southeast was 95 - 5 Democrat, the west was 90 - 10 Libretarian, the Northeast was 95 - 5 Republican, and the midwest was 50-50. Then imagine that we have to host Turkish troops because they are fighting the drug cartels in Mexico because of their war on drug terrorist and that some of the battles happen in Texas. Texas is mostly Democrat, but bordered by areas that are split, and the country itself is controlled by Republicans. Do you think the local Texans wouldn't lock someone up for helping the Turk's because he broke a state law, even though our federal government may not want that, because while we aren't the best friends in the world with Turkey we aren't hostile.

Oh and the US and Canada are constantly arguing that the 38th parallel was a crap and that southern Canada should be part of the US and that the northern states should be part of Canada and we have nukes aimed at each other all the time, but Turkey really likes getting all their tech support from those Canadians.

I know that isn't really what it is, but I end up trying to put things in terms like to wrap my head around the paths that need to be traveled. The hardest thing is because the US really is mixed regionally politically even if some states are always one way, you still find a lot of the opposing opinion there, that isn't the case in other countries.