We have shown pictures of the mass slaughter of Christians by Muslims in Nigeria. (See Christians slaughtered by Muslims in Nigeria, October 17, 2011; Acts of religion in Nigeria revisited, October 16, 2011; Christians murdered by Muslims, March 9, 2010.)

One picture (see Acts of religion, November 6, 2010) was questioned as a true illustration of these massacres, but the rest are authenticated. The wrong ascription of one picture is not misleading. The massacres, including the burning to death of Christian victims, were committed and continue to be committed.

Massacres and assassinations are carried out systematically by the Muslim terrorist organization, Boko Haram, which has links to “al-Qaeda in the Maghreb” and  to al-Shabab, the terrorist group of Somalia.

Arnold Ahlert casts light on Boko Haram:

In Nigeria, a radical Islamic sect known as Boko Haram carried out a series of terrorist attacks killing more than 100 people in the states of Borno and Yobe on Friday [Nov. 4, 2011]. Yobe’s capital city of Damaturu bore the brunt of the damage when a car bomb exploded outside a military office and barracks, killing several security agents. The terrorist assault continued through the night when rampaging gunmen blew up a bank, and attacked at least three police stations, and five churches, leaving behind nothing but rubble, officials said. Gunmen also raided the nearby village of Potiskum, leaving at least two people dead there, according to witnesses. A Boko Haram spokesman calling himself Abul-Qaqa promised more of the same. “We will continue attacking federal government formations until security forces stop their excesses on our members and vulnerable civilians,” he warned.

Boko Haram, which translates from the local Hausa language into “Western education is sacrilege” in English, wants to impose Sharia law over the entire oil-rich nation of 160 million people, despite the fact the country is evenly divided into a largely Muslim north and a largely Christian south. The sect completely rejects the notion of Western-inspired democracy, which they contend has corrupted government officials. …

[One faction of] Boko Haram … rejects any compromise. Its spiritual leader, imam Abubakar Shekau, heard speaking in a scratchy recording obtained by the AP, insists that holy war is the only way to bring about change. “Whomever we kill, we kill because Allah says we should kill …”

This [latest] attack, coupled with one in August on a United Nations compound in Abuja, which killed 24 and wounded 116, indicates the group’s continued potency, despite a 2009 crackdown. In July of that year, a riot and a military response left 700 people dead. …

About a year ago, Boko Haram … began a campaign of assassinations carried out by motorcycle-riding gunmen toting Kalashnikov rifles hidden under their traditional robes. The mayhem has resulted in at least 361 deaths this year alone …  In response, motorcycles have been banned from the street in Maiduguri, but the killing continues. Government officials, police officers, soldiers in the region, and clerics who speak out against Boko Haram are routinely targeted. …

For the most part, terrorism in Nigeria has remained under the radar despite the fact that the country has been victimized by more attacks in the last two years than any country in the world except Somalia–and despite the fact that the fruits of that terrorist-inspired unrest have already been exported to the United States: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to detonate a bomb hidden in his underwear aboard a Northwest Airlines flight in December of 2009, [is] Nigerian.

An isolated incident? Maybe not. Attacks with large bombs may indicate that Boko Haram is receiving training from al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Furthermore in August, Gen. Carter F. Ham, head of the United States Africa Command, contended that both groups were attempting to establish a “loose partnership” with Shabab, the Somali-based terror group responsible for the bombings at the World Cup soccer matches in Uganda last year where more than 70 people were killed. Ham characterized the development as one that “would be the most dangerous thing to happen not only to the Africans, but to us as well.”  …

Presumably he means to the US military in Africa. The most dangerous thing that could happen to the US – and the world – would be a nuclear-armed Iran.

It is worth remembering that Americans knew very little about al Qaeda and Afghanistan prior to 9/11, and those who did were loath to believe such a relatively “insignificant” development could blossom into a force capable of carrying out the worst domestic attack in the history of the nation.

Swiss Member of Parliament Oskar Freysinger, of the Swiss People’s Party, speaks out loud and clear against Islam and its jihad. The occasion was the launching of a new party in Germany called DIE FREIHEIT (Freedom). Is Europe at last rising against its Muslim invaders?

Again, Pat Condell boldly tells the truth about Palestinians and their supporters, including the intensely racist governments of Norway and Sweden:

This is from the American Thinker:

Most of us still stubbornly refuse to admit what we already know about Islam: that it’s a violent, malevolent religion whose adherents can’t stop themselves from announcing to us their intentions to make war against us until they’ve either killed us or made us slaves. …

Most of us still stubbornly profess our belief in a “true” Islam, peace-loving, egalitarian …

Most of us reflexively channel all blame for the daily bombings, beheadings, murders, mutilations, honor killings, and sundry other savagery committed in the name of Allah away from “true” Islam onto what we’re told is a distorted, hijacked Islam embraced by only a tiny fringe. …

Last Wednesday, the most important public trial against, potentially, the deadliest al-Qaeda jihadist to breach our airspace since 9/11 concluded when the defendant, a highly educated, well-spoken man who is neither crazy nor addled by pain nor drugs nor waterboarding, told us who he was and what he wanted. More important, he told us what Allah and the Qur’an and Islam wanted — namely, that “every able Muslim participate in jihad and fight in the way of Allah, those who fight you, and kill them wherever you find them.” …

Abdulmutallab ended his statement to the court this way: “If you laugh at us now, we will laugh at you.” Not “I,” but “we.” The very first thing to which he pleaded guilty was a criminal conspiracy count. “I had an agreement with at least one person to attack the United States.” I’ll say he did. He was doing only what is demanded of “every able Muslim.”

And for that he says he’s not guilty according to the Qur’an; for attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, he is “innocent in Muslim law.” …

Even if a bona fide Islamist terrorist … goes to the trouble of announcing to America that “my Islamic religious obligation requires me to carry an explosive device onto an aircraft and attempt to kill those onboard and wreck the aircraft as an act of jihad,” we still act as if Islam had nothing to do with it.

This isn’t innocent until proven guilty. This is innocent regardless of pleading guilty.

The writer’s point is that, as much as the individual perpetrators, Islam itself is guilty of the “bombings, beheadings, murders, mutilations, honor killings, and sundry other savagery committed in the name of Allah”.

Right.

Okay we’re only kidding.

But in the light of this, don’t be surprised if it happens:

Crucifixes hung in a classroom at the Catholic University — a private university in Washington, D.C. — are apparently now considered a violation of Muslim students’ human rights.

It’s also a human right to be Pope.

“Communism with a god”:  the two perversions of the human mind we most abhor and oppose, collectivism and religion, rolled into one in Islam’s sharia law. 

It is spreading more rapidly through the world – through our world – than the most despairing pessimist could hardly have thought possible at the dawn of this century.

To underline our message in the post immediately below titled Communism with a god, we quote from an article by Professor Barry Rubin at PajamasMedia:

First, to describe the Obama Administration’s Middle East policy as a disaster – I cannot think of a bigger, deadlier mess created by any U.S. foreign policy in the last century – is an understatement.

Second, the dominant analysis being used by the media, academia, and the talking heads on television has been proven dangerously wrong. …

It amounts to a retreat for moderates, allies of the West, and American interests coupled with an advance for revolutionary Islamists. …

Egypt, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey.

Six [actually seven – JB] countries or entities listed above have come—or are likely to come—under Islamist rule. …

We would add Iraq and make it eight.

In all but the case of Turkey — where the Obama Administration … has continually honored and excused an Islamist regime — and the Gaza Strip — where the Obama Administration helped entrench Hamas’s rule by forcing Israel to slash sanctions – they happened almost completely on Obama’s watch. Turkey and the Gaza Strip have become far worse on Obama’s watch. …

Syria, might merely remain under a repressive, pro-Iran, anti-American regime. And while there is a chance for a moderate democratic revolution, the White House is supporting the Islamists. …

There is no way to conceal this situation in October 2011 although it has been largely hidden, lied about, and misunderstood until this moment. Equally ideas must be quickly trashed that revolutionary Islamism doesn’t exist, cannot be talked about, is not a threat, that extreme radicals are really moderates.

Even now, the nonsense continues. The article you are reading at this moment probably could not have been published in a single mass media newspaper. Libya’s new regime calls for Sharia to be “the main” source of law. That is what the Muslim Brotherhood has been seeking in Egypt for decades. Yet we are being told that this isn’t really so bad after all.

The title of the Washington Post’s editorial, “Tunisia again points the way for Arab democracy, ” can be considered merely ironic. It certainly points the way… toward Islamist dictatorship. And then there are the New York Times and BBC headlines on the Tunisian elections telling us it is a victory for “moderate Islamists.”

They aren’t moderate. They’re just pretending to be. And you who fall for it aren’t Middle East experts, competent policymakers, or serious journalists; you’re just pretending to be.

I’m putting those headlines in my file alongside Moderate Islamists Take Power in Iran; Moderate Islamists Take Power in the Gaza Strip, Moderate Islamists Take Power in Lebanon, and Moderate Islamists Take Power in Turkey.

Without taking any position on climate issues, let me put it this way: Why are people frantic about the possibility that the earth’s temperature might rise slightly in 50 years but see no problem in hundreds of millions of people and vast amounts of wealth and resources becoming totally controlled by people who think like those who carried out the September 11 attacks?

We are observers, thinkers, skeptics, critics – not rabble-rousers. But we cannot stress too strongly that Barry Rubin and Frank Gaffney (quoted in our post below) are right to warn that our world is in dire peril.

Western sages coined the word “Islamist” to mean someone who took Islamic ideology too far; religious duty to pursue jihad to the point of mass killing, perhaps by suicide bombing, too seriously. In other words, an extremist. This allowed the sages, whose heads were more full of pride in their own tolerance than of little grey cells, to intone ad nauseam, “the vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving people who wouldn’t hurt a fly”. After which some of them would urge unknown spokesmen for that “vast majority” to come forward and denounce the “Islamist'” violence loud and clear.

They wait patiently, year in year out, for the silence to be broken.

The idea was that there are two Islams: a “moderate” one that does not take the commandments of the Koran – such as “kill the infidel” (Sura 9:5) – to be instructions to action, and another Islam that does.

The term “Islamist” has passed into common use to mean fanatical pursuers of Islamic jihad.

Now comes a new division: “moderate Islamists” – in other, equally oxymoronic, words: moderate fanatics, moderate extremists.

The idea crops up in this report about the elections in Tunisia:

A moderate Islamist group [Ennahdha] that was brutally repressed for decades was poised Monday to become Tunisia’s dominant political faction after a landmark election to choose a council that will draft the country’s new constitution and appoint an interim government. …

“The best way to deal with the Islamists is to include them in the process,” said Marwan Muasher, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an election observer with the National Democratic Institute. “There’s no excuse for keeping them out.”

In stark contrast to the Islamists’ success was the apparent poor performance of the secular Progressive Democratic Party …  The PDP ran a campaign that cast its leaders as the protectors of secular and modern values. … The PDP conceded its loss and pledged to work in the opposition rather than with Ennahdha.

In “the opposition”? How long will an opposition be allowed, we wonder.

The same idea of “moderate Islamism” was implied by the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, when, in February, 2011, he told a House Intelligence Committee hearing that the Muslim Brotherhood was ” largely secular” and “eschewed violence .”

The Muslim Brotherhood, however, does not agree with him. Its motto is:  “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

The probable coming to power of “Islamist” parties in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya is in fact a most ominous development.

Frank Gaffney, President Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense, warns:

War is on its way in the Middle East as Muslim countries are determined to force a showdown over the future of Israel …

“I’m afraid there’s a war coming, a very serious, perhaps cataclysmic regional war,” he said. “It will be presumably over, at least in part, the future existence of the state of Israel. It may involve all of its neighbors, as they have in the past, attacking Israel to try, as they say, to drive the Jews into the sea.

“It may involve the use of nuclear weapons … But whatever form it takes and whenever it occurs, it is unlikely to be contained to that region, and we must do everything we can to prevent freedom’s enemies from thinking they have an opportunity to engage in that kind of warfare.”

That means standing “absolutely, unmistakably” as one with Israel and doing everything to prevent Iran getting its hands on nuclear weapons.

Gaffney …  was speaking on the day that the “moderate” Islamist party Ennahda claimed victory at the ballot box in Tunisia and the day after Libya’s new rulers declared that country will be run on Islamic principles and under Sharia law. Gaffney does not believe Ennahda is really a moderating force. “I don’t believe there is such a thing as a moderate Islamist party,” he said. “The challenge with Islamists is that they seek to impose what they call Sharia on everybody, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. …

“They may, as a matter of tactical expediency, choose to do so in incremental ways, often nonviolently, at least initially.

“The problem is that, because ultimately they must — according to Sharia, according to what they believe is God’s will — make everyone feel subdued in order to achieve their God-mandated direction, they will not remain moderate. They will not be satisfied with anything less than the ultimate supremacy of Sharia and they certainly will not resist the use of violence when it becomes expedient to get their way.”

Gaffney … foresees a rising tide of Islamist governments growing throughout Middle East and North Africa and spreading even further.

“We’re witnessing not just the violent kind of jihad that these Islamists believe God compels them to engage in, but also, where they must for tactical reasons, a more stealthy kind, or civilizational jihad as the Muslim Brotherhood calls it. We’re witnessing that playing out, not only in places in the Middle East but also in Europe, in Australia, in Canada and here in the United States as well,” he said.

The spread of Sharia, which Gaffney said is often referred to as “Communism with a god,” is “the most urgent and grievous challenge we face as a free people.

“Those who follow this program of Sharia believe that God is directing them to engage in jihad or whatever form of warfare is necessary to accomplish their goals . . . .Through stealth, they have successfully penetrated important parts of the free world including our own government and civil society institutions.”

The Obama administration has to stop “embracing” the Muslim Brotherhood, Gaffney said.

“This is legitimating our enemies … It is facilitating their influence operations and their penetration and it greatly increases the prospect that they will be successful at what the Muslim Brotherhood’s own documents indicate is their desire, which is to destroy western civilization from within.”

Gaffney noted that Ennahda had won what appears to be a clean election in Tunisia, but that doesn’t mean there ever will be another vote there.

“The problem is not simply democracy. People are pointing to Tunisia as a perfect example of democracy at work. …  fine if all you want is one-man-one-vote one-time. That is precisely what the Muslim Brotherhood and its like-minded Islamist friends want.” …

“What we are likely to wind up with, not just in Tunisia, not just in Libya, not just in Egypt, but probably in due course in Syria — as we have in Lebanon, as we have in Gaza and probably will have down the road in Yemen, Bahrain, maybe Saudi Arabia — is the takeover, the unmistakable takeover, perhaps through the ballot box, of people who will not seek or allow others freedom, who will impose Sharia and who will use whatever resources they amass as a result, not only to suppress their own people, but to endanger us.”

We think Frank Gaffney is right about the Arabs wanting to make war again on Israel. They ache to make war on Israel. He’s also right that “Islamist” leaders are the most likely to try it.

But could they do it? Perhaps not in the near future. Egypt is desperately poor, on the verge of bankruptcy and mass starvation. Libya is rich enough to make war, but for all the pretense that the rebels were an army, it was only a collection of ad hoc militias, and the Libyan nation is a mass of quarreling tribes and factions vying to get their hands on the money Gaddafi stacked up round the world. True, a war against Israel would unite them, but could they fight it? Not on their own.

Yet sooner or later the war that Gaffney predicts will come. It may not come until the middle of the century, when Europe will be predominantly Muslim. Or it may be initiated soon by Iran, with nuclear bombs.

And when the war comes, the sages of the West who have helped to put “moderate Islamist” parties in power throughout the Arab world, will have gone a long way to promote the victory of “Communism with a god” and the fall of our civilization.

“O ye who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allah is with those who keep their duty (unto Him).” (Koran 9:123)

Bruce Bawer quotes this and other passages from the Koran (there are many) that show plainly enough how Islam is an intolerant religion commanding violence against non-Muslims.

He writes at Front Page:

Muslims have been persecuting Christians ever since the time of Muhammed. But in the wake of the so-called “Arab Spring,” such activity seems to be on the rise throughout much of the Islamic world, now that Muslims in several countries are enjoying greater freedom to do things they felt more restrained from doing before. Christians are being beaten and murdered, churches attacked and destroyed.

Bruce Bawer, a fine conservative and a provider of sound information on Islam, is also a Christian, so we don’t expect him to mention that Christians have beaten and murdered, tortured and persecuted at least as much as the Muslims have, though not as much lately. But it needs to be mentioned.

If there is a positive side of this terrible development, it is this: if there’s more such persecution going on, more attention is finally being paid to it in the mainstream Western media.

Can’t say we’d noticed that.

Yet even as some of the media are daring to report on these events, there remains a strong disinclination to suggest that this pattern of persecution has anything whatsoever to do with Islam. …

But in fact –

Anti-Christian and anti-Jewish passages, and all the other brutal precepts found in the Koran, need to be acknowledged and dealt with – because the people who are burning down churches and tormenting Christians have read their Koran, and they’re doing no more or less than what they think their God wants them to do.

“Dealt with” how?

The Obama administration bluntly denies that Islam teaches and demands slaughter, mass murder, subjugation, or any harm to non-Muslims at all.

This is from an article by Robert Spencer:

It has been a long time coming, but the Obama Administration has now officially banned the truth. Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole declared Wednesday at a conference in Washington that he had “recently directed all components of the Department of Justice to re-evaluate their training efforts in a range of areas, from community outreach to national security.” This “reevaluation” will remove all references to Islam in connection with any examination of Islamic jihad terror activity. The Obama Administration has now placed off-limits any investigation of the beliefs, motives and goals of jihad terrorists.

Dwight C. Holton, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, emphasized that training materials for the FBI would be purged of everything politically incorrect: “I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for. They will not be tolerated.”

Understandable, since this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stand for lies.

Holton said that he had spoken with Attorney General Eric Holder about FBI training materials that Holton claimed were “egregiously false,” and that Holder “is firmly committed to making sure that this is over….we’re going to fix it.” Holton said that this “fix” was particularly urgent because the rejected training materials “pose a significant threat to national security, because they play into the false narrative propagated by terrorists that the United States is at war with Islam.”

Cole suggested that these training materials had done damage domestically as well … “One of the many, tragic legacies of 9/11 has been an increase in prejudice, discrimination and hatred directed against persons of the Muslim and Sikh faiths …”

Robert Spencer comments:

For years Islamic advocacy groups like MPAC [Muslim Public Affairs Council] and Hamas-linked CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relation] have asserted loudly and often that telling the truth about Islam’s doctrines of jihad warfare and supremacism constituted “hatred,” and endangered innocent Muslims. Hamas-linked CAIR has trumpeted and even fabricated hate crimes against Muslims in order to exaggerate this perception of Muslim victimhood.

The entire premise of all this, however, is false. The now-banned FBI training materials were not written out of hatred for Muslims. They were put together in order to give agents an accurate picture of the beliefs and perspectives of jihad terrorists. It is unfortunate but true that the Qur’an and Sunnah do contain doctrines of warfare and exhortations to make war against and subjugate infidels (cf. Qur’an 2:191; 4:89; 9:5; 9:29; 47:4, etc.), and it is not an act of “hatred” to point this out, or even to scrutinize the Muslim community in the U.S. in order to try to determine its view of these texts and teachings. The only people who are genuinely threatened by such scrutiny are those who wish jihad terrorism to be able to proceed unhindered.

And there’s the rub: in banning the truth about Islam and jihad, the Obama Administration has opened the door for increased jihad terror activity in the United States. Agents who do not understand the threat they face and are constantly surprised by the places where that threat is coming from will be powerless to stop this jihad activity. And the nation will reap the whirlwind.

It will be a great saga for historians to tell –

How the West helped Islam to victory in state after state of the Arab world.

How, while Islam stealthily and steadily penetrated and gained power in the Western democracies by exploiting their own mores and law, its power base was vastly extended and strengthened with the help of Western military might in North Africa, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

How the jihad advanced at a pace that Muhammad himself could hardly have dreamt of.

A contemporary report the historians may study is this from the Washington Post:

The long-awaited declaration of liberation [was] delivered by the head of the National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil.

He … laid out a vision for a new Libya with an Islamist tint, saying Islamic Sharia law would be the “basic source” of legislation and existing laws that contradict the teachings of Islam would be nullified. …

Using Sharia as the main source of legislation is stipulated in the constitution of neighboring Egypt. …

In Brussels, neither the EU nor NATO wanted to address the issue of Sharia law. A NATO official said it was for the Libyans to decide on the system in their own country.

“We trust the Libyan authorities to build an inclusive Libya, respectful of human rights and the rule of law,” said an official …

Although “the Libyan authorities” – ie the rebel rag-tag army including al-Qaeda operatives – had given no sign that they could be trusted.

And this from the BBC:

Nearly 70% of voters have turned out to cast their ballot in Tunisia’s election, the first free poll of the Arab Spring, officials say.

Tunisians are electing a 217-seat assembly that will draft a constitution and appoint an interim government. …

Islamist party Ennahda is expected to win the most votes …

Ennahda’s leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, was heckled by a handful of secularist protesters as he left the polling station in Tunis where he voted.

The hecklers called him a terrorist and an assassin and shouted at him to return to London, where he spent 22 years in exile before returning to Tunisia in April.

But Mr Ghannouchi praised the electoral process, saying: “This is an historic day. Tunis was born again today; the Arab spring is born again today – not in a negative way of toppling dictators but in a positive way of building democratic systems, a representative system which represents the people.”

Iraqis have decided, with the blessing of coalition administrators, that Islamic law will rule in Iraq.

They reached this decision at about 4:20 a.m. on March 1, when the Iraqi Governing Council, in the presence of top coalition administrators, agreed on the wording of an interim constitution. This document, officially called the Transitional Administrative Law, is expected to remain the ultimate legal authority until a permanent constitution is agreed on, presumably in 2005. The council members focused on whether the interim constitution should name the Sharia as “a source” or “the source” for laws in Iraq. “A source” suggests laws may contravene the Sharia, while “the source” implies that they may not. In the end, they opted for the Sharia being just “a source” of Iraq’s laws.

This appears to be a successful compromise. It means, as council members explained in more detail, that legislation may not contradict either the “universally agreed-upon tenets of Islam” or the quite liberal rights guaranteed in other articles of the interim constitution, including protections for free speech, free press, religious expression, rights of assembly, and due process, plus an independent judiciary and equal treatment under the law.

But there are two reasons to see the interim constitution as a signal victory for militant Islam.

First, the compromise suggests that while all of the Sharia may not be put into place, every law must conform with it. As one pro-Sharia source put it, “We got what we wanted, which is that there should be no laws that are against Islam.” …

Second, the interim constitution appears to be only a way station. Islamists will surely try to gut its liberal provisions, thereby making Sharia effectively “the source” of Iraqi law. Those who want this change — including Mr. al-Sistani and the Governing Council’s current president — will presumably continue to press for their vision. Iraq’s leading militant Islamic figure, Muqtada al-Sadr, has threatened that his constituency will “attack its enemies” if Sharia is not “the source” and the pro-Tehran political party in Iraq has echoed Sadr’s ultimatum.

When the interim constitution does take force, militant Islam will have blossomed in Iraq.

Reuters reports that if there were to be war between the US and Pakistan, Afghanistan would support Pakistan.

So says that precious piece of corruption, President Hamid Karzai.

It is the big f-figurative slap in the face.

Afghanistan would support Pakistan in case of military conflict between Pakistan and the United States, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in an interview to a private Pakistani TV channel broadcast on Saturday.

The remarks were in sharp contrast to recent tension between the two neighbors over cross-border raids, and Afghan accusations that Pakistan was involved in killing the chief Afghan peace envoy, former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, by a suicide bomber on September 20.

“God forbid, If ever there is a war between Pakistan and America, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan,” he said in the interview to Geo television.

“If Pakistan is attacked and if the people of Pakistan needs Afghanistan’s help, Afghanistan will be there with you.” …

Pressure on Islamabad has been mounting since U.S. special forces found and killed Osama bin Laden in May in a Pakistani garrison town, where he apparently had been living for years.

God may forbid, but Hillary Clinton must do the ruling out.

In a two-day visit to Islamabad, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued stern warnings [shudder, ye powers!] and asked for more cooperation in winding down the war in Afghanistan, but ruled out “boots on the ground” in North Waziristan, where Washington has been pushing Pakistan to tackle the Haqqani network … a group of militants Washington has blamed for a series of attacks [on US and NATO forces] in Afghanistan, using sanctuaries in the Pakistani tribal region along the Afghan border

“No boots on the ground” should be engraved on Hillary’s gravestone. To her and the rest of the Obama clique, watching the pacifist Democratic fringe out of the corners of their eyes, the phrase is Leftspeak for “look, we are making war so distantly, surgically, and therapeutically, it’s hardly war at all”.

Is an alliance of Afghanistan with Pakistan  in a war against the US – even if only in theory – the reward America deserves for expending blood and treasure to save Afghanistan from the Taliban through ten long years of war? No, it is not.

Is it the just reward successive US governments deserve for sentimetally persisting in trying to transform the Afghans into a decent nation, “winning their hearts and minds”, “building democracy”, raising their standard of living, turning the US military into a mommery of social workers to fuss about their health care and education? Yes, it is.