Book of the Day.

I is For Infidel By Kathy Gannon


From OpinionJournal's uh, review, I guess:

Karim abruptly ended the conversation and headed out to his waiting car. Ms. Gannon caught a glimpse of the license plate--it started with the number 83. From her years of experience she had learned that, in Pakistan, such a number belongs only to plates that have been issued by the ISI, Pakistan's military intelligence service. This numeric talisman confirmed what she had long suspected: that three years after Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, had made an about-face and ditched the Taliban under U.S. pressure, his military intelligence service was still offering support to Islamist groups, including a resurgent Taliban...

For causing this tragedy Ms. Gannon takes everyone to task: the former anti-Soviet mujahideen for turning their country into a killing field and for committing unspeakable crimes; the U.N. for ignoring the Taliban's gruesome rule in the forlorn hope that to do so would promote peace; and the U.S. for failing to court moderate Taliban members and later for sacrificing Afghanistan's security for the sake of prosecuting the war in Iraq. But she saves her sharpest indictment for Pakistan's military and intelligence service. She argues that it has been in cahoots with terrorist groups for decades, groups driven by a "jihad ideology" according to which Islam justifies all kinds of violence.

The military's omnipresence in Pakistani life, Ms. Gannon notes, is in part a legacy of British rule, under which Hindus dominated the civilian bureaucracy and Muslims the military. When the British left, a feudal ruling class arose. Its members included, alongside major landowners, military men with a strong religious sense of mission and no interest in establishing democratic institutions. As one Pakistani general tells Ms. Gannon: "Jihad has always been a motivating concept for our troops from day one." The concept motivated Pakistan's military all the more forcefully, in the decades after independence, with each of Pakistan's humiliating defeats at the hands of India...

"In hindsight," writes Ms. Gannon, "it was a mistake [for the West] to support Zia and his Islamic fervor, which gave rise to extremist militants." It was also a mistake to support Gen. Musharraf, whose military "is strangling Pakistan's civil society and protecting the religious right." So compelling is Ms. Gannon's case that by the end of the book, when she asserts almost in passing that Osama bin Laden may well be under the protection of the Pakistani military, it is easy to believe her.

Yes, that's why we call it hindsight.

It is time to start over. Time to make these third and fourth world potentates realize who's boss in this world. Time to free the people. Time to make everyone democrats. (Small "d", of course.) Time to make them eat genetically engineered chicken and drink Coke. Time to fire up the giant flying head of stone and go about the countryside delivering condoms and Norplant to the savages...