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We are bemused, not for the first time, by an organized jailbreak that this weekend turned 400 Pakistani Taliban loose onto the streets.
Probably the biggest fish to slip back into the stream was already under death sentence for attempting to assassinate Mussharaf.
Without dwelling overlong on the individual stories, we may profitably wonder how it can be that Af/Pak jails are so porous
I can only hope that if I am ever in the slam, it has similar administration–although several of my cousins might opt to prevent rather than facilitate my escape.
The underlying flaw in the penal system under review, like the underlying flaw in the whole Af/Pak adventure, is that the Pashtuns are all cousins–all *41 million of them.
That's why all their names (think, eg.,,Karzai) end in "ai".
When the Brits ran ot of conquering zeal half-way into Pashtunistan, about where the Hindu Death is (Hindu Kush…), they drew one of their customary lines on a map, and carried on.
Until the whole enterprise fell apart (literally, with partition) in 1947.
The Pashtuns are not about to be their own jailors–indeed, the Afghan National Army on which we have pinned our current hopes for graceful exit (cf, ungraceful exit) from this briar patch, is mostly ethnic Tajiks (like Ahmad Shah Massoud) who are viewed as "foreigners" by the Pashtuns on the northern side of the Durand Line.
Bottom line: Why go out on the lake, if you are going to catch-and-release.
Big fish, little fish, it's all the same.
No jail built can hold'em.
8 Comments
Why is then where/when ever there is some political quagmire, you can usually trace it back to the British or the French ?
And why is it that when they leave, we think we can stick our noses in it and things will be different ?
The Brits worse than the French, because they love to impose a partition just before the door hits their ass.
The French just go all in (Battle of Algiers) and then fold. Francophone Africa, grands mercis…But at least they don’t leave festering communal strife on the macro scale.
Too bad he missed Musharraf, he came to power through a coup.
Ah, yes, the Brits do love “divide and rule”. It’s why to this day it still takes less time to travel from Cardiff to London than from Cardiff to Anglesey — the Brits didn’t want the Welsh to travel much within their own country, but instead shuttling themselves and their good back and forth between their major cities and London.
The Durand line drawn by the Brits was specifically intended to split the Pashtuns in half…! Just like they’d split the Kurds in thirds, between Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, with some in Syria too…! 8-(
I kinda thought it was the result of having several columns of troops destroyed at Maiwand. That is to say, the Brits would have taken all of Afghanistan if they could.
It’s kinda odd that he was still hanging around awaiting execution–I didn’t think they had so much due process…
divide and rule is bad enough. Divide and then leave the divided to sort things out on their own is maybe worse.