TheAfPakThreat

With all of the awful issues confronting our leaders it is not the huge economic mess that we’re in that is their biggest problem. In the same week that President Obama met Prime Minister Brown we saw the awful news pictures of the Sri Lankan cricket team being attacked by terrorists in Lahore, Pakistan on their way to play sport.

Masked men opened fire, killing six policemen escorting the Sri Lankans and a driver. In addition seven players and an assistant coach were wounded.

The team later flew back to Sri Lanka. There is no word on the identities or motives of the gunmen, who melted into the city and escaped.

Pakistani officials stated that the incident bore close similarities to deadly attacks in Mumbai in India last November.

This is another of those all too familiar attacks that we see, sigh then shake our heads. We have become totally anaesthetized about the sheer horror of such events. A bombing in a restaurant in Tel Aviv, a bus in London, a shooting in Mumbai, jets being flown into skyscrapers in New York, carnage in Malaysia, a Jewish community centre in Argentina being bombed, trains and hundreds of Spanish commuters in Madrid blown apart or thousands of other cowardly assaults on innocent civilians anywhere in the world.

What do all of these terrible attacks have in common? Militant Islamic terrorists conduct them all. Whatever name they use, the Taliban, Al Quada, Hamas, Hezbollah or a thousand other little known similar organizations, they are all the same and their aim is our destruction.
Whether you’re Nick Berg in Iraq or Daniel Pearl in Pakistan it doesn’t much matter what label your Islamic terrorist has when he is hacking your head from your body.

The current and recent attacks on the Indian sub-continent are especially worrying for a series of reasons that are both inescapable and very scary. It is clear that the insidious and evil reach of the Taliban has infected more than the lawless borderlands running between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In fact the Pakistani government recently allowed its own Swat valley to become Taliban territory although it is nominally still part of their country.
The Swat valley is an administrative district in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan located about 100 miles from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. This once princely state with its high mountains, green meadows, and clear lakes, was once popular with tourists as "the Switzerland of Pakistan". In December last year most of the area was captured by the Taliban insurgency and Islamist militant leader Maulana Fazlullah and his group Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi that have banned education for girls and bombed or burnt more hundreds of schools for girls and many other government-owned buildings.

The result is that there will be no education for the girls of that benighted place. The Taliban in Afghanistan continue to attack girls who still dare to go to school and recently threw acid in the faces of many of the girls who dared to want to be educated.

I have never understood the loony left wing liberals who espouse furiously against anyone they dislike but who think its cool and fun to wear T-shirts that say, “We are all Hamas now!” Now the Taliban are killing and maiming the women of their own nation where are the left wing protests against these acts of barbarism?

Instead we are urged to understand the plight of the various Islamist populations and their motivation for hating and killing us or anyone else that they take a dislike to. Personally I don’t think the world is helped by this attitude. The vast majority of Muslims in the world hate these terrorists as much as anyone else. But they must make this known not only by their words but also by their actions.

The current and festering danger is that the entire region of Afghanistan and Pakistan is being terminally destabilized and this will continue and escalate unless and until there is a clear strategy to combat and contain this menace emanating principally from the USA and supported by the EU, China and Russia. The reason for this being so vital is obvious, Pakistan is a nuclear state and there can be no more terrifying image than a Pakistan run by the Taliban having at their disposal weapons of mass destruction. The rest of the world is severely threatened as this situation degenerates.

There are many sweetheart deals being done by various nation states to placate or mollify the growing terrorist menace I describe. There is no question that the aim is to “buy” a quiet life in the forlorn hope that their turn to be beheaded will never arrive.

This is not far fetched and cannot be allowed. There must not be any more bending of the knee to the world wide terrorist threat. You do not achieve peace by appeasement you achieve defeat.

We are fighting with one hand tied behind our back in Afghanistan whilst most of our allies with the noble exception of the Americans do little or no real fighting at all. This cannot continue. It is time we burned the poppy fields and attacked the Taliban where they live and where they hide, on the borders of Pakistan. If we have to pursue terrorists across borders we have to do so. There can be no safe havens for our deadly enemies.

Such Islamic holy warriors publicly state that their idea of compromise is the world’s surrender to an Islamic caliphate; failing which they want us dead. We must not allow such lunatics the levers of ultimate power and weapons of mass destruction. We must widen the fight against the terrorists now, while we are much stronger than they are, or we will live to regret our hesitation.