Well, in addition to pronouncing Balochistan better, he is right that “elements of the ISI and Pakistan’s military operate radical Islamic groups”, and that, “Pakistan has for decades leveraged radical terrorist groups to carry out attacks in India and Afghanistan,” and that, “Pakistan helped to create the Taliban.”

The question is what to do about it, not whether you can cleave the Pakistani government into good Pakistanis and bad Pakistanis, the way previous administrations have talked about moderate and extreme elements of previous foreign governments. (What an echo of Reagan!)

Pakistan has had a state policy of exporting violent groups for decades. A decade ago, mixed with the Saudi state policy of exporting radical Islam by dually trying to standardize Islam to their rigid Wahhabism and banishing their problem children, it became something the rest of the world saw as lethal. The question isn’t whether we can work only with those Pakistanis who aren’t in on it, the question is how to stop it.

Rohrabacher’s solution isn’t the right one, in fact it’s kind of ridiculous, but what is?

@Jim White: I guess so, but what the Pakistanis do has global reach as well. Sitting in the U.S. with our heads in the sand isn’t a viable policy either. Milliken’s Multifiber Textile Act wasn’t very good for the Pakistanis and that was entirely pushed as a U.S. jobs protection bill. Giving the Chinese the Pakistani markets in finished clothing after the Pakistan flood was entirely the U.S. corporate 1%ers here in the U.S. and that wasn’t very good for Pakistan either. When people don’t have jobs in Pakistan and the Taliban and al Qaeda are paying top dollar, whose jobs do you think they’re going to take, whether we’re there or not?

But yeah, it’s all the military’s fault, and has nothing to do with Pakistan’s corrupt elite or America’s race-for-the-bottom capitalists.

Newsflash people: Pakistan has been launching cross-border Islamic groups since the 1940s. Anyone who thinks they were put up to it for the first time by the CIA 35 years later is just a fucking idiot. Meanwhile, the country is in shambles from too many military dictatorships, too few basic services, and too many personality cults. Public education is guaranteed to 2nd grade. The elite grind the peasant sharecroppers so bad that when the floodwaters receded, many IDPs didn’t want to return to the land because they were afraid of what would happen to them. The TTP get footholds not because of drones but because they promise more justice than the Pakistani government with its corrupt and broken court system and a police force that is known for bribery and graft. And all because the country sustains itself on one thought: Hatred of India. Not a formula for a viable nation-state.

And that’s the real reason Rohrabacher’s solution won’t work. Because the country needs simultaneously to be contained and coddled. Cajoled and treated like a wounded animal. Its poor lack human rights. Its middle class lacks the foreign investment to take off and pull the country up. Its parliament loses itself in endless debate on topics of honor while the parliamentarians personal lives are so lacking in honor as to make a joke of the whole thing.

Meanwhile, it sends suicide bombers to Kabul under threats that it will kill their families, and builds nuclear weapons. It is not a benign threat, it was Pakistan which instituted the opium farming and heroin trade in Afghanistan. Iran is paying dearly for that. Do you think they like it? What will the region do? Who knows. But this isn’t some kind of CARS conflict, and it won’t be over because the U.S. leaves. Because it isn’t Vietnam. The decolonization era was over several decades ago. So was the cold war.