The great Afghan bailout - Tom Englehardt

What this all adds up to is an ambitious doubling down on just about every bet already made by Washington in these past years - from the counter-insurgency war against the Taliban and the counter-terrorism war against al-Qaeda to the financial love/hate relationship with the Pakistani military and its intelligence services underway since at least the president Richard Nixon years of the early 1970s. (Many of the flattering things now being said by US officials about Pakistani chief of the army staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kiani, for instance, were also said about the now fallen autocrat General Pervez Musharraf when he held the same position.)