Thursday, October 22, 2009

Freed scribe trashes US policy

oct 23rd, 2009

if anybody at the NYT actually read what rhode wrote, they would stop sucking up to pakistan

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Wednesday, October 21, 2009 


Freed scribe smashes US policy

Barry Rubin

Journalist David Rohde is no longer a prisoner of the Taliban, but Washington is still a captive of its foreign policy which ignores Pakistan's sponsorship of terrorism

When reality breaks into the mainstream media it can be of earthquake intensity. Such is The New York Times article by David Rohde, a journalist held prisoner by the Taliban for over seven months and finally released.

Rohde's conclusions aren't of much comfort for the Obama Administration, or for those who are naïve about radical Islamists, or indeed for his fellow journalists. But his honest thinking out loud should affect their writings and policies.

During his captivity, Rohde writes: "I came to a simple realisation. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organisation as a form of 'Al Qaeda lite,' a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan."

But he came to understand from close observation as a prisoner: "I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious... They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.

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1 comment:

witan said...

It is interesting that you have highlighted Rohde's reported observation: ""I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious... They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world." — because the objective behind the formation of Pakistan, as enunciated by Chowdhary Rehmat Ali, was the same, i.e., the frmation of a Islamic Empire stretching from Morocco to Indonesia.