Saturday Morning Links

By John Ballard

So many links. So little time.
(Forgot what day it is. Had to change the title from Friday to Saturday. Check url. See my point?)
Kat's catches today are a trove of treasures. Time permitting I'll try to put up a few of them later.
Meantime, these need attention.

?Mother of all embarrassments by Ayaz Amir
Anyone who thinks Pakistan is unaware of or indifferent to world opinion is not paying attention. This op-ed from Karachi could only have come from a Pakistani pen.

For a country with more than its share of misfortunes and sheer bad luck, we could have done without this warrior of the faith, Osama bin Laden, spreading his beneficence amongst us. He was a headache for us while he lived, but nothing short of a catastrophe in his death. For his killing, and the manner of it, have exposed Pakistan and its security establishment like nothing else.

To say that our security czars and assorted knights have been caught with their pants down would be the understatement of the century. This is the mother of all embarrassments, showing us either to be incompetent � it can�t get any worse than this, Osama living in a sprawling compound a short walk from that nursery school of the army, the Pakistan Military Academy and, if we are to believe this, our ever-vigilant eyes and ears knowing nothing about it � or, heaven forbid, complicit.

I would settle for incompetence anytime because the implications of complicity are too dreadful to contemplate.

And the Americans came, swooping over the mountains, right into the heart of the compound, and after carrying out their operation flew away into the moonless night without our formidable guardians of national security knowing anything about it. This is to pour salt over our wounds. The obvious question which even a child would raise is that if a cantonment crawling with the army such as Abbottabad is not safe from stealthy assault what does it say about the safety of our famous nuke capability, the mainstay of national pride and defence?

He's just geting warmed up. Go read the rest. (H/T 3Quarks, the horse's mouth for all matters about Pakistan)

?Bin Laden raid's lone glitch could be headache for U.S. military By Larry Shaughnessy, CNN Pentagon Producer
Kat gets credit for this one. I almost missed the juicy part.

What makes the experts think the aircraft that crashed in Abbottabad was a secret "stealth helicopter?"

• "The first thing that stood out, and it may seem like a small thing, is the color scheme. Whereas most Black Hawk Army helicopters are painted olive green, this particular one is gray. Not just any gray; it's infrared-suppressant gray, and the purpose of the IR gray, as it's known, is to help reduce the vulnerability of the helicopter to ground-launched heat-seeking missile systems," Jennings told CNN Pentagon Correspondent Chris Lawrence.


• Photos from Abbottabad show that the chopper had a five-bladed tail rotor. "On a conventional Black Hawk, you have four blades. The addition of the extra rotor blades on the tail rotor hub reduces the acoustic signature of the helicopter there by making it hard to hear, giving the SEALs that extra few minutes to get over the compound before anyone on the ground quite knows what's going on," according to Jennings.


• Those five tail rotor blades are partially covered by a disk-like object that Jennings called a "hub-mounted vibration suppression system." He believes it provides more noise suppression and some possible protection for the tail rotor from bullets of shrapnel. And it's not typical on military helicopters. "No, I've never seen that on an operational helicopter before," Jennings said. But he added that a similar system was part of the Comanche helicopter design.


• The blades on that tail rotor also appear to be shorter and thinner than typical Black Hawk helicopter's blades. One former Army Black Hawk pilot, who asked not to be identified, said, "More blades and shorter blades means the helicopter would make less noise in flight."
  It's not just the tail rotor blades that are different. "On the main rotor assembly that was actually destroyed by the SEAL team on the ground the blades themselves are threaded, which signify that these are carbon composite rotor blades as opposed to conventional metal rotor blades, which again signifies aspects of stealth technology that have been incorporated into this particular helicopter," Jennings said.


• Some photos show parts of the helicopter appear similar to non-secret stealth aircraft. "What's left of the tail section of that helicopter, the shape of the fuselage, it's canted. It's angled. It's a shape that's synonymous with fixed-wing stealth fighters such as the F-22, the F-35. Essentially, it's designed to defeat radar. If you eliminate right angles in an aircraft design, radar waves can't bounce back," Jennings said.

After this, who needs Wikileaks?

?Cry, the Beloved Country The endlessly deepening crisis that is Pakistan.
Ahmed Rashid reviews four books about Pakistan in New Republic. Informative and refreshing.
(Subscription wall can be avoided by going through 3Quarks, but tell no one.)

As a long-time fan of Rashid I value his personal observations as much as his equally insightful remarks about what he reads. These opening paragraphs show what I mean.

Recently I gave a lecture on Pakistan and Afghanistan to an audience of many hundreds in Chicago. There were some sixty or seventy Pakistani Americans among them. As I walked into the hall, something strange started to happen. A small delegation of young Pakistani men and women came up to me. They told me they were Ismailis, thanked me for my outspokenness about the rights of minorities in Pakistan, and expressed the hope that I would raise the issue during my lecture. Ismailis are a small Shia sect, led by the Agha Khan, who have been persecuted in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan by Sunni extremists and the Taliban. This group of Ismailis in my Chicago audience wanted me to know that they would be listening carefully, and they had expectations.

Then another delegation came up to the podium. These were Ahmadis, a sect proscribed as non-Muslim by the state constitution of Pakistan. Ahmadis have been killed, jailed, and beaten in large numbers in Pakistan, and most recently in Indonesia; many have fled to the United States and Canada. And then a third delegation arrived�Pakistani Christians�who said they had only recently been given political asylum in America. Several of them broke down when describing the recent murder of Shahbaz Bhatti, a Pakistani official who had tried to change the blasphemy law in Pakistan that targets Christians in particular. Bhatti was the only Christian in the federal cabinet.

This experience was repeated when I carried on to Toronto to lecture at a university there. Coming from Pakistan, I have lectured in America for over twenty years, but I have never before encountered in this way my fellow countrymen who are now American citizens. Persecuted minorities never want to make a spectacle of themselves, but clearly these people feel so helpless because nobody in Pakistan now dares to raise their voice on their behalf that they felt the need to introduce themselves. And this was the United States, where they enjoyed greater freedoms.

These religious minorities, along with the tiny population of Pakistani Hindus and the much larger Shia Muslim minority (between 15 to 20 percent of the population), and even mainstream Sunni sects and the shrines of their saints, have all been the targets of a wave of religious intolerance that is sweeping Pakistan. The armed wing of this growing intolerance that is wreaking havoc up and down the country is led by the Pakistani Taliban, who are based among the Pashtuns in the northwest, and their allies are extremist groups in Punjab province and the coastal city of Karachi who at one time fought in Indian Kashmir.

Many factors are helping to spread extremism and its resulting wave of intolerance: the continuing American-led war in Afghanistan and its fallout in Pakistan; a bankrupt economy; a disastrously corrupt and incompetent government; the near-collapse of the public educational system; the fifth largest nuclear arsenal in the world, which is massively expensive to run and to keep safe, and which dictates the country�s foreign policy. But the most important cause of contemporary Pakistani extremism is the simple fact that for the past three decades the state itself has sponsored many of these groups, so as to further its foreign policy aims in Afghanistan or Indian Kashmir. The Pakistani state�s patronage of these militant groups, which has continued even after September 11, 2001, has helped to sustain Islamic extremism in south and central Asia. Is it surprising, then, that none of Pakistan�s neighbors or the West really trusts it?

The military is now partially trying to reverse this trend, but the path ahead is not looking bright. In April, the White House bleakly reported to Congress that �there remains no clear path toward defeating the insurgency in Pakistan, despite the � deployment of over 147,000 forces.� The report describes the situation as deteriorating rapidly along Pakistan�s border with Afghanistan, with no ability by the Pakistani army �to hold and build� in insurgency-hit areas. (A Pakistani government spokesman rejected the report, saying that it �should not be held accountable for the failings of coalition strategy in Afghanistan.�) Europe and the United States are particularly concerned about this situation because almost all the global terrorist plots uncovered recently have involved European citizens of Pakistani origin or in Taliban camps in Pakistan.

Apart from the Taliban insurgency, Pakistan faces another bloody separatist insurgency in the province of Baluchistan and the mayhem created by recent unexplained killings in Karachi. There were 260 targeted killings of people in the first three months of this year, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. What Pakistan lacks, above all, is real leadership and a vision for the future, which the politicians have failed to provide.

?Tweets from Pakistan via nick Schifrin, ABC News

You think the #Pakistan army isn't just a little embarrassed right now? Some examples of SMSs going around:

SMS 1 going around: "Pakistan radar system for sale: $99.99, buy one, get one free."

SMS 2 going around: "Public Service Message from the Army: Stay Alert. Don�t rely on us."

SMS 3 going around: "No honking: the army is asleep."