"Back to the Stone Age"

I know Ayaz Amir is going to have a great time with this story. For five years the poor people (including me) who read Dawn on Fridays have had to deal with his whiny, populist, reality-ignoring, ego-driven drivel on why we should have held out for more from the Americans in exchange for our support against the Taliban. How many times has he written the words "one phone call" in the last five years? Seriously, can we get an estimate on this? Can't google come up with some tool to count exactly how many times one person has used the exact same phrase?

There is nothing in this story that we didn't already know. While the words "stone age" are definitely provocative, needlessely so in fact, the premise still stands. It was in our best interest to extend cooperation to the U.S. the minute that first plane went through the WTC and abandon the Taliban. Screw that, it was in our best interest to have never supported the Taliban in the first place. But that's another story entirely.

I always laugh when people suggest we should have bargained harder on September 12th. Does anyone remember the Pakistan of Sepetmber 12th? Did the Pakistan of September 12th really have any sort of position from which it could bargain? We were on the verge of bankruptcy, a pariah state, both region-wide and internationally, and had no chips with which to bargain. We were like the friend of the street gangster who went too far one day and messed with the Italian mafia without us knowing. Well, the Italian mafia paid us a visit. And when the mafia visits, you shut up and do what they say. Or you get bombed back to the Stone Age.