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Days Since JD Vance Insulted Women Across America: Zero

When they say they’re pro-life, they don’t mean yours.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

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A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

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Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

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My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

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Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

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… gradually, and then suddenly.

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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Open Thread: Bad Example, Mr. Ambassador

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58Comments

  1. 1.

    Yutsano

    I believe Mr Haqqani committed what we call in the West a gaffe. The political definition is a politician telling the truth at an inopportune time.

  2. 2.

    opie jeanne

    Thanks for linking to the Scocca article. It was short, sweet and made us both laugh as I read it aloud.

  3. 3.

    TheMightyTrowel

    Being Irish-American from Boston, it’s amazing the family feuds that one can spark just by whispering the name ‘whitey bulger’… three of my aunts’ heads just exploded.

  4. 4.

    JGabriel

    Tom Scocca:

    For the record, James “Whitey” Bulger was able to rule Boston’s criminal underworld in large part because he was an informant protected by the FBI—even as he allegedly murdered people. It also didn’t hurt that his brother, William Bulger, was the president of the Massachusetts State Senate. When the Justice Department finally moved to arrest Whitey Bulger anyway, he was tipped off by his corrupt contacts in the FBI and the Boston police.
    __
    So: enmeshed with the government and protected by the agency that was supposed to be capturing him. If Haqqani really believes bin Laden was the Whitey Bulger of Pakistan, then the ISI has a lot to answer for.

    You know, diplomats assigned to the US are not typically stupid people.

    I don’t know anything at all about Pakistan’s ambassador, Hussain Haqqani, so I wouldn’t know if he’s just ignorant or trying to send a messaage. But I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if that was the meaning he intended to convey.

    Edited To Add: Of course, that may be his intended meaning and still be stupid, if it’s actually an accusation that the US routinely does the same thing.

    .

  5. 5.

    JGabriel

    Now that I think about it a little further, I bet that is what Haqqani intended: To say “The US does it too” as an excuse for any complicity Pakistan may have had in hiding Bin Laden.

    If so, what a jackass. Expect Pakistan to recall him in short order.

    .

  6. 6.

    Martin

    @JGabriel: Two points:

    1) Just the fact that a guy from fucking Pakistan knows about Whitey Bulger suggests that he knows enough about Whitey Bulger to know exactly what parallel he’s drawing.

    2) The Pakistani civilian government and the military/ISI, who are the ones that appear to be protecting al Qaeda do not exactly work well together. Your followup suggesting that he’s making an excuse is probably off the mark. More likely, he’s sending us a message. So far most of the al Qaeda guys we’ve picked up came out of Pakistan. Now that we’ve got a shitload of new intel, we’re going to be climbing up Pakistans ass for some time to come yet. The only way to get us out is going to be to help us get what we want.

  7. 7.

    JGabriel

    One more thought: If Haqqani knew for a fact that Pakistan helped Bin Laden hide, he’d stay as far away from it as possible. So I doubt he really knows anything. This is likely not an admission, just defensiveness on his part. He found the Bulger story, and thought he could use it to mount a defense.

    Again, if so, it’s still a jackass move.

    .

  8. 8.

    JGabriel

    Martin:

    Your followup suggesting that he’s making an excuse is probably off the mark.

    Possibly. It reads like accusatory defensiveness to me, but maybe he is trying to send a message. I suppose we’ll see if anything comes of it.

    Edited to Add: We seem to agree, though, that it’s not just “Oh, the US can be stupid too”, which is how it initially comes off.

    .

  9. 9.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    @Martin:

    The Pakistani civilian government and the military/ISI, who are the ones that appear to be protecting al Qaeda do not exactly work well together.

    That’s been my train of thought for a while, but lately I’ve been wondering if maybe the fact is that the civilian government is using the military as a convenient excuse. I think the government and the military might have a common interest on this, that is, and that interest is called Pashtunistan.

    Think about it. Pakistan wants to have the Taliban focus to the north and west, not the south and east. AQ doesn’t have a horse in the race. Pakistan tells AQ, “Hey, look, we’ll let you operate out of our country and provide cover IF you help us distract those Pashtuns that straddle the border.”

  10. 10.

    cbear

    Pakistani Ambassador Haqqani: “If Whitey Bulger can live undetected by American police for so long, why can’t Osama bin Laden live undetected by Pakistani authorities?” Haqqani asked.

    I take his point. Maybe somebody in the State Department should ask the Pakistani authorities to be on the lookout for Ayman al-Zawahiri and Stevie “The Rifleman” Flemmi living in sin together in another Abbottabad villa.

  11. 11.

    Martin

    @Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):

    That’s been my train of thought for a while, but lately I’ve been wondering if maybe the fact is that the civilian government isn’t using the military as a convenient excuse.

    I don’t think so. The civilian government cannot be happy that we’re filling their sky with Predators and humping SEAL teams into their major cities without their knowledge. They want us the fuck out. We’re far more destabilizing than al Qaeda can possibly be to serve any goal they might have.

  12. 12.

    Villago Delenda Est

    The analogy breaks down in that Whitey Bulger was just your average gangster, albeit a fairly important one…crime lord of a large American city. But he was not, shall we say, Al Capone or Michael Corelone, or even John Gotti. He was not world infamous. He wasn’t a media star at the level of OBL, wanted dead or alive in 12 systems, with a price so big on his head that every bounty hunter in the galaxy would be looking for him.

  16. 16.

    JGabriel

    @Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):

    Pakistan wants to have the Taliban focus to the north and west, not the south and east. AQ doesn’t have a horse in the race. Pakistan tells AQ, “Hey, look, we’ll let you operate out of our country and provide cover IF you help us distract those Pashtuns that straddle the border.”

    Except that Al Qaeda does have a horse in that race. They’re closely allied with the Taliban, and would like nothing more to have their own allies in charge of Pakistan’s civilian government, and its nukes.

    I doubt that looks like a good idea to the civilian leadership, though it may appeal to some fundamentalist elements in the ISI.

    As for the civilian government wanting to create a Pashtunistan, they already have enough trouble governing the North West Frontier Provinces. Between the NWFP and Kashmir, colonial expansionism into Afghanistan has be pretty low to non-existent on their list of priorities.

    .

  17. 17.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    @JGabriel:

    As for the civilian government wanting to create a Pashtunistan…

    My point is that they DON’T want it. Where the Sindhi-led government doesn’t have much interest in getting the Indian Punjab inside of Pakistan’s borders, it also doesn’t want to lose Baluchistan or parts of Sindh to a Pashtun state. The status quo- as long as the Punjabi-led military isn’t throwing a coup- works for them.

  18. 18.

    JGabriel

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):

    My point is that they DON’T want it. … The status quo — as long as the Punjabi-led military isn’t throwing a coup — works for them.

    Ah. I misunderstood you then. I still think the civilian leadership would find keeping a dagger like Al Qaeda pointed at their own necks — just to maintain a (probably self-maintaining) Pashtun status quo of redirected energies and tribal conflicts — an untenable proposition.

    The ISI, maybe; it’s not their necks. But the civilian leadership? That strikes me as unlikely.

    .

  19. 19.

    bjacques

    You all misunderstood the ambassador. He was hinting that al-Qaeda are wishing they had a Whitey Bulger for the Caliphate.

  20. 20.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    @JGabriel:

    It’s the deal with the Devil- civilian government looks the other way as the ISI gets to use AQ to cross the Indian border from time to time. AQ influences the Taliban to fight in Afghanistan and gets room to operate inside of Pakistan. At least that looks like the deal to me. Everyone gets a little something out of the deal. Or did, anyway.

  22. 22.

    piratedan

    I dunno, I took it at face value, the implication that no government is pristine, we all have our secrets, sometimes left hands are working at cross purposes to right hands. Pakistan has its own issues, its own separatists, its own problem terrorist organizations, maybe they did indeed look the other way while OBL fed them information on their neerdowells and was allowed to stay in place because of that. Sometimes it may not be about us, just sayin’.

  25. 25.

    alwhite

    The guys statement was longer than just this & he went on to say that his country does not have the sophisticated law enforcement infrastructure of the US. He was saying if you guys with all your skill and tools can’t find one guy in 12 years why do you think we should be able to.

    But it has been obvious for a long time that the government of Pakistan is at war with itself. There are forces inside that are fighting each other & maintaining power means not going too far to one side or the other. Thats just the facts of life there. We shouldn’t expect them to be our puppet & have to take what we can get.

    I also find it interesting that we know Muslim governments that let us help them as long as they can claim they knew nothing about it yet that possibility was not mentioned regarding the raid.

    Those guys where there for close to an hour yet the Pakistanis couldn’t get a single plane into the air to check up on them?

  26. 26.

    Kirbster

    I predict that Republicans in the House will suddenly and uncharacteristically develop a deep devotion to “International Law” and use the President’s failure to secure the permission of the Pakistani government for the raid on the bin Laden compound as a basis for impeachment proceedings.

  28. 28.

    Gunner

    The ambassador should be bringing up the name of Eric Rudolf, the American terrorist who evaded police for years with the aid of southern Christianists sympathetic to his beliefs.

  30. 30.

    alwhite

    @Southern Beale:

    Thank goodness I read the link! I was afraid they had accused Gary Condit of killing Chandra Levy – Now THAT was some pre-9/11 America!

  31. 31.

    sixers

    Comparing the two fugitives does indeed make sense. Two countries who had rouge members of law enforcement agencies help a fugitive evade capture. It’s a pretty dead on comparison actually.

  37. 37.

    BettyPageisaBlonde

    Is anybody else noticing that the New York Times is using the word “torture” on its homepage? Isn’t that a shift?

  39. 39.

    gex

    I’ve typically found that most Americans I talk to about this issue have no interest in the Pakistani politics that are also involved. Anyone who suggests that Pakistan should have “just handed him over to us” instead of making us go get him seems naive.

    What I have been telling people is that Pakistan finally got rid of the military leader to get a civilian leader. Leader of a country that isn’t exactly fond of us. They’ve always had a delicate balancing act in helping us and not destabilizing the existing government. And if Taliban sympathizers take over… well, they do have nukes.

    @BettyPageisaBlonde: I’m more surprised that the switch didn’t happen in January 2008.

  40. 40.

    gex

    @Gunner: This. And since he was an anti-abortion, anti-gay warrior, much of America would still provide aid and comfort to this guy.

  41. 41.

    The Swiss Army Knife of Visual Effects

    I think Scocca’s right. I went and read the original article Scocca’s referring to. The ambassador is claiming that Pakistan was not responsible for its failure to find OBL. Inferring that some of Pakistan’s top authorities were hiding him and deliberately misleading the search completely ruins his own argument. More likely that he picked Bulger because 1) of the internationally famous manhunt for him, and 2) Bulger and OBL went on the most wanted list within months of each other, so the manhunts have been going on for nearly the same amount of time. On the surface, the comparison looks pretty good. And this mistake has nothing to do with the ambassador’s intelligence. Most Americans wouldn’t know the ins and outs of Bulger’s sordid story. They know he was a gangster, and that’s about it.

  42. 42.

    Yutsano

    @gex: There is evidence that Rudolph did indeed get at least passive assistance from the locals in the area he was hiding out in. Plus he was eventually caught in the rural South, which is the epitome of gay-hating abortion-stopping Chistianist America, so in a similar fashion he was hiding in less than hostile territory.

  43. 43.

    Paul in KY

    @Yutsano: From what I read, it was apparent he’d either had some help with rations & camp supplies, etc. or he was the kind of woodsman who would make Grizzley Adams seem like a hipster from Soho.

  44. 44.

    different church-lady

    Well, then there’s the additional point that Bulger probably isn’t hiding in the U.S.

    The dude might have an analogy had we found Bin Laden in Somalia or something.

  46. 46.

    gene108

    How many Pakistanis, in Pakistan, did Whitey Bulger kill?

    There are probably mafia bosses in Pakistan being protected by corrupt government officials, at some level, just like White Bulger. We really don’t give shit about the local stuff.

    It’s a bad analogy.

  48. 48.

    different church-lady

    @sixers: Last time he was definitively spotted was in London nine years ago. The odds of him being in the US are very slim.

    The place where the analogy holds up is that Bulger’s contacts in the FBI tipped him off that arrest was coming so he could swoop the scene.

  49. 49.

    Paul in KY

    @gene108: Rudolph was wanted for a crime he bragged about. Grizzley Adams was the first ‘mountain man’ that popped into my head.

    Didn’t you like my analogy?

  51. 51.

    Jager

    @Villago Delenda Est: For all of this to work, Whitey would have to be living down the street from Mayor Tom Menino or have a comfortable condo a couple of blocks from the Boston Police Headquarters. Last I heard he was spotted in London.

  52. 52.

    4jkb4ia

    4 errors leading to 3 unearned runs is NOT MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL. Fortunately this is yesterday’s thread so General Stuck will not show up to gloat.

  53. 53.

    4jkb4ia

    Great. Dan Wheeler comes in and promptly gives up 2 runs. Oki is there to stop the bleeding.

    (I mean, he had nothing. First 3 batters–double, HR, and walk)

  56. 56.

    Steeplejack

    @4jkb4ia:

    I’m still watching. Got home from work about 11:30 and was surprised to see the game still on. Rain delay, I presume.

    I’m off work tomorrow, so, yee-haw, let it rip!

    Steep + some small integer number

  58. 58.

    Steeplejack

    @4jkb4ia:

    And the Red Sox are toast. They have to play tomorrow afternoon, don’t they? Bummer.

    Yep–1:35 p.m. I just checked the schedule.

    I hope the game is on TV. I am off work tomorrow.

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