RUTHFULLY YOURS

Oct 3 Written by: Diana West
Sunday, October 03, 2010 4:39 PM 

In January 2009. Adm. Mike Mullen — he who failed to present and then sabotaged a non-COIN Afghan war plan for the POTUS, says Woodward — wrote that our problem in Afghanistan (after seven years of American sacifice to ward off Taliban depredations against “the people”) is that the US hadn’t yet won Afghan trust.

That was idiotic then (here’s why) and it’s idiotic now as Mullen applies his trust plan to Pakistan, where the “moderate” government is blocking the NATO supply trucks the “extremists” are burning.

Admiral Mullen, who has visited Pakistan 20 times since taking the top military post in 2007, said the United States had been working to rebuild Pakistani trust. How that’s resolved, he said, would go a long way towards shaping the future US-Pakistani relationship.

“We left them in a dark hole from about 1990 to 2002, and they don’t trust us,” he said. “We are trying to rebuild that trust. And it’s basically coming, but you don’t rebuild it overnight.”

Maybe you don’t “rebuild” it ever.  And maybe. just maybe, a good rule of thumb would be to nix vital supply lines through countries whose army motto is, like Pakistan’s, “Faith, Piety and Jihad in the Path of Allah.”