Refugee resentments are fertile recruitment ground for the Taliban. The best relief efforts conducted at refugee camps are those provided by the outlawed Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a charity front for the terrorist Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). The LeT was responsible for the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, and they can slip in among refugees to replicate this feat in Karachi, Rawalpindi, Islamabad and Lahore.
Interestingly, the US Army included a refugee-induced insurgency scenario during a recent war simulation exercise. The subject though was North Korea, but it is timely and applicable to Af-Pak. [10]
All the Af-Pak variables emerging now are force multipliers for additional terrorism down the line.
This war is un-winnable unless someone tries the unthinkable – extermination. It is a thought I have personally heard from neutral, non-US lips and remains unthinkable unless the "Talibs" pry out a nuke a or two during their current rampage in Pakistan. Anyway, it is an old thought.
Whatever happens, not all is lost.
The Prize is in Dollars
During a private forecast I made earlier in the year, the US dollar was expected to slide beginning June/July. It will be a controlled slide, backed by unconventional fundamentals.
During a Great Recession, it is not the industries, brainpower, fiscal or trade surpluses that decisively chart a nation's future; it is the ability to bring order, to wage a strategic war and seize a strategic lifeline. Global trade and the fiscal health of nations are dependent on the dollar, and any slide has to be in measured degrees.
Enter the US Army, the greatest fundamental component of the US dollar. With such a fighting colossus, a nation can print its way out of a deficit, as they have real people doing real work, fighting and redirecting "strategic traffic" back to their nation.
Russia and China understand and fear this, and complained of the dollar hegemony during the recent G20 summit. No nation can replicate the dollar contradiction. The US has a currency hated but desirable for the foreseeable future, and an army whose boots are stomping new grounds.
The US deficit for the current budget year has now risen to $1.8 trillion, and it is getting worse. The US GDP is 14 trillion. According to some estimates, the US government borrows 50 cents for each dollar spent.
Moreover, never forget this: There is a one quadrillion dollar (one thousand trillion) derivatives bubble floating out there for a day of reckoning. That is only a ballpark figure. Some calculate the figure to be as high as $1.4 quadrillion.
There is no balloon analogy for this one. If the derivatives bubble is squashed in one spot, it will explode all over the planet.
In a highly volatile market, you need real order with real assets, to produce real goods. Only an army can provide the backbone for that. A dollar depreciation of 30 per cent might make US manufacturing viable again in a highly volatile world where production processes can be wrecked by social instabilities.
External chaos does wonders for the US dollar. Safety is sought in the currency and safe investments in the United States itself.
Changing the World?
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