Essentially, then, you want to bribe the people of Pakistan to keep them from sympathizing with and supporting the terrorists. How naive. This is precisely the same argument that has been used to justify the $2 billion in aid we give Egypt every year. Yet, the Egyptian people still despise us.

Prior to 9/11, we were sending hundreds of millions of dollars annually to Afghanistan. Yet, the Afghan people did nothing to stop the Taliban from helping al Qaeda carry out 9/11.

We send millions annually to Jordon, Pakistan, Liberia and Turkey. Yet, we are almost universally hated by those populations.

I could continue with many examples. Suffice it to say that America has been flooding the world with the taxpayer's money and aid for decades. There is not the slightest evidence that it has bought us any goodwill anywhere. I, for one, am sick of seeing my money poured into these sewers of corruption only to have the people living there spit in our faces every chance they get.

I know what you will say: "But we don't send enough". What you fail to grasp is that there will never be enough. You cannot purchase respect.

you want to bribe the people of Pakistan to keep them from sympathizing with and supporting the terrorists

I have to agree. India made some heroic efforts to help the people of Pakistan after the earthquake. This was the right thing to do, just on a human-to-human level, and we should always help out as much as we can, but we also have to realize that, on a pragmatic level, NGO aid will never 'work' to stop Islamist state-sponsored terrorism. It never has worked.

Bribes won't work either because the terrorists do not need to win the locals' hearts and minds to do their jobs.

The terrorists don't require the support of the local people - as you said, they thrive on the money sent by the Wahhabists/Salafists in the Gulf. They've won the hearts and minds of the Wahhabists/Salafists because they share their goals, a caliphate under sharia law.

The terrorists win the cooperation of the local people using the same tactics they use to win the cooperation of the Western press and the Left - they terrorize them and threaten them while simultaneously offfering them the chance to profit from their acts. If we want to understand the power the terrorists have over the locals, we should study the power they have over the left and the press. Pure terror & greed trumps a few random bribes every time.

Bribery is the last resort of the incompetent. The smart thing to do is to sabotage the culture. The mainstream media and the entertainment industry is coddling the muslim terrorists. Stupid fools. They should be portraying muslim terrorists as totally unsympathetic characters, worthy of contempt and universally despised. Instead of tip-toeing around muslim countries with bribes and faux respect, the US should be swamping the countries with cultural imperialism and superiority. The few losers who are pushed toward islamism by this approach will be reviled by the majority who choose to join the world at large. You want to isolate the islamists as a despised minority, not make them look like the victors who force the west to respect islamist culture.

I'm wondering how you conclude that LeT is "salafist" rather than "Deobandi" inspired?

The Deobandis have been active--both politically and militantly--in seek to expell perceived persecuters of their form of Islam since at least the 19th C. These latest attacks are well within the norm for LeT as well as their Taleban kin.

Michael Smith:

Bribery? No. But it's naive at best to think that not trying to match the LeT's aid to the quake victims isn't going to have real-world consequences as far as how many people they're able to recruit and how quickly they can rebuild. If we don't like the LeT (and I certainly don't) then we have to be willing to compete with them for the hearts and minds of the local population.

The Egypt analogy is flawed because that money goes to the government, how much of it do you think is seen by the general population? Same goes for all the cash we send to the other countries you listed. In each case, that cash has gone to the government and has generally bought cooperation on a state to state basis, but very little of it has ended up in the hands of the general public ... with the entirely predictable results.

mary:

NGO cash alone isn't going to stop terrorism, but for all the cash being sent in by the Golden Chain and the Gulf state donors, the Bad Guys still need somebody to do all their grunt work. What do you thinks going to happen to the thousands of Pakistanis now left homeless or orphaned who are going to be depend on the LeT and similar groups to support them if other aid organizations don't start seriously competing with them? They couldn't ask for a better recruiting poster.

John Burgess:

The LeT is Salafist, which enables it to go global, whereas the Deobandist knock-off is a South Asian phenomenon. That's why it's much, much easier for the LeT to go international and get support from the Gulf states than its various competitors.

What do you thinks going to happen to the thousands of Pakistanis now left homeless or orphaned who are going to be depend on the LeT and similar groups to support them if other aid organizations don't start seriously competing with them? They couldn't ask for a better recruiting poster.

The money we send through NGOs is rarely seen by the general population. Before 9/11, we sent millions to Afghanistan. Various warlords stole the money, and kept the food for themselves. Is there any reason at all to believe that the same thing wouldn't happen in Pakistan?

Lots of people joined the Taliban because they had few other choices; the Taliban appeared to be powerful, the Taliban took their side in tribal conflicts and they had lots of Gulf state money. Our bribes wouldn't turn people against their tribe, and our bribes didn't offer real financial/political opportunities. People stopped joining the Taliban after we decimated them.

We send millions to the Palestinian Authority, and what is the result of that? The money buys us nothing and we keep sending more. The Australians made a heroic effort to help the Indonesians after the Tsunami. That was followed by a second terrorist attack in Bali.

We need to help out in emergency situations because its the right thing to do, but every example we see proves that we do not win hearts and minds by doing so. The hearts-and-minds theory sounds really nice, but it just doesn't apply to Islamist expansionism/terrorism. It's been proven wrong so many times, we have to assume that it's not going to work. We stick our hands in the fire, say OW, then we do it again, and again, and again. I wonder how many times we have to burn ourselves?

mary:

I'm recommending that the US send in direct aid intervention, not give money to governments. These "dual use" charities and social service wings that all of these terrorist groups provide are going to exist up and until somebody comes up with a replacement for them.

Before 9/11, the US wasn't giving aid money to Afghanistan with the intent of turning the people against the Taliban, it simply wasn't an issue on our radar. The problems inherent in giving money to groups like the Palestinian Authority are precisely why I recommend going directly to the people rather than to a government.

As for the idea that the Australian (and American) aid to Indonesia after the tsunami was payed back with the second Bali bombing, I think that's a little harsh. Another way to look at it was that it was paid back with a partial resolution to the Aceh insurgency. It also wasn't the Indonesian government that attacked or was complicit in attacking the Australians in Bali the second time around, they got hit just as bad if not worse than the Australians were in terms of dead citizens and lost revenues. Moreover, if you look at some of the surveys that have been done in Indonesia since the tsunami you'll see that bin Laden and al-Qaeda have far less support in Indonesia than they did beforehand and while I think it's mistake to apply all of that drop in support to the tsunami aid, I don't think it particularly hurt either.

Attacking unarmed aid workers, stealing food meant for the starving is how Islamists fight their wars. It's how they fought in Afghanistan, it's how they're fighting in the Sudan, it's how they fight in Iraq, Israel and and it's how they fought in Somalia. If terrorists steal the food, the UN, NGOs and the press blame us. If we don't send the food, they blame us. For the terrorists, it's a win/win situation.

if you look at some of the surveys that have been done in Indonesia since the tsunami you'll see that bin Laden and al-Qaeda have far less support in Indonesia than they did beforehand and while I think it's mistake to apply all of that drop in support to the tsunami aid

Popular support may have gone down - and that did not result in a drop in terrorism. Which is what I said. Terrorists don't need to win local hearts and minds to carry out attacks. If we win local hearts and minds, terror will still continue.

On the other hand, when we wipe out terrorist groups like the Taliban, terror does stop.

I'm completely in favor of being nice to people and helping out in an emergency, but it's not going to have a real effect on terrorist attacks. It never has.

The bombs were timed when muslims would be indoors breaking their Ramzan fast and only non-muslims would be out shopping

http://www.dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?main_variable=front%5Fpage&file_name=story3%2Etxt&counter_img=3?headline=Timing~of~the~blasts~may~hold~the~key

"Popular support may have gone down - and that did not result in a drop in terrorism. Which is what I said. Terrorists don't need to win local hearts and minds to carry out attacks. If we win local hearts and minds, terror will still continue. "

In the long run terrorists cant continue to recruit, finance etc, without hearts and minds support of at least part of the population - and local govts are more likely to get tough when the terrorists have alienated the public. Much of this of course is long term.

In the long run terrorists cant continue to recruit, finance etc, without hearts and minds support of at least part of the population - and local govts are more likely to get tough when the terrorists have alienated the public. Much of this of course is long term.

We've been trying soft diplomacy and hearts-and-minds tactics with our allies the Saudis for a long time. It's still not working.

Being nice to the general muslim population is a great thing, but often, our hearts-and-minds policy cripples us in our dealings with genuine terrorists. We're so frightened that we'll offend people, we're afraid to confront the people who are financing and arranging the actual killing. We're also wasting a lot of money on bribes.

Hi,

This is an interesting dicussion. I am Indian, and would like to add my two cents..

While mentioning aid, there are a few things that bear mention:

Aid is absolutely essential for a state like pakistan. This can be in the form of cash or goods, or preferably in the form of trade conecessions, such as increasing import of Pakistani textiles, etc. Without aid, you have more unemployment, and more people joining madrassas to learn the Quaran by rote and little else.

However, having said that, I strongly feel that aid is totally useless when you dont have a democratic goverment in place. The military regime including Musharraf are a bunch of thugs, and are hand-in-glove with the islamist extremists. As long as the regime exists the aid will never be put to any good use, and otoh might be used to finance further terrorism against India, Afghanistan and the West.

So you need first, regime change, then aid.

The other thing that is overlooked by many in the west, is the ammount of aid coming in from Wahabi oil rich states. That aid far outstrips anything given by the west, and directly reaches its target: radical Islamic organizations in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where the Wahabis can carry out their social experiments in militant Islam, while claiming to be great and stable allies in the WOT. Any Al-Queda funds that were frozen is small change compared to what is available to terrorist organizations from the wealthy oil sheiks. And for the general public, that is the aid that really gets seen, as evidenced by the all-round praise from the quake affected in POK for the Jamat-Ud-Dawa (another name for the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba) which has had a free run of the countryside, and apparently has more resources than the local government.

The blasts in Delhi

Just want to add that Musharaff and other assorted army officers occupying posts of government have been all over the media begging for money, and saying that the world has not done enough etc, at the same time you see media stories from leftists pushing the idea that it would hurt the west and further terrorism if enough aid was not provided by them(i.e pay up or we will send out more terrorists).

At the same time:
Pakistan has just signed a deal with Ericsson and SAAB to buy a 1 Billion $ Airborne Surveillance system.
Pakistan has made a public statement in the last week that there was no change in their plans to buy 80 F-16s for between 3-5 B$.
The Pakistani military government has released a very measly ammount as official quake relief.

It goes to underscore the point i made above about the aid being useless or perhaps dangerous while the current regime continues.

Shortly after the Christmas tsunami I happened to get into a panel discussion with the ambassador of Thailand, who was pushing very hard for aid in the form of direct deposits into the Thai account (Wachovia Bank), which I would be very interested to know about in retrospect. It didn't look to me like the Thai gov't was all that large a factor in assistance to the coastal areas and its people, but I never have seen figures.

It was commented on several times that the Pakistani army was sitting in place, not attempting to get aid into the areas hit hardest by earthquake. It looks like using the devastation as a large fundraising tool may be ultimately cynical.

It happens for cool contries like India.

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