The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    jollyroger's picture

    Pashtuns, no jail yet built can hold'em (their cousins are the guards...)

    By jollyroger on Mon, 04/16/2012 - 12:27am |

    We are bemused, not for the first time, by an organized jailbreak that this weekend turned 400 Pakistani Taliban loose onto the streets.

     

    Probably the biggest fish to slip back into the stream was already under death sentence for attempting to assassinate Mussharaf.

     

    Without dwelling overlong on the individual stories, we may profitably wonder how it can be that Af/Pak jails are so porous

     

    I can only hope that if I am ever in the slam, it has similar administration--although several of my cousins might opt to prevent rather than facilitate my escape.

     

    The underlying flaw in the penal system under review, like the underlying flaw in the whole Af/Pak adventure, is that the Pashtuns are all cousins--all *41 million of them.

     

    That's why all their names (think, eg.,,Karzai) end in  "ai".

     

    When the Brits ran ot of conquering zeal half-way into Pashtunistan, about where the Hindu Death is (Hindu Kush...), they drew one of their customary lines on a map, and carried on.

     

    Until the whole enterprise fell apart (literally, with partition) in 1947.

     

    The Pashtuns are not about to be their own jailors--indeed, the  Afghan National Army on which we have pinned our current hopes for graceful exit (cf, ungraceful exit) from this briar patch, is mostly ethnic Tajiks (like Ahmad Shah Massoud) who are viewed as "foreigners" by the Pashtuns on the northern side of the Durand Line.

     

    Bottom line: Why go out on the lake, if you are going to catch-and-release.

     

    Big fish, little fish, it's all the same.

     

    No jail built can hold'em.

    *"The Pashtuns are the world's largest (patriarchal) segmentary lineage ethnic group. According to Ethnologue, the total population of the group is estimated to be around 50 million"

    Comments

    Why is that the west refuse to accept that their are people in that region that simply cannot stand one another for there own reasons.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 04/16/2012 - 1:05am

    Well, yes, yes there are.

    But we can unite them in righteous hatred of us, given enough contact.

    Surely, this is some kind of social engineering efficacy, if not exactly success...


    by jollyroger on Mon, 04/16/2012 - 1:37am

     

    I have been watching and listening to segments from these TED conferences.

    Great lines can be discerned from these videos.

    One line had to do with Buddhists who were in the fishing trade.

    Now a good Buddhist is not supposed to murder living things any more than a 'good' Muslim is supposed to drink of the fermented grape.

    So the fisherman's excuse is that he is saving the aquatic animal from drowning. hahahah


    by Richard Day on Mon, 04/16/2012 - 1:11am

    Those TED conferences are the shizzle...I'm waiting for my invitiation, which has been consistently lost in the mail now for several years....


    by jollyroger on Mon, 04/16/2012 - 1:39am

    Ah Jolly....

    You have to pay 6 grand to become a part of the 'movement' (?) or whatever.

    So just send your check to me, payable to Richard Day at my email address and I shall see what I can do.

    haahahahah


    by Richard Day on Mon, 04/16/2012 - 2:05am

    why, certainlyl

    I would gladly pay you 6000 dollars tuesday for a conference today...


    by jollyroger on Mon, 04/16/2012 - 2:24am

    serendipitously, i just stumbled on a TED app for my phone, and I think I just downloaded all the videos of all the conferences.

    No more boring subway rides...


    by jollyroger on Mon, 04/16/2012 - 2:52am