Professor Alam has a piece in Counterpunch about the recent thaw in Pakistan-Israel ties. He believes that President Musharraf’s prime concern is “regime salvation,” not Pakistan’s national interest.

Only the most faithful of President Musharraf’s toadies would disagree.

But when Prof. Alam starts recounting Pakistan’s losses from its role as America’s ally in the “war on terror,” he is on less firm ground:

Pakistan surrendered its territorial sovereignty to the US, handing over Pakistan’s airspace and land bases to be used in a war against a friendly neighbor, Afghanistan. As a result, Pakistan lost the ’strategic depth’ it had created in Afghanistan ­ though, not with the best means ­ by handing over Afghanistan to its strategic adversaries, the Northern Alliance and India. On its eastern border, Pakistan stopped supporting the resistance in Kashmir.

Unbelievable. An enlightened academic like Professor Alam is actually legitimizing the Pakistani military’s pipe-dream of “strategic depth?” Is clamping down on ultra-rightwing terrorist outfits like LeT and HuM considered stopping support for the “resistance in Kashmir”?
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