Let’s access some empirical method and policy on this: I believe U.S. officials know that when Pakistan received domestic and military aid funds, those moneys are then managed by Pakistanis, and they may go where they’re supposed to go, or they may go where they shouldn’t. Is that aspect of Pakistani corruption America’s problem?

The CIA is one of a number of the world’s shadowy intelligence compartments — as long as the lingo “Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility” is in use, I’m inclined to use “compartment” too (and, for the record, I ain’t paid by nobody!). It has therefore been easy for the injudicious and paranoid to cite the “usual suspects” — but not from the side intended in the film _Casablanca_ — without having to resort to verifiable records or reports.

Asif Irfan — Americans are not against Pakistan, and by extension, the CIA, State Department, Department of Defense, the whole shebang, isn’t “against” Pakistan either. To place the “locus of control” in the creation and myth of a “Great Satan” may comfort the fearful, but such comprises a false comfort. The truth is people like me, truly just another human being on the planet, speaking English, and hoping to prove more decently so than not over a lifetime, to partner with and provide Pakistan, as need, if needed, with access or insight into every kind of development or ecological knowledge available. We want to help with good things — health, longevity, quality of life, security — not bad ones.

At 9:29, Pakistan becomes an aggressor against all others.

My rabbi notes, “Some people are in a hurry to get to the end of the story.” He was referring to apocalypse. I don’t want to get there? Do you? Does the CIA want to get there?

How about the FSB?

MI5?

Ah, but there’s another to include in this question: ISI?

If you were to feel the energy-developed wealth of the privileged states of the Arabian Peninsula was contributing to mischief in Pakistan at at least sub-state levels — private money, also poppy money, also _diverted_ money — to the literal immediate expression of Islam in the modern world, including the imposition of 9:29 on all others, I might agree with you.

I may also agree that western military hardware manufacturing interests may have interest in continuous conflict, but those especially know they lose if lobbying — or working in underhanded ways — to perpetuate conflicts. The American Fourth Estate — my fellow journalists — would have a field day, and the American people would shut them down by way of elections.

Where else in the world — in cyberspace too — can one have a conversation like the one implied by the above posted fast chatyping?

No one but their overseers or owners know what state secret services may be up to, but that is no cause to fill in the gaps with emotionally-driven suspicions and, worse, assumptions!

At the moment (well, around the moment, lol), I am reading The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB by Andrei Soldatav and Irina Borogan.

Thank God for highest-integrity investigative journalism and the immensely nervy people who work at it!

In any given nation state, constituents may not need nor wish to know operations undertaken on their behalf, but the same have every need to know — and the moral requirement to know — the state policies driving operations.  Without that knowledge, or less than true knowledge, their freedom comes to an end, leaving only ruthless narcissists to fight about who might be prettier in God’s eyes, even if all such may be as unclothed as the famous fairy tale emperor and equally as ugly.

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