Pakistani troops involved in skirmish with US troops

[ICantSpellDawg]

Its just one of a long line of incidents between the coilition and the Pakitani army / border police /frontier force.
There are no positives about it as each incident has led to less co-operation between the Pakistani government and the coilition and more co-operation between the taliban and elements of the armed forces , plus every stike and incursion has meant more hostility towards the coilition by the local tribes and every government move at working with the coilition has led to increased hostility to the government from the population nationwide .


No these incidents mean that they take away the ball and stop any semblance of being on the same team .

What would you have done? Even Obama has proposed incursions into Waziristan and the rest of the border regions without adequate Pakistani action. If anything, the Bush administration has avoided it for too long.

The reality about the Pakistan/Afghan border is that the regions are ethnically and linguistically identical. Couple this with the fact that the border is about the size of the border between Mexico and the United States and you have a serious strategic problem. I know that since you are Irish you don't have a horse in this race, but NATO is in Afghanistan and nearly everyone on this forum believes that the war there was both legal and necessary. How would you do it differently; just keep fighting the same way in Afghanistan while the border creeps east without us? Or should we be any nicer to the Pakistani government than we have been over the past 25 years?

I said that it could be a good thing because sometimes incursions get people on the ball. Colombia went into Ecuador - who is a quasi enemy - just this year and it almost sparked a war. In the end though, Ecuador was pressured to increase its anti-insurgency action along the common border. We have a long standing and pleasant diplomatic relationship with Pakistan. It's time that we cashed some of that in for firm action on the part of their government in response to these wild accusations that Afghan insurgents are living scot free within their Federal border lands.

It could go both ways, but I'm putting out an alternate scenario to all the talk of "cataclysmic nuclear holocaust" that we have in this thread.