The Taliban Surge in Pakistan: John Batchelor’s Hot Topic Tonight, with Larry Johnson
By SusanUnPC on April 26, 2009 at 12:05 AM in AfPak Border, John Batchelor, Larry Johnson, Open Thread, Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Southwest Asia, Taliban
LARRY JOHNSON’s SEGMENT CONCLUDED . TUNE IN NEXT SUNDAY, SAME TIME, SAME STATION, SAME LINK
O P E N T H R E A D T O O
John Batchelor’s show begins at 10 p.m. ET. Then, at 10:30 p.m. ET, DON’T MISS LARRY JOHNSON TONIGHT on the Batchelor show, via KFI 640 AM. [CLICK on this map to see it full-size. The map is from Bill Roggio's Long War Journal. Roggio is a guest with Larry Johnson tonight.] 
Check out the full slate of guests and topics tonight. John Batchelor’s KFI show begins at 7:00 p.m., so tune in early. Here are the topics and fellow guests during Larry’s appearance:
If this is your first time listening, you’ll want to visit the site early in case you need to download an easily installed program to hear the show.
HERE is the full line-up of guests and topics tonight on KFI, from beginning to the program’s conclusion:
705P Pacific Time: Tim Starks, Congressional Quarterly, re the Obama adminsitration release of the Torture Memos and the Byzantine debate between the Hil and the White House and the GOP.
920P: Joseph Sternberg, Asia Wall Street Journal, re Chinese official warns US on protectionism A top adviser to the Chinese government warned the US that a proposed border tax on carbon sensitive materials ’smells of protectionism’ and could spark retaliation from developing countries
705P Eastern Time: Jon Hilsenrath, Wall Street Journal, re Ben Bernanke became Federal Reserve chairman intent on making the central bank less personality-driven than it was under Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker. But as he confronts an economic crisis that has pushed the Fed to shatter precedent and lend trillions of dollars, Mr. Bernanke is waging a public-relations offensive that casts him in the starring role. Bernanke PR Push Rewrites Fed Script
820P: Roundtable on North Korea continues, re the United NAtions Security Council, re Beijing refuses to agree to new sanctions, re the farility of the North Korea regime.
705P Pacific Time: Nicholas Casey, Wall Street Journal, re next month, shipping giant AP Moeller-Maersk will make a move that was unlikely ten years back. A line of 6000 container ships that now goes to Southern California will go instead dock at Seattle. Why?
920P: Joseph Sternberg, Asia Wall Street Journal, re Vietnam and the Obama administration, re Vietnam and the worldwide downturn in trade.
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wow..Larry.this is going to be a good one..
The Taliban are not much a threat to Pakistan. The rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, and with the exception of some northern hardscrabble areas, I can’t see any evidence that the vast majority of them has the slightest interest in Talibanism. Most are religious traditionalists, Sufis, Shiites, Sufi-Shiites, or urban modernists. At the federal level, they mainly voted in February 2008 for the Pakistan People’s Party or the Muslim League, neither of them fundamentalist. The issue that excercised them most powerfully recently was the need to reinstate the civilian Supreme Court justices dismissed by a military dictatorship, who preside over a largely secular legal system. It is not clear where the Taliban would get its base of support to rule a country as big and secular as Pakistan.
Opinion polling shows that even before the rounds of violence of the past two years, most Pakistanis rejected Muslim radicalism and violence. The stock of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda plummeted after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
The Pakistani Taliban amount to a few thousand fighters who lack tanks, armored vehicles, and an air force.
The Pakistani military is the world’s sixth largest, with 550,000 active duty troops and is well equipped and well-trained. It in the past has acquitted itself well against India, a country ten times Pakistan’s size population-wise. It is the backbone of the country, and has excellent command and control, never having suffered an internal mutiny of any significance.
O.K. but has Pakistan ever prepared in recent times for an enemy that was not India? The border dispute style of fighting by shooting mortars back and forth with India in largely uninhabited areas seems to be quite different from the guerrilla style of fighting with the Taliban which is quickly moving to more highly populated areas. Put this in “street” terms, how do you identify a gang member when everybody wears the same gang uniform? Especially when they have to wear the uniform including the full beard? If Pakistan was ready for this, we wouldn’t be talking about it.
[...] Roggio is a frequent guest on John Batchelor’s program. Check our site on Sundays for promos of the show, and Larry Johnson’s regular [...]