Consistent with the US military’s willful blindness to the Islamic enemy doctrine of jihad, as described elegantly by Major Steven Coughlin (in his 333 pp. 2007/2008 thesis, To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad), security expert Praveen Swami‘s illuminating essay, “God’s soldiers: Pakistan army’s ideology,” reiterates (as I discussed in 2008, here and here) why our feckless “policy” toward Pakistan is delusive, and doomed to failure:
The Pakistan army’s jihadist commitment is not merely a tactical tool to project influence or win legitimacy: it is, instead, the paradigm through which the institution comprehends the world and seeks to shape it. The jihadists the U.S. hopes to bribe and cajole the Pakistan army to abandon are in fact soldiers of the nation the institution seeks to build — a dystopia that dollars, ironically enough, will continue to underwrite.