Updates From Southeast Asia

Recently I've been quite busy with work and as such the frequent posts here have slowed down a bit. For those wondering, yes I'm okay and on top of things, I've just been extremely busy and at the moment Adsense and the small donations I receive from time to time just ain't enough to pay the bills. Remember that your support makes "An American Expat in Southeast Asia" better. Hopefully the day will come when I can afford to dedicate much more time to something that has become not only a labor of love, but one that I consider to be a duty.

I've got several drafts of items to be posted soon and hope to get them up in the near future including the continuation of how Islamic Extremism can be defeated once and for all and how we are, at the moment, heading in the absolute opposite direction in achieving that. A bit cocky sounding on my part you might think. How can someone actually claim to hold the answer on how to defeat Islamic Extremism, but what you will read in the days ahead is how that was actually achieved on a small scale right here. There really is no secret to it and sometimes the answer is right there just waiting to be discovered. Maybe you've noticed the recent absense of people like Adam Yahiye Gadahn. You might be wondering where he is and what happened to him, why his sudden silence, the clues have all been posted here at "An American Expat in Southeast Asia" my friends.

What inspired me to take a break from work and update was the subject of Benazhir Bhutto and Pakistan. The other night I received a call that Bhutto was assassinated. I can't really say that I was shocked or surprised, it was something that was expected, also expected was the blame being placed on Al Qaeda. Interestingly enough at the time I was mulling over how to word a post regarding the recent New York Times article on the billions of US dollars in aid that have been completely wasted in Pakistan. American tax dollars that has been diverted to extremist groups in Pakistan by our "friend" Pervez Musharraf and his pack of Islamist thugs who masquerade themselves as a legitimate government. You might have read the original story here entitled "All Musharraf All The Time" back in June. Unfortunately I don't have the circulation that the New York Times does.

Andrew McCarthy is on the right path when he said that - "Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they’ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto."

What Andrew McCarthy left out is that often in our self-perceived vocation as the torch-bearers of freedom and democracy, we tend to lose sight not only of the limited power of politically engineered change in an Islamic country such as Pakistan, but of that simple truism that no society can ever live outside the parameters of its basic ideology. The foremost condition required for democracy to ever take root in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan or any Islamic country for that matter is the acceptance by all of the sovereignty of the people, a concept that runs contrary to the basic ideology of Islam and effectively denies the fundamental Islamic affirmation of the sovereignty of God.

---