If Pakistan’s intelligence service continues to plot terrorist attacks with the Taliban in Afghanistan, as the mass of documents released yesterday by Wikileaks allege, who is responsible for covering this up for so many years? The answer, I argue in this morning’s Asia Times Online, is everybody .
This raises the question: Who covered up a scandalous arrangement known to everyone with a casual acquaintance of the situation? The answer is the same as in Agatha Christie’s 1934 mystery about murder on the Orient Express, that is, everybody: former United States president George W Bush and vice president Dick Cheney, current US President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, India, China and Iran. They are all terrified of facing a failed state with nuclear weapons, and prefer a functioning but treacherous one.
As of 9:00 a.m., there was nary a mention of one of the year’s biggest news stories on either National Review or the Commentary magazine website. Perhaps that is because the new documents put as much egg on the face of the previous Republican administration as on the present Democratic one. “What elephant in the parlor?”, sadly, is not a full-credit answer.
