Obama’s inexperience deadly in South Asia

Kolkata, India. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is still congratulating the Pakistani government for “resolving its crisis,” by which she means an internal political spat; the real crisis is only getting worse. The Taliban continues its march through Pakistan, imposing Sharia law and persecuting non-Muslims as it does, while President Barack Obama continues to happily search for the “moderate Taliban” among them. And that’s not all.

Yesterday, police here foiled an attempted terrorist bombing by a former member of the Pakistani Rangers paramilitary force. According to Kolkata police and the Indian Border Security Force (BSF), Shahbaz Ismail, flew from Karachi, Pakistan northwest of India to the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka, which borders the Indian state of West Bengal that has Kolkata as its capital. He slipped across the border near Murshidabad not far from this sprawling metropolitan area, the world’s 14th largest. The BSF got a tip about Ismail and alerted the Kolkata police. “We found out that [Ismail] would go to Fairlie Place to buy a rail ticket,” a police spokesman said. Read more