Sherry Chandler

In response to my Faces in Places post a few days ago, Rosalie O’Leary sends this photograph. Says Rosalie:

We found the Woman of the Woods resting in this old tree stump at Muir Woods Park, CA, on Christmas Day, 2004.

Not much sun comes through the tall redwoods at Muir Woods, but she seemed to radiate her own light. Her discovery made an already very special Christmas Day even more so.

I am off for a three-day poetry-writing retreat with the Green River Writers. Because I don’t have a laptop, posting will be scarce the next few days and I won’t be answering e-mails.

I’ll be back some time Sunday afternoon.

I don’t pretend to have an informed opinion about Pakistan, except that it’s an ally we really can’t afford to lose.

But from the little I’ve read about this latest strongman coup, the U.S. is as usual going about our relations arse backwards.

Take this little factoid from Talking Points Memo:

But the upshot is that the great bulk of the more than $10 billion we’ve given to Pakistan since 9/11 has been in the form of unsupervised and unaudited cash transfers. We cut him [Musharraf] a check and he can do with it whatever he wants. It’s not tied to a specific US Agency or program; it’s just cash to do with as he pleases.

I would take this item to mean that we are not giving aid to Pakistan; we are giving aid to Musharraf.

And then there’s this letter from Shahin M. Cole, a lawyer trained in Pakistan, posted by Juan Cole:

How much of the blame for this crackdown can be laid at the feet of the Bush administration’s unconditional support for the Pakistani military? The events of this week put the lie to the idea of a democratizing Pakistan with an independent judiciary and rule of law. If the US wants to play a fair and honest role in helping Pakistan achieve democracy and reducing the threat of religious extremism, here is what it can do.

The US should be earmarking aid to Pakistan not for military use but for funding and building schools for the millions of poor Pakistani children (some of them still from refugee Afghan families displaced by the US struggle with the Soviet Union in the Cold War). Such schools should stress east-west understanding. That would be one way of keeping children out of fundamentalist-funded madrassas and keeping them from being turned into Taliban.

…The Bush administration has stressed democratization and the rule of law in the Muslim world. If it does not take practical steps toward those ideals in this crisis, America will altogether lose the confidence of the educated Muslim middle classes. If that happens, the ultimate winners may well be the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, there does seem some irony in our war president, the man who loves to dress up like a soldier, telling Mr. Musharraf, in his usual John-Wayne speak,

The United States wants you to have the elections as scheduled and take your uniform off …You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time..

Firedoglake has a take on that statement.