Cutting Military Aid to Pakistan Is a Good Start, but It’s Not Enough

Earlier this month, the White House announced a decision to suspend all military aid to Pakistan—such aid has amounted to billions of dollars—for its active support for the Taliban and affiliates of al-Qaeda. The editors of the Weekly Standard applaud the decision:

Pakistan zealously backs our enemies even as it takes our money. . . . Pakistan supplies the Taliban with arms and with territory for training camps. We know this because Taliban commanders have freely said so. Pakistan arms the al-Qaeda-affiliated Haqqani network, responsible for many deadly attacks in Afghanistan. Although the Haqqani headquarters in Waziristan [an area of Pakistan that borders on Afghanistan] is well known, and although the Pakistani military has conducted antiterrorist operations there many times, the group remains unmolested. . . .

Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for appalling terrorist attacks in both India and Afghanistan, openly operates recruitment centers throughout Pakistan. It was Lashkar-e-Taiba that carried out the 2008 suicide attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people over the course of three days, [including a Chabad rabbi and his pregnant wife]. As for al-Qaeda itself, it’s no coincidence that Osama bin Laden’s compound was in Abbottabad—the home of Pakistan’s military academy. . . .

But withholding money, however sensible, isn’t enough. We will have to impose other and more severe penalties. This begins with naming and sanctioning Pakistani government officials and entities who support jihadist groups. Depending on the behavior of the Pakistani government, it might include a more fundamental change: formally designating Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism. . . .

Such a step might lead Pakistan to deny the United States use of its territory for Afghan operations, which will require our forces to use the Russian-influenced territories to the north as bases of operation. But the region will not cease to be the globe’s jihadism nerve center until Pakistan ceases to see [jihadism] as a tool of the state. Just as our weakness and naïveté encouraged the country flagrantly to disregard American interests in the first place, a progressively tougher stance toward Pakistan’s terrorism backers will produce geopolitical benefits elsewhere, We may not be able to pry Pakistan from its paranoid dependency on jihadism, but we don’t have to fund it, either.

Read more at Weekly Standard

More about: Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Pakistan, Politics & Current Affairs, U.S. Foreign policy, War on Terror

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society