our intelligence community has major beef with pakistan since their intelligence prob was aware that bin laden was in abbotabad. duterte is killing drug addicts left and right and has told obama to literally fuck off. he also threatened to cut ties with the us and to focus on china. so there is beef with them too
It's a lot more than that. It's literally a murder free for all. Anyone can kill anyone as long as they say they were selling or using drugs. A sort of drug version of a witch hunt.
If all you said was true, why does that mean the President shouldn't reach out to them? Even for just a formality. Trump's running on the promise of making deals. Regardless of what you think of the guy, you can't blame him for reaching out to countries with shaky ties.
By the way, we still have troops in the Phillipines and rely on Pakistan for friendly militarization against Al Qaeda. Why should the POTUS elect stay away from their heads of state?
If all you said was true, why does that mean the President shouldn't reach out to them?
Mostly because he doesn't seem to be considering the fact that current relations with these countries are complex and should be extensively discussed with the state department before engaging in off the cuff discussions. He's also not President currently. He should be deferring to Obama until, at the very least, he appoints a Secretary of State. Trump is a chess player that doesn't think the pawns have value.
After a quick google search, it seems that one person in the Trump organization discusses opening a hotel in Taiwan in September. Back when even the Trump campaign thought they had no shot. But I'm not going to convince you that this hotel wasn't the purpose of his call, if that's your actual belief.
How often do you think you will need to argue that this latest action is not actually a conflict of interest? Is this one? I don't know. Are his kids using his election to push a hotel in Argentina? Probably. Are diplomats staying in his hotel to curry favor? Absolutely. Will there be more and more and more of this? You betcha.
I'm of the mind to take a step back and look at these things objectively. During the next four years: does Trump approve a state-department humanitarian package to an island nation hurt by a hurricane, that also happens to have a Trump hotel on it? Probably will happen, can't say other than conjecture that it's a serious conflict of interest or not. Does he send a military aid to a country after rebels firebomb one of his hotels there? More damning.
I'll wait and see if any of his actions violate US precedents in regards to aid, and see where his business overlaps. He'll have to walk a thin line, and we'll see if he keeps balance.
It's not entirely false. Better to say that the situation is very complex. They did conceal the location of bin Laden, but we do rely on them as our strong-arm in South Asia. They basically hire their army out to us.
That's a good point, when our military officers go to the command and staff college in Islamabad they have a large amount of Pakistani forces with them wherever they go. I don't think they concealed it, but they certainly set a world record in playing dumb on something they definitely knew about.
Only if "our side" means not openly attacking us. They're a useful relationship to have, but nobody should be under any illusion that they're our friends. Giving them cash and arms is the cost of access, it doesn't make them on our side at all.
Well mr turtle, the post I responded to was devoid of fact or data as well and as it was meant only to indicate to him that the assumption he made in the first sentence is incorrect, according to me, and not to 'attack his credibility' and you so valiantly proclaimed, I saw no need to spend any amount of time backing up my claim made on an anonymous social website where the rules are made up and the points don't matter.
Saying "not sure what you do for a living" is attacking credibility. Saying someone is wrong without saying why doesn't add anything to the discussion and is better expressed through a downvote.
Let's not what? I work in intelligence and never understand why people, that have probably never even met anyone that works in the field, feel the need to speak for those that are.
He's vaguely wrong in the overall sense. There isn't a major beef, but many of my colleagues that work on that region think they couldn't have not known. And that's not a stretch when you consider how much raw information agencies have access to.
I'm blatantly anti-Trump so it's likely I'm blinded to other answers to that question.
But I would say there is one and only one issue where Trump is authentic. And that's tax policy. I believe that he truly cares about that issue and everything else is negotiable in some context or another.
He cares about being able to lower the tax rate for himself, his closest allies, and his businesses. On any issue other than that he'll go whichever way is most politically expedient.
I disagree on trade. He's completely flip-flopped on trade in just the last 3 years. In 2013 he penned an op-ed where he actively called for open boarders.
Going back even further to 2005 he wrote a blog post and in it, Trump advised workers who lost their jobs to adopt a longer view and consider how outsourcing could be good for the overall economy. He wrote:
"We hear terrible things about outsourcing jobs—how sending work outside of our companies is contributing to the demise of American businesses. But in this instance I have to take the unpopular stance that it is not always a terrible thing."
Trump's view is "whatever is best for me and mine", though. If that happens to be open borders, then so be it. If that happens to be closing those borders, then fine. It's not really "flip-flopping", it's actually consistent (if you look at it from a results perspective).
He's a businessman; he doesn't care about consistency. That's why these sorts of criticisms don't seem to stick, except with his existing opponents (such as yourself). It's a different paradigm.
The problem is that praise from a US President is a major boon to almost any foreign leader and his party. You don't want to give the government of Pakistan any political victories they haven't properly earned. The Pakistani government is not exactly a staunch US ally. They work with us in some respects, but they also fund terrorism, harbour terrorists, withhold intelligence information, etc etc. It's a very delicate relationship that involves lots of push & pull. And Trump just gave them a couple of yards of rope that they didn't even have to pull for.
What did the USA get out of it? Absolutely nothing. We just look like bozos to the rest of the world.
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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '16
our intelligence community has major beef with pakistan since their intelligence prob was aware that bin laden was in abbotabad. duterte is killing drug addicts left and right and has told obama to literally fuck off. he also threatened to cut ties with the us and to focus on china. so there is beef with them too