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Thomas Friedman: Knock, knock.....anyone there?

MPS has never been a fan of the much-over rated Thomas Friedman. His politics have been suspect, to say the least, and his commentary often borne out of ignorance. And his writing has been one of singularly beating the American drum, right or wrong.

Maybe his latest column for The New York Times has seen Friedman wake up - at least a tad.

"When one looks across the Arab world today at the stunning spontaneous democracy uprisings, it is impossible to not ask: What are we doing spending $110 billion this year supporting corrupt and unpopular regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are almost identical to the governments we’re applauding the Arab people for overthrowing?"

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"In other words, the Arab peoples have done for free, on their own and for their own reasons, everything that we were paying their regimes to do in the “war on terrorism” but they never did.

And that brings me back to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last October, Transparency International rated the regime of President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan as the second most corrupt in the world after Somalia’s. That is the Afghan regime we will spend more than $110 billion in 2011 to support.

And tell me that Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI, which dominates Pakistani politics, isn’t the twin of Hosni Mubarak’s security service. Pakistan’s military leaders play the same game Mubarak played with us for years. First, they whisper in our ears: “Psst, without us, the radical Islamists will rule. So we may not be perfect, but we’re the only thing standing in the way of the devil.” In reality, though, they are nurturing the devil. The ISI is long alleged to have been fostering anti-Indian radical Muslim groups and masterminding the Afghan Taliban."

What Friedman conveniently overlooks is that the US has been the principal backer of corrupt regimes in the Middle East - the very ones Friedman now applauds as having been overthrown.

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