An update to last month’s decision by a school board in Mesquite, Texas to impose an in-school suspension on a four-year-old boy for the heinous crime of having long hair. You can always count on bureaucrats, especially public school bureaucrats, to stick to a dumb policy no matter how much the evidence mounts that it’s a dumb policy. True to form, the educational bureaucrats in Texas have offered a “compromise” to the parents of young Taylor Pugh, the miscreant who insists on maintaining a long hair style. They can braid his hair–as long as the braids don’t come past his ears.
How a boy with braids is less of a “distraction” in the classroom (the official justification for the suspension) than a boy with long hair, I will leave it up to the Texas hair police to explain. If this is the best that so-called educators can do with their time, I know a way that the hard-pressed Texas state budget could save some money. Eliminate those positions and divert back to the state treasury whatever funds are used to pay for them.
Repeat after me: We are not the Taliban. We should not try to dictate hair styles.
The situation in Pakistan is becoming increasingly ugly. Taliban forces and their Al Qaeda allies have gained control over significant chunks of Pakistan along that country’s border with Afghanistan. The feckless government in Islamabad, after unsuccessfully attempting an appeasement policy, has now apparently reversed course and is confronting the militants with a major military offensive. The bottom line is that Pakistan is an extremely fragile country with a growing radical Islamic insurgency. At the very least, those developments complicate America’s already beleaguered mission next door in Afghanistan, where the Obama administration is beefing-up the U.S. military presence. And we need to ponder a possible worst-case scenario: Pakistan completely unraveling and the militants getting control of that country’s nuclear arsenal. While the risk of Pakistan becoming the South Asian version of Somalia is still relatively remote, that possibility cannot be ruled out.
My colleague Malou Innocent recently published an excellent study on this extremely complicated situation. She spent several weeks last year in Pakistan as part of her research, and her analysis is the best relatively short treatment I’ve seen of this crucial and difficult issue.
I never agreed with President Bush’s stark demand regarding the war against radical Islamic terrorism that “either you’re for us or you’re against us.” It seemed entirely reasonable to me that nations that had no dispute with the Muslim world might not want to get involved in that conflict. At the same time, though, it is not acceptable for foreign governments to pretend to be America’s allies and then knife us in the back when convenient. Our so-called ally Pakistan has done that before, and now has apparently done it again. Back in late 2001, there was evidence that Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, helped Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters escape from U.S. forces in Afghanistan who were closing in on them.
Just this past week, U.S. intelligence agencies uncovered evidence that ISI operatives were again aiding the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Washington should make it clear to Islamabad that the time is long overdue to clean out terrorist sympathizers from the military and the ISI. If that doesn’t happen, we then know that Pakistan is an adversary, not an ally, and we should develop our policies accordingly.
The irony is that while U.S. leaders focused on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Revolutionary Iran as the principal sources of trouble for genuine American security interests, the greatest damage has been done by two supposed allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis funded anti-American schools around the world, and Pakistan not only helped put the Taliban in power in Afghanistan (and has periodically assisted it ever since), but was probably complicit in scientist A. Q. Khan’s nuclear proliferation activities to North Korea and other adversaries of the United States.
With “friends” like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, America doesn’t need any enemies.