Who is this broad?

Hillary Clinton and her faithful buttboys on the ground in Pakistan,
or some other forsaken hell-hole over there

When I saw this photo, my first reaction is, who is this bimbo? It's supposed be another on those tedious pieces about Hillary Clinton upbraiding our "allies" like Pakistan for not carrying out the prime objective assiduously enough. She does look like a bureaucratic functionary, but Hillary? C'mon, must be the wrong ID...

On the other hand, what difference does it make? What difference does Hillary's trip make? The same old same old, with her doing a victory dance in Libya, giving a pep talk to Hamid Karzai in Kabul, and finally, telling the Pakistanis that they aren't doing enough to justify all the money we send 'em:

Clinton Calls for Pakistani Crackdown - WSJ.com: "U.S. and Afghan officials have long contended that Pakistan's powerful military spy service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, has supported the Taliban leadership, which is based in the Pakistani city of Quetta, and the Haqqani network, which is based in the Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan.
The Haqqanis, these officials say, are responsible for a series of recent high-profile attacks in Kabul, including an assault on the U.S. Embassy."

Whoopie shit! Ain't it a war or something?

Funny how quickly the US foreign policy establishment forgets how much their clients have done for them. When it was time to give the Soviets a black eye in Afghanistan, the Pakis were right there, funneling weapons in and bringing the heroin out to help pay for the CIA's secret war. And when it was time for the agency to blow dodge, it was our friends in Islamabad who hooked us up with the Taliban, as a fiercely anti-modern, fundamentalist movement we could count on to keep Afghanistan in the dark ages.

It wasn't the Pakis fault that times changed, and the US needed a new boogey man to help it fend off any notions of a peace dividend after the calamitous and unforeseen disintegration of the old reliable Soviet adversary.

Anyway, Hillary is over there dressing down the wavering friends whose support we so desperately need, though we have little to offer them but a few billion dollars in payoffs to the military and politicians. Your money just doesn't buy what it used to any more -- have you noticed?

Most interesting to those who pay attention to such things is the ascension of the Haqqani network as a new object of the US' wrath. Once the Seal Team Six massacre of Osama bin Laden, there was a little less cachet to the campaign against al-Qaeda. With the head guy of the evil terrorist network sleeping with the fishes, the was a void in the Hall of Calumny which was in urgent need of having a new enemy enshrined, so that in the everlasting crusade against killers of innocent life, the US military security establishment would not be bereft of drone targets.

From out of nowhere, we've now witnessed the ascension to the pinnacle of enmity of this heretofore anonymous league of bad guys and evildoers. In order to publicly proclaim the seriousness of the threat and the bonafide badness of the new foe, Hillary was dispatched to Pakistan to show the crazy muslims that SHE MEANS BUSINESS!.

That's all you know, and all you need to know. Let the hostilities begin!