Pakistan may join Saudi led coalition in Yemen fight

Bloomberg:
Senior Pakistan leaders will arrive in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif weighs how much support to provide the kingdom in its battle against Shiite rebels in Yemen.

“Pakistan holds Saudi Arabia in very high esteem and considers the security of the holy land of utmost importance,” Sharif’s office said in a statement on Tuesday. “Any violation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Saudi Arabia would evoke a strong reaction from Pakistan.”

Sharif chaired a ministerial meeting on Tuesday and sought an early evacuation of any Pakistanis in Yemen, according to the statement. Opposition leaders have warned that taking sides could fan sectarian violence in a nation that’s home to the most Shiite Muslims outside of Iran.
...

“If Pakistan sends its troops to Yemen, or Pakistan gets involved in the Yemen conflict, it would prove to be a divisive development within Pakistan’s domestic context,” Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a Lahore-based analyst who used to teach at Columbia University in New York, said by phone. “Secondly, relations with Iran will get strained.”
...
Pakistan's internal politics may make it difficult to take overt action in Yemen.  As for Iran, I don't think their relations are all that good in the first place and I would not be surprised if the Iranians have Pakistan in their sites for their new Shia empire.  Finding a way to help defeat the religious bigots in charge of Iran would be a plus for the region and the world.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more