Gyrfalcon: RoyFokker'sGhost: casual disregard: Lunaville: The collected whole: China and India saber-rattling (for what cause? to what end?); China's' communist paper proving to be a capitalist success: it all makes me think I may as well take up drinking.

They've had wars in recent history. They still have a major border dispute. Apparently all of Asia is basically a ton of unresolved borders.

Mostly courtesy of the British Empire pullout, where the Brits established borders that ignored tribal, ethnic, and religious lines as a final 'Fark you! We didn't want to be here anyways!'

But it's all America's fault, for some reason....

Because we added to the instability of the region by setting up Musharif in Pakistan and keeping him in power and financing the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan to fight the Commies.

America's policy in the Middle East and Central Asia since the mid-60's has been 'support whatever homicidal maniac is in charge as long as they're anti communist and give us a price break on oil if they have any.'

Suadi Arabia: keeping the House of Saud in power despite the Saud's extremist religious views and police state tactics that the Gestapo could take notes from.
Iraq: Keeping Saddam Hussien in power despite well-documented and well-known use of chemical weapons testing on ethnic Kurds from the 1980's onward
Iran: Financing the overthrow of an elected socialist government in order to put the Shaw in power, financing the Shaw's pretty brutal regime and even giving him an actual US Treasury printing press because gotta keep him happy
Afghanistan: Financing of the Mujahadeen to fight an insurrigent war against the Soviet occupation, looking the other way after the Soviets left which allowed the Taliban to rise to power from the Mujahadeen framework.
Pakistan: Aiding General Mushariff in a military coup, providing him with fund to continue turning Pakistan into a military police state so that there would be a second aggressor on China's south border. The US just underestimated that the Pakistanis would hate the Indians more than the Chinese.

That part of the world doesn't hate the US because of the freedoms we enjoy, they hate us because we support the rulers that torture, main, and kill their families.

TheBigJerk:

Gah. Can't believe I brain-farted on that. I know how to spell Shah, really....

And I do get your point about similar countries in the region being able to pull themselves out of the mess they were put in by the exit of the British Empire and being used as pawns in the Cold War. Most of the ones that did, though either had no resources that the First World government cared about, or discovered the best thing to do was to not play the game (Jordan, Egypt under Sadat).

Personally, my view is to pull out all American troops in the region, redeploy as many of them as Israel would allow in that country, and say 'Okay, you guys figure all this out. No more support except for medicine and humanitarian supplies'. And get serious about getting the US off the petroleum teat; that's the biggest thing preventing us from pulling up our stakes in the region.

RoyFokker'sGhost: Gyrfalcon: RoyFokker'sGhost: casual disregard: Lunaville: The collected whole: China and India saber-rattling (for what cause? to what end?); China's' communist paper proving to be a capitalist success: it all makes me think I may as well take up drinking.

They've had wars in recent history. They still have a major border dispute. Apparently all of Asia is basically a ton of unresolved borders.

Mostly courtesy of the British Empire pullout, where the Brits established borders that ignored tribal, ethnic, and religious lines as a final 'Fark you! We didn't want to be here anyways!'

But it's all America's fault, for some reason....

Because we added to the instability of the region by setting up Musharif in Pakistan and keeping him in power and financing the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan to fight the Commies.

America's policy in the Middle East and Central Asia since the mid-60's has been 'support whatever homicidal maniac is in charge as long as they're anti communist and give us a price break on oil if they have any.'

Suadi Arabia: keeping the House of Saud in power despite the Saud's extremist religious views and police state tactics that the Gestapo could take notes from.
Iraq: Keeping Saddam Hussien in power despite well-documented and well-known use of chemical weapons testing on ethnic Kurds from the 1980's onward
Iran: Financing the overthrow of an elected socialist government in order to put the Shaw in power, financing the Shaw's pretty brutal regime and even giving him an actual US Treasury printing press because gotta keep him happy
Afghanistan: Financing of the Mujahadeen to fight an insurrigent war against the Soviet occupation, looking the other way after the Soviets left which allowed the Taliban to rise to power from the Mujahadeen framework.
Pakistan: Aiding General Mushariff in a military coup, providing him with fund to continue turning Pakistan into a military police state so that there would be a second aggressor on China's south border. The US ...

No argument there; I merely hate seeing everyone else in the West sit back and piously reach for their towels as if Winston Churchill hadn't laid the groundwork for all this back in 1919.

It was then-Secretary Churchill who created the State of Iraq to make his Saudi puppets happy, after all; ignoring the hundreds of years of sectarian hatred between the north (Kurds), center (Shia) and south (Sunni), which the Ottoman Turks had been careful to keep separate during their tenure, and which the British consul in the area spent a lot of time briefing Churchill on before Winston redrew all the lines and said "We'll worry about it later." Well, here we are!

Subtle_Canary: Do either China or India have a sophisticated missile tracking infrastructure? The thing that kept the US and USSR from popping off missiles at each other was that both sides had excellent SIGINT support and would immediately know, and reciprocate. Do they yutzes have anything similar?

I imagine Russian would tell China they are being shot at, and the US would tell India.