There are a lot of news clips out there about last week’s Mumbai atrocities but this particular Sky News segment manages to hit a couple of angles particularly well –

• A new-to-me video clip where the train station mob unleashes some old skool justice on the lone surviving terrorist
• Photographer Sebastian D’souza provides the frame-by-frame narrative for how he captured his now famous pictures of the terrorists & repeats his assertion that terminal cops didn’t intervene
• The correspondant recreates the sea-borne attack route used by the terrorists to gain frontdoor access to the hotels

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A slew of interesting updates on Pakistan have popped up in the past few days and I thought Mutineers would enjoy some quick summaries.

First on the docket is an NYT investigative report on the depth / breadth of Bush-administration sanctioned covert ops in Pakistan as well as other countries in the pursuit of Al Qaeda –

WASHINGTON — The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials.

These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.

One particular raid described in the NYT piece brings to mind a pivotal scene from Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games –

In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission — captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.

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The response to the mortgage security mess is now winding its way through the government sausage factory and the next level of operational leadership is being revealed. This morning, Hank Paulson announced that Neel Kashkari will oversee the $700B program –

The Treasury Department plans to tap Neel Kashkari, an assistant secretary of international affairs and a former Goldman Sachs banker, to oversee the government’s $700 billion financial rescue program, sources familiar with the situation said yesterday.

Kashkari has been a close adviser to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. on the credit crisis and helped draft the legislation for the massive rescue plan. He is expected to run the program on an interim basis until the Treasury finds a permanent head, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment. Kashkari’s replacement would stay on after the next administration takes office in January.

At the tender age of 35, Neel is being handed quite a shopping budget. Then again, often the only thing bigger than a government amplified problem is the government created solution.

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Abhi asks how “Does the credit crisis affect ‘us’” and what Desi’s could do so I thought I’d chime in. Personally, although I’m a pretty strident free trader, the more I learn, the more I believe some sort of bailout is ultimately necessary (and so I’m probably disappointed by the House’s failure to pass legislation – don’t know enough of the deets to say for sure).

The Solution to the Credit Crunch? More Desis.

Of course, it’s awful on almost all counts that taxpayers get stuck holding the bill. But as I often say here, most of life’s choices aren’t between good and bad (and a bailout is clearly bad) but rather, between bad and worse (an economy-wide credit crunch). It’s cheap & easy moral pontificating to iterate the umpteenth reason why the situation is Bad (or why some sort of Wall Street comeuppance is Good). What real adults have to do is accept the bad to avoid the worse.

This interview from Greenspan, circa August 2008 is quite plain & direct about the necessary outcome –

The collapse in home prices, of course, is a major threat to the stability of Fannie and Freddie. At the Fed, Mr. Greenspan warned for years that the two mortgage giants’ business model threatened the nation’s financial stability. He acknowledges that a government backstop for the shareholder-owned, government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, was unavoidable. Not only are they crucial to the ailing mortgage market now, but the Fed-financed takeover of investment bank Bear Stearns Cos. also made government backing of Fannie and Freddie debt “inevitable,” he said. “There’s no credible argument for bailing out Bear Stearns and not the GSEs.”

If there’s a silver lining here, perhaps it’s that taxpayers & voters will have been taught a bitter lesson about what danger lurks the next time a politician tries to promise some new class of positive, economic rights…

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