Morgoth, on 04 December 2010 - 10:01 AM, said:
If I was Pakistani I certainly would want to know about my elected representatives' dealings with the US, and the abysmal state of my country's nuclear weapons and power plants.
The average Pakistani citizen does not give a crap about the abysmal state of their nuclear weapons program and power stations. They want them and to use them as a bully stick to get concessions out of the more prosperous nations/scare India. Until something goes catastrophically wrong, they will continue to not give a damn. The general mindset of the populace and large chunks of the government there is so screwed up that I'm surprised they haven't gotten into a full scale war with India yet. Zardari is a crook too.
The Yemenis, I'm not so sure about, but the U.S. and other nations (as I'll point out in a quote below) have been conducting missile strikes and bombing raids in the Maghreb and down the Eastern coast of Africa since at least the Clinton years (when my memory of this stuff begins). Yemen is a tough place to be in employment-wise, wracked by a civil war and several significant connections between locals and terrorist groups in other parts of the Middle East (and Somalia) have been brought to light. It's basically a hotbed of strife and the government there has little to no incentive to say "No" to the Americans because they get so little from the other, richer Middle Eastern countries and the strikes are sometimes directed at their enemies (see how the Pakistanis allow and direct strikes in their own country).
From Information Dissemination, a naval blog I follow:
Quote
- The Ethiopia invasion of Somalia in 2006. I suspect we will learn a lot of things we did not know, like who was flying the Ethiopian air force MiGs that were able to make precision bomb drops on the fighters for the Islamic Courts. US pilots don't fly MiGs, and I have serious doubts they were Ethiopian pilots.
- The Song class submarine surfacing near Kitty Hawk in October 2006. It wasn't until almost a year later that Bill Gertz of the Washington Times revealed that incident even happened. We may learn a lot more details about the incident in the Wikileaks cables that suggests how that event actually happened.
- Diplomatic cables as a result of Global Fleet Station and Medical Diplomacy missions including the first African Partnership Station. This seems like as good a time as any to learn how to improve coordination between the Navy and the State Department for these soft power deployments by getting insight to the way the State Department viewed them, and how the host nations discussed these activities at the diplomatic level.
- The harassment of the USNS Impeccable (T-AGOS-23) and other ocean surveillance ships by China in 2009. I suspect there might be a few interesting conversations that took place behind the scenes.
- The ballistic missile launch by North Korea over Japan. I'm thinking this will be an insiders look at how the ballistic missile defense partnership between the US and Japan came to be, which is important as that model is now being used for BMD in Europe.
- There have been several quiet shooting incidents in the Gulf over the last few years between the US Navy and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that will likely come to light in the Wikileaks story.
- I am looking forward to perhaps learning more regarding the history of the Somalia piracy courts in Kenya. This will prove particularly important as we approach potential UN discussions about a world court for dealing with maritime piracy.
- We may learn of some interesting discussions regarding F-22 sales to Japan or other nations. FMS in various forms, including potential submarines for Taiwan, might pop up as interesting topics.
- The great tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004 might pop up as an interesting topic with inside details not previously disclosed.