Pakistan Gets Worse

Pervez Musharraf and George W. Bush are gone, but the game goes on as, in the wake of $7.5 billion in new aid by the Obama Administration, the Pakistani prime minister complains of a "trust deficit" by US benefactors.

The shell game over Islamist extremists that began after 9/11 is looking even worse. In proposing increased aid, President Obama said he expected Pakistan security forces to crack down on terrorists in tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

What he got was an agreement by the Islamabad regime to turn over control of the Swat Valley less than a hundred miles from the capital to a pro-Taliban group whose militants have burned schools, banned education for girls and beheaded government officials.

Sen. John Kerry, in Pakistan this week as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is greeted by a statement from the Prime Minister: "The U.S. should not attach conditionalities to the assistance package being presented to the U.S. Congress, as aid with strings attached would fail to generate the desired goodwill and results in Pakistan."

In Washington, Islamabad's ambassador complains that the new aid package is too "intrusive," while back home the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court condemns the flogging of a 17-year-old girl for refusing to marry a Taliban fighter and 200 comrades-in-arms storm terminals storing NATO supplies in Peshawar, killing a guard and torching vehicles.

With the infusion of more troops into Afghanistan, the shakiness of the government across the border is looking worse as it takes US billions and keeps telling us, as Musharraf did, to trust it and mind our own business about the extremist threat to its existence.

Obama's envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, faces a tough job in trying to break that cycle.

Where Terrorists Could Go Nuclear

Our “vital ally in the War on Terror,” as President Bush describes Pakistan, is on the brink of a crisis that could make Iraq look like a Sunday picnic.

To stabilize his situation, President Pervez Musharraf is negotiating a power-sharing arrangement with former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who is taking a hard line about her return from self-imposed exile, insisting that Musharraf give up control of the army that brought him to power.

"The Red Mosque was just a warm-up for what will happen if the religious schools are not disarmed," Bhutto said this week about the recent bloody occupation in Islamabad, adding that Islamist extremists plotting the overthrow of Musharraf's government had converted madrassases into military arsenals.

All this unrest and uncertainty comes amid the Bush Administration’s increasing doubts about Pakistan’s role in rooting out Al Qaeda and the imminent passage by Congress of an aid bill that would be tied to Pakistan’s progress in cracking down on terrorist safe havens.

Add to this volatile political mixture Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons, and it may soon make our worries about Iraq and Iran look simple by comparison.