Playing With Fire in Pakistan

Barack Obama avoided going there and John McCain has trouble remembering where it is, but Pakistan is the hottest spot in the Mideast with today's news that Islamabad's intelligence agency, the ISI, helped plan last month's bombing of the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul.

A senior US official tells the Washington Post about "significant" evidence that ISI members provided logistical support to the bombers as well as in an attempted assassination of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

In this CIA leakfest, the New York Times gets "new information showing that members of the Pakistani intelligence service were increasingly providing militants with details about the American campaign against them, in some cases allowing militants to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas."

These revelations, called "hellacious" by the ISI chief, come right after the new Prime Minister's trip to Washington offering assurances that his intelligence agency is above suspicion and asking for more technical aid to help them keep doing their work.

In a sane world, Pakistan with all this duplicity as well as its who-knows-where nuclear stockpile, would be seen as a threat to national security calling for an immediate, bipartisan, continuing response, but sanity is in short supply.

Our current president greets their prime minister burbling about "our common desire to protect ourselves and others from those who would do harm" while the presidents-in-waiting bash each other about failing to understand the problem and then studiously avoid addressing it.

It would be reassuring to believe that, behind the scenes in Washington, some real thinking and planning about how to deal with Pakistan is going on but, from the evidence, there is only political posturing and CYA leaking from the CIA.