Tired Old Terrorists

This week brings intimations of mortality from Osama bin Laden and Carlos the Jackal, two aging terrorists who achieved reknown by cutting short the lives of countless unknown others in pursuit of their ideology.

The mastermind of 9/11 is reduced to making an audiotape to hitchhike on the "accomplishment" of the 23-year-old loser who couldn't find his way to the lavatory to blow up an airliner, claiming that the work of "the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a confirmation of the previous messages sent by the heroes” of 9/11.

Without claiming credit for the botched effort, bin Laden seems to be, according to a terrorism expert, attempting to franchise the Al Qaeda name, like McDonald’s, "to create mutual benefits. The benefit for bin Laden is he gets to associate himself with this attack. The benefit for the regional group is it gets to use the Al Qaeda name for fund-raising and recruiting.”

In doing so, bin Laden is putting himself in the position of those retired minor celebrities who appear in TV commercials to promote iffy products with their waning fame.

What may lie ahead for Osama, if he doesn't end his days in the cave equivalent of a nursing home, is suggested by the fate of Carlos the Jackal, now in a French prison after terrorizing Europe and the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s.

Carlos is suing makers of a documentary about him to get in on the final cut of the film in order to protect "his intellectual property rights to his name and biographical image."

As heedless as they have been about the value of human life, neither Osama nor Carlos is immune to the inroads of aging and the seductions of immortality, a sad commentary on the pathetic few who can create so much pain and fear for so many in the modern world.

Good News About Afghanistan Ambivalence

The War on Terror, confusing and anxious-making as it may be, has produced one encouraging side effect in American politics: The gung-ho is gone as all sides concede the military effort in Afghanistan is a dangerous enterprise with an unknowable outcome.

As President Obama goes face-to-face with General McChrystal today by tele-conference, the debate over what to do next has been a good deal less rancorous than any other in recent Washington history. "Dithering" has been the harshest accusation against the White House by Congressional Republicans, as the Administration leaks reports of success against Al Qaeda by covert operations.

On PBS, GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss agrees with the Democrats' Carl Levin that "just putting troops out there is not going to guarantee success" and argues for more reliance on the military judgment than Levin is willing to accept, a far different tone than partisan disagreements over the Surge in Iraq.

As wrenching as what's at stake is, it's heartening to see some semblance of sanity in American politics, the disappearance of which Tom Friedman laments today: "Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word 'we' with a straight face. There is no more 'we' in American politics at a time when 'we' have these huge problems."

On the fringes, the overheated rhetoric goes on, from Gore Vidal on the Left expressing disappointment in Obama and predicting "dictatorship soon" to a Republican Congressman calling the President "an enemy of humanity."

In a perverse way, Afghanistan with all of its corruption and complexity is bringing back serious thought to political debate at a time when the substance of issues has been degraded into a 24/7 circus of media slanders.

Granted that self-interest is, as always, involved in both Republican and Democratic reluctance to stake their political futures on either going all in or pulling out of another quagmire in the making, the resulting focus on what's at stake there and how to going about dealing with it is a partial answer to Friedman's worries about "a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss political issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest."

Whatever the outcome of White House deliberations on Afghanistan, they offer the faint hope that maybe "we" can.

Obama's First Week

Here is what we know after seven days of Change:

(1) The new president is aggressively attacking the economic downturn and, though perhaps too eager to make tax-cut concessions to roll up a bipartisan score, is realizing that nothing will appease Republican know-nothings and, as a result, showing some signs of toughening up in getting a stimulus bill passed without delay.

(2) Though there is much that can be done by executive fiat, it will take longer and be more complicated to make good on campaign promises to close Guantanamo (without freeing Al Qaeda terrorists) and get troops out of Iraq without endangering stability.

(3) His ambition and self-confidence are huge. In making his first phone call to Palestinian President Abbas and giving his first exclusive interview to an Arab TV network, Obama is signaling a change not only in Middle East policy but US attitude toward engaging the rest of the world, insisting that “the Americans are not your enemy.”

He is telling them, "I cannot respect terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians and we will hunt them down. But to the broader Muslim world what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship.”

All this is leaving him open to attacks for being naïve, reckless or worse but, in the first week of America After Bush, government is beginning to look like it might possibly be (pace Ronald Reagan) more like the answer than the problem.

So far, so good with 207 weeks to go in Barack Obama's first term.

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.

Pakistan's New Face, Same Old Double Talk

Instead of President Pervez Musharraf, it was Pakistan's new Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani this week posing in the White House, asking for more military handouts and flimflamming the Bush Administration about his country's efforts to root out terrorists across the Afghanistan border.

As American casualties and frustration mount, the New York Times reports, a top CIA official this month confronted senior Pakistan officials with new evidence about ties between the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and militants in the country’s tribal areas "responsible for a surge of violence in Afghanistan."

But here is the Prime Minister on PBS' News Hour, insisting that ISI is "a great institution" and such claims are "not believable...because the ISI is directly working under the prime minister."

So much for that, but Gilani is complaining that his country needs advance notice so that his people can deal with terrorists rather finding out after the fact about this week's US missile strike on a border outpost that killed six foreign fighters, one of them believed to be a top al Qaeda operative.

"We believe in sovereignty of the country," he huffed. "And naturally, nobody likes it."

What might calm him, the Prime Minister indicated, would be a gift of Predator drones and FM radio systems to jam the terrorists' communications.

One of the first jobs of the new President in January will be to sort out this Pakistani shell game that has been costing us American lives and billions in wasted military aid since 9/11.

Doing Afghanistan

So endeth Day One. Barack Obama did Afghanistan yesterday, where more Americans are now dying than in Iraq--a photo op with President Hamid Karzai, bacon and eggs with the troops (hold the grits) and shooting hoops with them.

His comments were low-carb, too. "To see young people like this, who are doing such excellent work with so much dedication and pride, it makes you feel good about the country," he said. "You want to make sure that everybody back home understands how much pride people take in their work here and how much sacrifice people are making. It's outstanding."

If and when he visits the Middle East again as president, the atmosphere won't be as relaxed. If Obama keeps his campaigning word, the emphasis of the war on terror will shift to Afghanistan from Iraq, where Nouri al-Maliki is now waffling on endorsing Obama's withdrawal plan.

Nine US soldiers were killed last week fighting Taliban militants in eastern Afghanistan during the deadliest attack on American troops in Afghanistan in three years.

Obama won't be visiting Pakistan on this trip, but that's where the problem lies, getting the post-Musharraf government to stop tiptoeing around the tribes shielding al Qaeda there. If he can do something about that, Obama would lessen the "sacrifice people are making" of the troops he visited today.

Iraq in the Rear-View Mirror

Barack Obama and John McCain are squaring off on foreign policy this week, but there is an oddly retrospective quality to the debate over Iraq. Both promise to end the war, albeit on differing timelines, but the main issue is whether we should have fought it at all.

In his foreign policy speech today, Obama's answer was a resounding no, claiming the effort should have gone into hunting down Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, the Taliban and terrorists responsible for the attacks, and that the billions spent on the war could have been invested in alternative sources of energy to "end the tyranny of oil" and strengthening our position in the world.

"Instead," he said, "we have lost thousands of American lives, spent nearly a trillion dollars, alienated allies and neglected emerging threats--all in the cause of fighting a war for well over five years in a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks,"

Meanwhile, McCain's foreign policy adviser is harrumphing that his candidate "would rather lose an election than lose a war and see the nation lose a war. Senator Obama seems to think losing a war will help him win an election."

New polls are reflecting uncertainty among voters on how to react to all this. In the coming weeks, after he travels to the Mideast, Obama is going to have to make an effort to persuade the public to sign on to his five foreign policy goals:

"(E)nding the war in Iraq responsibly; finishing the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban; securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states; achieving true energy security; and rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21st century."

Our Wobbly War on Terror

With President Bush's would-be successors squabbling over Iraq, they are neglecting the main threat of terror that will face one of them taking office next January.

In Pakistan, Musharraf is on his way out as leaders of the two dominant parties agree to reinstate the judges he fired and try to strip him of crucial powers.

"Afghanistan is slipping toward failure," Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden warns. "The Taliban is back, violence is up, drug production is booming and the Afghans are losing faith in their government. All the legs of our strategy--security, counter-narcotics efforts, reconstruction and governance--have gone wobbly."

The schedule of staying or going in Iraq is dominating the foreign policy debate in the presidential campaign, but Pakistan and Afghanistan are becoming more urgent.

"If we should have had a surge anywhere," Sen. Biden wrote last week in the New York Times, "it is Afghanistan...In six years, we have spent on Afghanistan’s reconstruction only what we spend every three weeks on military operations in Iraq."

The border area between the two countries, according to Biden is "a freeway of fundamentalism: the Taliban and Al Qaeda find sanctuary in Pakistan, while Pakistani suicide bombers wreak havoc in Afghanistan."

The Bush-Cheney strategy of relying on Musharraf's unreliable assurances about rooting them out is collapsing, but this Administration is unlikely to face that fact.

Biden sums it up: "The next president will have to rally America and the world to 'fight them over there unless we want to fight them over here.' The 'over there' is not, as President Bush has claimed, Iraq, but rather the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Voters should be pressing Sens. McCain, Clinton and Obama to tell them what they are going to do about that.

Musharraf Marches On

A year from now, when Bush is gone, what will President Clinton, McCain or Obama do about our most annoying ally, Pervez Musharraf?

Here he is today, sashaying around Paris with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, pooh-poohing the notion that capturing or killing Osama bin Laden is of any importance in the war on terror and insisting that Pakistan is as stable as a rock.

His 100,000 troops on the Afghan border are not "trying to locate Osama bin Laden and (Ayman-al) Zawahri, frankly," Musharraf tells a conference at the French Institute for International Relations. "They are operating against terrorists, and in the process, if we get them, we will deal with them certainly."

As for the instability that led him to declare a state of emergency only weeks ago, Musharraf is sanguine. "I can assure you that nothing will happen in Pakistan," he says. "We are not a banana republic."

We have heard these songs before and, after years of being euchred out of $100 million by the Pakistani President's shell game without finding out where his nuclear weapons are, even the Bush Administration is catching on.

The State Department's counterterrorism chief is complaining about "gaps in intelligence" about the activities of extremist groups in the tribal regions.

"We don't have enough information about what's going on there. Not on al-Qaeda. Not on foreign fighters. Not on the Taliban," he says.

Our next President's priority will be picking a Secretary of State who will stop buying Musharraf's song and dance and make sure we get what we are paying for in Pakistan.

Exit White House Musharraf Critic

With Pakistan imploding, the only top Bush official who has been criticizing President Pervez Musharraf in public for some time now is leaving her position.

In July, Frances Fragos Townsend, the President's homeland security advisor, who resigned today, said that Musharraf's cease-fire with tribal leaders to drain support for Islamic extremism was a failure, acknowledging frustration that Al Qaeda had rebuilt its infrastructure and links to affiliates, while keeping Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants alive for nearly six years since 9/11.

“It hasn’t worked for Pakistan,” she said. “It hasn’t worked for the United States.”

At the same time, Townsend was suggesting that, if Musharraf wouldn't take action, the US would.

"Just because we don't speak about things publicly doesn't mean we're not doing things you talk about," Townsend told a TV interviewer who asked why the US does not conduct special operations and other measures to cripple Al Qaeda.

"Job No. 1 is to protect the American people. There are no options off the table,’" she said, "...no question that we will use any instrument at our disposal" to deal with Al Qaeda and bin Laden.

Townsend's unexplained departure now to "pursue some private-sector opportunities" comes at a time of crisis with Pakistan.

There is no way of knowing why the one-time official in the Clinton Justice Department, who was mentioned as a possible successor to Alberto Gonzales, is leaving now, but Bush fatigue, disappointment and disagreement over what to do in Pakistan are certainly among the possible reasons.

Is This a Great Country or What?

In Washington, our Congress has settled in to business as usual now that the Surge is going so well. Democrats are overjoyed at news of Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, while Republicans are fresh from the triumph of sliming a brain-injured 12-year-old boy to make sure he and others like him don’t rip us off by getting health care insurance.

In Iraq today, other people acting in my name and yours killed six women and nine children during an air and ground attack on senior Al Qaeda leaders. We issued a statement of regret that “civilians are hurt or killed while Coalition forces search to rid Iraq of terrorism."

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, AP reports, “has recently confronted top American commander Gen. David Petraeus about what he sees as overly aggressive U.S. tactics that harm innocent civilians, according to Iraqi officials.”

Last Friday, a pre-dawn U.S. raid on Khalis, a Shiite city north of Baghdad, killed 25 people when troops called in air strikes while hunting suspected smugglers of arms from Iran to Baghdad. Village leaders said the victims included civilians, but the military insisted the 25 killed were militants.

Meanwhile, Shiites and Sunnis are reported to be making no progress toward national reconciliation. But the Surge is working just fine, isn’t it?

We can all go on getting Halloween costumes for the kids and maybe driving somewhere for a little leaf-peeping.

The YouTube Terrorists

Now, after Osama’s pathetic stand-up routine, the Al Qaeda video production company is announcing a special with “the last testament of one of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers, marking the sixth anniversary of the attacks.”

One of the classic American answers to TV network and cable trash is not watching and, even in our new unmediated media world, making editorial judgments about the value of enemy propaganda.

TV and cable networks, take note. We appreciate knowing about this garbage, but you are not compelled to rub our faces in it.

Osama Has Jumped the Shark

There is something weird about Osama bin Laden’s new tape, an old-timer with dyed facial hair or, even worse, a chin rug, trying to be “with it” by snappy remarks about Bush, the Democrats and Iraq, the mortgage crisis, the new British and French leaders, whatever. He and/or his ghost writer must watch the Daily Show in a bad translation.

Al Qaeda may well be planning new terror attacks on the U.S., but it’s not likely that the garrulous elderly man in this new Islamic infomercial is in charge of them. He is too busy reading Michael Scheuer and Noam Chomsky.

Six weeks ago, the director of national intelligence, Admiral Mike McConnell pointed out “it’s been a year” since there was a confirmed sighting of bin Laden: “There are rumors about his illness...I believe he is in the tribal region of Pakistan, and...only speaking to a courier, staying completely removed from anything we could exploit to find him.”

Trotting out bin Laden on the anniversary of 9/11 may be a boost for jihadist morale, a reminder of the good old days of terrorism, but the next step would be a roast on Comedy Central.

Petraeus' Gung-Ho Preview

Like any theatrical piece, “The David Petraeus Show” is having out-of-town tryouts before opening in Washington two weeks from now.

Today, the General gave an upbeat performance. He told the Australian in an interview at his Baghdad headquarters there has been a 75 per cent reduction in religious and ethnic killings since last year, a doubling in the seizure of insurgents' weapons caches between January and August, a rise in the number of al-Qaeda "kills and captures" and a fall in the number of coalition deaths from roadside bombings.

The Surge, he claimed, has turned U.S. forces into pursuers instead of defenders. "And that is a much better place to be than to be doing a deliberate attack into their defenses, like we had to do in Ramadi," he said. "Ramadi was like Stalingrad."

More ominous was the impression that the General was toeing the Bush-Cheney line about Iran.

"There is growing concern,” he said, “by the Iraqi Government, by us, and our own Government as we have learned more and more about the degree of this malign involvement of the Iranian Quds force with the militia extremists that have been supported by them, trained, equipped, armed, funded and even in some cases directed."

If this is the monologue he is working on for his Congressional appearance, Gen. Petraeus may end up turning the discussion about getting out of Iraq into a debate about invading Iran.

Has anybody been helping him with the script? The war critics had better be preparing their rebuttal to a new Petraeus offensive.

A Sane Re-Start for the Iraq Debate

After all the wishful thinking and political posturing on all sides, a basis for serious discussion makes the “tenuous case” for staying in Iraq while scaling down our presence.

The report urging “strategic patience” is by Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank chaired by former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, with a bipartisan board including Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and William S. Cohen, a former Republican Senator who was Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton.

Some recent advances in Iraq, Cordesman writes, are the result of “sheer luck,” such as Sunni tribesmen turning against Al Qaeda insurgents. He quotes an unnamed U.S. official as describing our situation as "three dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you."

Rejecting the extremes of staying the course or immediate withdrawal, Cordesman makes a case for phasing down troop levels starting early next year.

His analysis and recommendations will draw fire for being too qualified, too middle-of-the-road and politically unsatisfying. But they have the ring of reality, something so rare in the furor over Iraq that has made Americans unhappy with both the Bush Administration and the Democratic Congress elected to oppose him.

Here, at least, is a starting point for facing the true options and thinking seriously about them.

As Cordesman writes, “The U.S. will ultimately be judged far more by how it leaves Iraq, and what it leaves behind, than how it entered Iraq.”

We’ve lost the war. Can we win the withdrawal?

Breaking the Bush-Obama Language Barrier

Ten days ago, Barack Obama said this about Pakistan: “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.”

He was pooh-poohed by Tony Snow and called naïve, dangerous and irresponsible by candidates of both parties. Mitt Romney said, “He’s gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week.”

Today President Bush, asked what he would do in Pakistan, answered: “I'm confident that with actionable intelligence we will be able to bring top Al-Qaeda to justice. We're in constant communications with the Pakistan government...And I'm confident, with real, actionable intelligence, we will get the job done.”

There is no daylight between these two answers except that Bush is taking Musharraf’s acquiescence for granted and is ducking the possibility that he “won’t act.”

But two week ago, his homeland security adviser Frances Townsend didn’t. She told Fox News that, beyond working with Musharraf, we were ready to take additional measures.
"Just because we don't speak about things publicly doesn't mean we're not doing things you talk about," Townsend said, when asked why the U.S. does not conduct special operations and other measures to cripple Al Qaeda. "Job No. 1 is to protect the American people. There are no options off the table...No question that we will use any instrument at our disposal."

A week earlier she expressed “frustration” with Musharraf to the New York Times, which reported that “there was growing concern that pinprick attacks against Al Qaeda targets are not enough, but that some new American measures might have to remain secret to avoid embarrassing General Musharraf.”

So Bush’s policy, translated from Texan, is that, if Musharraf won’t act, we will. He just uses more words than Obama.

If Jane Fonda won’t explain all this to Mitt Romney, maybe some Administration Dr. Strangelove will.

Drinking Sand in Iraq

I love my country more than I dislike George Bush, so it’s tempting to believe Michael Barone’s contention today that, in Iraq, “instead of accepting defeat and inviting chaos, we may be able to achieve a significant measure of success.”

Tempting but not sustainable--the crumbs we are being fed about local gains by Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon in their New York Times OpEd piece last week and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on Meet the Press yesterday are not enough to nourish hope for overall improvement in that shattered nation.

Even in his upbeat assessment, Gates admitted that “the problem when we would go after Al Qaeda and insurgents before is that when we would hit them in one place, they’d squirt to another place. For the first time the commander has enough forces that he can attack all of their basic locations at the same time, so it’s much more difficult for them to squirt out and escape...”

For now. But how long will we have to keep the troops we have there in place and how many more will it take to stop the “squirting” all over Iraq? And how much good will local pacification be if the central government fails, as it has so far, to come together even on the simplest issues?

There is so much Iraq Fatigue in the U.S. that a change in the narrative is like an oasis in the desert, but we can’t let ourselves be sidetracked by another mirage and end up trying to drink the sand.

Distorting Obama's "Inaugural Address"

At the invitation of Lee Hamilton, one of the nation’s wisest elders, Barack Obama made the speech of his life today, one that presages what he might say as President in January 2009. Typically it was mined for a media headline and reduced to: “Obama Might Send Troops Into Pakistan.”

Speaking at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, whose director of Middle East Studies is in a Teheran prison, Obama laid out a foreign policy that projects the use of U.S. military strength and diplomacy in a way that would reverse the bluster and bungling of the Bush-Cheney Administration.

He began with an indictment: “After 9/11, our calling was to write a new chapter in the American story. To devise new strategies and build new alliances, to secure our homeland and safeguard our values, and to serve a just cause abroad. We were ready. Americans were united. Friends around the world stood shoulder to shoulder with us...

”We did not finish the job against al Qaeda in Afghanistan. We did not develop new capabilities to defeat a new enemy, or launch a comprehensive strategy to dry up the terrorists' base of support. We did not reaffirm our basic values, or secure our homeland.

”Instead, we got a color-coded politics of fear. Patriotism as the possession of one political party. The diplomacy of refusing to talk to other countries. A rigid 20th century ideology that insisted that the 21st century's stateless terrorism could be defeated through the invasion and occupation of a state. A deliberate strategy to misrepresent 9/11 to sell a war against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.”

From there, Obama proposed in detail a new approach to “stop fighting the war the terrorists want us to fight” and “wage the war that has to be won, with a comprehensive strategy with five elements: getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan; developing the capabilities and partnerships we need to take out the terrorists and the world's most deadly weapons; engaging the world to dry up support for terror and extremism; restoring our values; and securing a more resilient homeland.”

As President, Obama promised to remove troops from Iraq and put them "on the right battlefield," sending at least two more brigades to Afghanistan and increasing nonmilitary aid by $1 billion as well as initiate a three-year, $5 billion program to share intelligence with allies to take out terrorist networks from Indonesia to Africa.

In Pakistan, he said, “There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.”

Obama’s speech is sure to generate criticism from other Presidential contenders and ridicule from commentators and bloggers as a ploy to one-up Hillary Clinton in their squabble about talking to enemies.

But, prepared with the best foreign-policy advice he could get, it is a serious statement by a serious man that should go far to ease voter qualms about his lack of experience or possible softness as Commander-in-Chief.

If the critics have substantive counter-arguments, let’s hear them. Invective won’t cut it.

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.

The No-Win War Gets Worse

Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a drowning man encircled by sharks, who is trying cut his only lifeline by feuding with Gen. David Petraeus and asking President Bush to replace him.

His action reflects intense pressure from fellow Shiites to keep Petraeus from arming Sunni tribesmen to fight Al Qaeda insurgents from Saudi Arabia who are car-bombing U.S. troops, exposes hopes for a power-sharing central government in Iraq as a Bush pipe dream and leaves both heads of state politically trapped.

Bush is now joined at the hip with Petraeus as his only defense against growing pressure to leave by using the General’s “progress” in pacifying Iraq to keep Republican Congressmen from breaking ranks. Dumping Petraeus is unthinkable.

But al-Maliki’s bind is just as tight. Reputedly tied to Shia militias responsible for sectarian violence, the Prime Minister is far from his own man.

The resulting frustration and anger have led to “shouting matches” with the U.S. Commander, refereed by Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who only concedes that "sometimes there are sporty exchanges." Petraeus puts it less diplomatically: "We have not pulled punches with each other."

The civil war that has been predicted if the U.S. leaves is under way. What are we accomplishing by staying, other than more American deaths and humiliation over our helplessness?