Perv

Despite the spin emerging from the less-than-credible lips of Rice, Gates and Bush, Pakistan looks increasingly like a candidate for the Next Big U.S. Foreign Policy Triumph, similar to the brilliant maneuvering by the Carter Administration that turned Iran from ally to enemy in the late 1970s.

Although the headlines are all about ‘elections’ to be held in a couple of months (with half the civilian opposition in jail, no independent media and the courts in military receivership), less sanguine news can be found further down the page. Turns out the Taliban and their allies are conquering more and more Pakistani villages and towns while the nation’s soldiers are refusing to fight them. That alone would be enough to convince me that the survival chances of Pervez Musharraf (we’ll call him ‘Perv’) are not so good.

It’s rather remarkable that the collapse of the Shah’s terror regime almost 30 years ago taught the American foreign policy establishment so little. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that the lessons may have been learned, but at crucial moments like these they just don’t matter. Decisions about how to handle the Pakistani crisis are being made by a half-dozen people closeted in some D.C. bunker, and the chances of a wise head with a long-term perspective having a say looks remote, especially among this crew directly mandated by God Above.

The ironies abound. After all the nonstop banging on about Iran’s attempt to acquire a nuclear capability, it turns out that the real threat is a country supposedly safely in the western camp where such weapons already exist and were acquired, furthermore, under the benignly unwatchful eye of the United States for the simple reason that the Pakistanis were our guys all those years. One expert commentator is saying not to worry because the radical nutcases typically only get 13% of the vote when the country gets around to holding elections. Somehow, that fact isn’t terribly reassuring just now.