Pakistan Takes Refuge Under Chinese Wing

Pakistan continues to drift further away from the West and closer to China. When Pakistan plays such an integral role in the war which we’re supposed to be fighting next door in Afghanistan, that’s hardly welcome news.

The Pakistan news agency, Dawn, gives a pretty good indication of where this is going:

..Islamabad is looking forward to bolstering ties with Beijing in a big way.

The president’s decision to visit Beijing after every three months and agreements for the setting up of two nuclear energy plants, launch of a satellite and heavy investments by Chinese corporations in several other projects are some of the signs.

According to the foreign minister, the president would visit China every three months for “promoting economic integration between the two countries, enhancing their connectivity, optimally utilising the economic complementarities; and promoting trans-regional economic cooperation”.

“President Zardari wants to give a new dimension to China-Pakistan relations, basing them on enhanced economic cooperation,” the foreign minister said.

In the energy sector, Mr Qureshi also saw a role for China in the gas pipeline project between Iran and Pakistan. “I see a role for China whether China joins the projects at some later stage or invests in it.”

Another Pakistani news service, PakTribune, has this from Zardari:

The President pointed out that Pakistan has been following China’s progress and “we take pride in their success, because we are like a family.”

“Chinese and Pakistani people are like a family”, he said. “We see their progress with pride and are happy to see our friends strong. If China is strong, we are strong.”

There has been a groundswell of anti-Americanism building in Pakistan since before the ouster of Pervez Musharraf. The Zardari government seems to be riding that wave with real success. There are real economic, military and security questions that will come out of the closer bonds being forged between Islamabad and Beijing.

 

Pakistan – the Fuze in the Powder Keg

This is a glass half full sort of story, the kind you don’t see on this blog very often. Here’s the premise – maybe a South Asian Cold War wouldn’t be all that bad.

Pakistan is in a shambles. It needs a big power patron to get it through the tough times it’s now in. The US has already gone with India and has now fallen into its own economic abyss. Maybe we’d all be better off if China stepped in.

Just how bad are things in Pakistan today? That’s pretty much answered in today’s Guardian:

…A special session of parliament called by the government to forge a political consensus on the “war on terror” has backfired spectacularly as parties, including some in the ruling coalition, denounced the alliance with Washington and Nato rather than backing the army to take on the Pakistani Taliban.

…Critics of the government, which is led by controversial president Asif Ali Zardari, complain that there is a paralysis of decision-making and policy. A leaked US top secret National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan concludes that the country is “on the edge”. A US official was quoted summing up the assessment as “no money, no energy, no government“.

The economic nosedive will aid recruitment to extremist groups, experts fear, and force more poor families to send their children to the free madrassa schools, which offer an exclusively religious curriculum. Inflation is running at 25%, or up to 100% for many staple food items, and unemployment is growing, pushing millions more into poverty. The rupee has lost around 30% of its value so far this year.

“The canvas of terrorism is expanding by the minute,” said Faisal Saleh Hayat, a former interior minister.

“It’s not only ideological motivation. Put that together with economic deprivation and you have a ready-made force of Taliban, al-Qaida, whatever you want to call them. You will see suicide bombers churned out by the hundred,” he said.

“The majority of the people of Pakistan do not see it as our war. We are fighting for somebody else and we are suffering because of that,” said Tariq Azim, a former minister in the previous government of Pervez Musharraf, whose party now sits in the opposition. “At the moment the only ones toeing the line are the People’s party.”

Members of parliament are particularly angered by recent signals from Washington that it is prepared to talk to the Afghan Taliban, while telling Pakistan that it must fight its Taliban menace. “They [the US] are showing a lot more flexibility on their side of the border,” said Khurram Dastagir, a member of parliament for Sharif’s party. “The US are trying to externalise their failure in Afghanistan by dumping it on us.”

The rising spread of anti-American and anti-NATO anger among the Pakistani people and their leaders is bloody awful for those of us with troops stuck in next door Afghanistan. It seems that the more we push Pakistan, the worse our position becomes.

So, it’s becoming painfully clear that we really can’t deal with Pakistan and we’d be fools to keep repeating the same mistakes. Maybe we’d all be better off with Pakistan stabilized under Chinese hegemony. At least we know we have some ability to deal with the Chinese.

Don’t get angry about this, it’s our own damned fault. Back in the days of Bush I, we came to treat the end of the Cold War as the end of our problems. We refused to see the obvious, that the decline of Soviet hegemony would actually make the world a more dangerous place, spawning a whole nest of failed and rogue states.

There was an enormous opportunity to create a Marshall Plan for the most critical Third World states to stabilize them politically and economically but it was a window of opportunity that we neglected. If you don’t understand that, look at Afghanistan. There was an enormous opportunity but no one was in the mood to commit the vast resources it would have taken to promote such an initiative, and so we let too much slide and we’re paying for that today.

Maybe a return to Cold War hegemony wouldn’t be entirely bad. For starters, it’s already underway, it’s happening whether we like it or not. Powerful nations inevitably seek to establish spheres of influence in their neighbouring states. We take ours for granted but imagine what Washington would do if it found Russian weaponry deployed along the Rio Grande?

As China borders both Afghanistan and Pakistan it has an inevitable vested interest in the spread of its sphere of influence into these countries. Likewise Russia has a strategic interest in maintaining its sphere of influence in the Cacasus and Eastern Europe. That doesn’t mean subjugation as much as co-operation and doing what’s necessary to achieve stability in these regions.

Maybe it’s time we stopped running around trying to poke rivals in the eye with a sharp stick. It might be time to work with the Chinese to see if they can accomplish in Pakistan what we can’t achieve. That might mean handing over a hunk of geo-political interest but that much seems inevitable in any case so perhaps we ought to see what we can get for it through negotiation first.

 

Arms Race Update – Security Fallout of US Meltdown

The Great Wall Street Caper crash has spread around the world and in some troubling spots the locals are getting decidedly anti-American. One of them is Pakistan.

There’s some speculation that China is about to capitalize on America’s fiscal blunders to extend its own sphere of influence while its rival is in disarray.

Pakistan is said to be on the verge of debt default, a crisis that has sent President Zardari off, not to Washington, but to Beijing looking for a rescue in the form of a $6-billion bailout. In a world where trillion dollar bailouts are now a fact of life, $6-billion doesn’t sound like much but it can sure buy an awful lot of influence with a country such as Pakistan.

From the Washington Post:

“The Pakistanis like to call the Chinese their all-weather ally, and the U.S. their fair-weather friends,” said Daniel Markey, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This kind of loan could be seen as self-serving by the Chinese, and continue that impression.”

The paper reports that, in Pakistan, “the climate of crisis and public anger over domestic bailouts in the United States and Western Europe have made even a modest infusion from its Western allies politically difficult.”

With American intelligence agencies calling Afghanistan a “downward spiral,” a move by Pakistan away from the West and toward China’s sphere of influence cannot help but jeopardize America’s position in the region.

 

Are We Losing Pakistan to the Taliban?

It’s no secret that anti-Americanism is spreading fast through Pakistan. American air attacks and special forces raids intended to strike at al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership seem to be backfiring by renewing both sympathy and support for the insurgents.

Put simply, the Pakistani people are outraged at the idea of American military strikes against their homeland. American justifications don’t seem to make any difference.

A suicide bomber yesterday blew up the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad, killing about forty people. That atrocity didn’t generate much anger toward the attackers.

BBC correspondent Owen Bennet-Jones has written a stark account of the shifting attitude of formerly moderate, pro-Western Pakistanis:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7623097.stm

This is a hell of a rotten outcome to the campaign Washington began seven years ago. A guy who knows this troubled region about as well as anyone is The Independent’s correspondent, Robert Fisk. Today he questions why the US thinks it can win in Afghanistan:

As the Algerian journalist Hocine Belaffoufi said with consummate wit the other day, “According to this political discourse … the increase in attacks represents undeniable proof of the defeat of terrorism. The more terrorism collapsed, the more the attacks increased … so the stronger (terrorism) becomes, the fewer attacks there will be.”

We, of course, have been peddling this crackpot nonsense for years in south-west Asia. First of all, back in 2001, we won the war in Afghanistan by overthrowing the Taliban. Then we marched off to win the war in Iraq. Now – with at least one suicide bombing a day and the nation carved up into mutually antagonistic sectarian enclaves – we have won the war in Iraq and are heading back to re-win the war in Afghanistan where the Taliban, so thoroughly trounced by our chaps seven years ago, have proved their moral and political bankruptcy by recapturing half the country.

Oddly, back in the Eighties, I heard exactly the same from a Soviet general at the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan – yes, the very same Bagram airbase where the CIA lads tortured to death a few of the Afghans who escaped the earlier Russian massacres. Only “terrorist remnants” remained in the Afghan mountains, the jolly Russian general assured us. Afghan troops, along with the limited Soviet “intervention” forces, were restoring peace to democratic Afghanistan.

…And now? After the “unimaginable” progress in Iraq – I am quoting the fantasist who still occupies the White House – the Americans are going to hip-hop 8,000 soldiers out of Mesopotamia and dump another 4,700 into the hellfire of Afghanistan. Too few, too late, too slow, as one of my French colleagues commented acidly.

…The Soviet general at Bagram now has his amanuensis in General David McKiernan, the senior US officer in Afghanistan, who proudly announced last month that US forces had killed “between 30 and 35 Taliban” in a raid on Azizabad near Herat. “In the light of emerging evidence pertaining (sic) to civilian casualties in the … counter-insurgency operation,” the luckless general now says, he feels it “prudent” – another big sic here – to review his original investigation. The evidence “pertaining”, of course, is that the Americans probably killed 90 people in Azizabad, most of them women and children. We – let us be frank and own up to our role in the hapless Nato alliance in Afghanistan – have now slaughtered more than 500 Afghan civilians this year alone. These include a Nato missile attack on a wedding party in July when we splattered 47 of the guests all over the village of Deh Bala.

Joseph Conrad, who understood the powerlessness of powerful nations, would surely have made something of this. Yes, we have lost after we won in Afghanistan and now we will lose as we try to win again. Stuff happens.

 

Don’t Buy That New Atlas Just Yet

The way things are going today’s Atlas might be out of date before you know it, at least from the Middle East to the Caucasus.

Georgia seems about to look a lot lighter with the loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as “independent” republics under Russian protection.

Oh yeah, then there’s the Crimea. Maybe you haven’t read about this one but there’s a move afoot by the Russian-leaning Crimean peninsula to say “no” to a Ukraine enlisted in NATO. That would, of course, leave Sevastapol, whose port is under lease to the Russian navy until 2017,under Russian control and eliminate any ideas of a viable Western presence in the Black Sea.

But wait, there’s more.

Afghanistan, as we know from our Furious Leader’s recent tacit admission of failure, remains very much in play. It’s not just the Taliban any more. Other tribes are beginning to turn on Kabul as well. We’ve long since gone from “liberator” to “occupier” in the minds of the locals and, as Petraeus himself noted in his counterinsurgency field manual, once you lose your moral legitimacy in a guerrilla war, you’ve lost the war. Shit, oh dear!

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be a strong American military presence in Iraq and a strong American military presence in Afghanistan with Iran caught right in the middle. Like all half-assed plans, this one doesn’t seem to have worked out as hoped.

You see there’s Pakistan messing up the gears. Ah Pakistan, a classic example of a Western attempt to hobble together disparate tribes into a modern country. Ouch! Think I’m kidding? Look up the history behind the country’s name.

Pakistan is somewhat less than the Western ideal of a stable, nuclear power. But we cannot sort out Afghanistan until we overcome the refusal of the Pakistanis to do our bidding in the untamed tribal homelands. Here’s where we begin to run out of options.

One of these is to try to pursue al Qaeda and the Taliban into the agencies, particularly Waziristan, as US special forces have done a couple of times recently. It sounds like a plan except it infuriates the Pakistani people and turns them against us. That’s why their military has issued orders to fire upon Western forces who show up inside Pakistan.

Maybe we should just wipe out the Pakistan military. Trouble is it’s too large and far too well trained to be taken lightly. It’s not at all a pushover outfit like Saddam’s army was in 2003. And then there’s that business about Pakistan’s nukes. Add to that the inconvenient fact that America’s ground forces have been all but trashed by the protracted nonsense in Iraq and you’ve got a problem, but that’s just the start.

Pakistan, if pushed too hard, could jump into the other camp. I’m talking about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or SCO, the ascendant East’s equivalent of NATO for the 21st Century. Guess who else is trying to get under the SCO’s skirts? You’re right – Iran. Best get that map out again.

Think of these numbers. Kabul to Islamabad – 374 km. Kabul to Tehran – 1614 km. Kabul to Moscow – 2,095 km. Kabul to Beijing – 4,183 km. Kabul to Washington – 11, 134 km. Get the picture?

Paskistan already has observer status at the SCO. So does Iran. That’s sort of like the touchy-feely deal Washington is forcing NATO into with Georgia and Ukraine. Is this beginning to sound blurry? It is.

Back to the map. Take a look at Afghanistan. Now imagine it isolated, surrounded on all sides by decidedly anti-Western Iran, Kazakhstan and Pakistan under the protection of Russia and China. Do you begin to see the picture? Hell, all China would have to do is to announce it would refuse to buy any more American debt. It doesn’t have to raise a gun barrel to inflict crippling damage on the West. We can hardly grouse about it, we put that little weapon in their hands.

For more than two centuries Asians and South Asians have borne the yoke of Western domination. If you were in that situation, how would you feel about that?

Sorry, folks, but I think we may must have screwed the pooch this time. The Atlas, the one we created, may be about the change.

 

Welcome to the Afghan-Pakistan War

Wow, and we’re right there to see it too, the Afghanistan-Pakistan War featuring cameo appearances by US Special Forces and maybe, before it’s over, NATO too.

Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, talks about the terrorist bombing campaigns being waged against both Afghanistan and India by Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence agency.

Now Islamabad has announced that Pakistan’s military has ordered its forces to open fire if US forces launch another air or ground raid across the Afghanistan border. From the Associated Press:

…army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas told The Associated Press that after U.S. helicopters ferried troops into a militant stronghold in the South Waziristan tribal region, the military told field commanders to prevent any similar raids.

“The orders are clear,” Abbas said in an interview. “In case it happens again in this form, that there is a very significant detection, which is very definite, no ambiguity, across the border, on ground or in the air: open fire.”

 

Pakistan, Land of Circuitous Problems

What to do, what to do? If we want to achieve some sort of success in Afghanistan (and what that might look like grows smaller as the years pass), there will have to be some breakthrough in Pakistan.

Musharraf is gone. Like most things that happen in Pakistan, that’s a mixed blessing, certainly for NATO forces in Afghanistan and probably for the Pakistanis themselves. Mushie might not have been a great ally to the West in the fight against al Qaeda but he was a somewhat effective keel for his country.

Without Musharraf, the two ruling parties will now have to try to govern and, in Pakistan, that’s a Herculean chore. The pols are going to have to carve out turf that has been traditionally dominated by Pakistan’s army. The military is actually far more than just an armed force. It’s also a wealthy and powerful political and economic institution and, as such, tearing the country out of the generals’ grasp may not be all that easy. Pakistan’s military is more than familiar with seizing power in coups.

The other key segment of the military is Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency or ISI. This secretive outfit is still believed to be harbouring Taliban forces in the tribal lands and is also strongly believed to have played a role in the July 7th bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. Some experts believe the ISI remains a free agent utterly beyond the control of the civilian government.

While the attempted orderly transition of power into civilian hands proceeds there’s the question of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and Dr. Kahn’s nuclear weapons export shop that was never completely dismantled. There are some experts who fear that Kahn & Co. could surreptitiously resume business if the fledgling government gets distracted.

Finally there’s al Qaeda and the Taliban operating relatively freely in the tribal lands. Mushie was never able to bring them to heel and he was Washington’s boy, something that severely wounded his popularity and political survival. The new bunch seems intent on distancing themselves from America and, when it comes right down to it, there’s really only one way to do that.

America keeps raising the notion of crossing into Pakistan to hunt down the terrorists and the insurgents but that’s probably just noise. The US and ISAF are woefully understrength in Afghanistan as it is. Where would they get the megaforce it would take to try to tame the tribal homelands and purge them of the insurgents? That’s really tough, forbidding territory and any infidel who seeks to take it on will be fighting more than the insurgents. They’ll have to fight the tribesmen themselves and they are genuinely tough customers.

There seem to be no good answers on how to deal with Pakistan. Perhaps with infinite patience, and perseverence and solid groundwork, some breakthrough may yet be achieved, eventually. And yet the Bush administration’s recent courting of India has created an enormous setback in relations with Pakistan.

What we ultimately achieve in Afghanistan may well depend on Washington’s ability to sort out its problems with Islamabad. Don’t hold your breath.

 

Just What We Need – Another Conflict in Afghanistan

When it comes to foreign policy, the Bush/Cheney regime has been an unmitigated disaster, the perfect storm of indifference, over-confidence and inconsistent goals.

Toppling Saddam was supposed to spark the spread of democracy through the Middle East. Instead it resulted in the ascendancy of fundamentalist Shiite influence from Iraq to Iran, Syria to Lebanon.

In its War (without end) on Terror, the United States has fractured Trans-Atlantic solidarity and undermined NATO unity. Bush has done a lot to try to mend fences over the past two years but it’ll take a new American administration and an awful lot of diplomacy to restore those relationships.

Already faced with being eclipsed economically by an emerging China, the US has driven China and Russia into each other’s arms through clumsy attempts at containment. This is not to say the Shanghai Cooperation Organization wouldn’t have emerged otherwise but US efforts certainly gave it unhelpful impetus.

Then there’s Afghanistan. We’re busy trying to hold the Taliban and al-Qaeda at bay while the country literally rots beneath our feet. Fundamentalist Islamist warlords rule most of the country, barely tolerating a notional central government in Kabul that is both feeble and terminally corrupt. We’re struggling to save the irredeemable.

We keep saying the key to stopping the Taliban is the neighbouring state of Pakistan. Then Washington gives Islamabad ample cause not to cooperate by encouraging rival India to expand its presence in Afghanistan. Bloody minded idiocy!

With warlords, drug barons, insurgents and a corrupt government and security service, what we all need now in Afghanistan is another source of conflict, especially a proxy battle between Pakistan and India. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening.

India has a history of meddling in Afghanistan to bring pressure on Pakistan’s western front. As Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar, a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service, reported in Asia Times Online, Indian-Pakistani rivalries are very much in play in Afghanistan:

“All through the painful twists and turns, Indian policy towards Afghanistan was steeped in pragmatism and remained largely Pakistan-centric. But things seem to be changing. The horizons appear to have vastly expanded. According to Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid, Kabul is “replacing Kashmir as the main area of antagonism” between India and Pakistan. The Pakistani security establishment has convinced itself that Indian and Afghan intelligence agencies are engaged in undermining Pakistan’s security. American analysts say Afghanistan has explicitly become a theater of Pakistan-India adversarial relations. But there is a much larger dimension.

The Pakistani establishment is also sizing up the new geopolitical reality – the unprecedented pro-India tilt in the US’s regional policy. It is having a hard time coping with the trilateral consensus between Kabul, Delhi and Washington, which pillories Islamabad as the “primary and near-exclusive trouble maker” in the region. The Pakistani establishment cannot accept that while Islamabad remains a key partner for Washington in the “war on terror”, it is Delhi that is on the way to becoming a stakeholder in US global strategies.

…the Pakistani perspective sees the emerging regional equations as a dangerous slide toward Indian military superiority and regional “hegemony”. How does the Pakistani military, weaned on adversarial feelings towards India, countenance such a challenge?

First, Pakistan will assert its legitimate interests in Afghanistan, no matter what it takes. Make no mistake about it. The Pakistani generals know what transpired when American and British top brass met in Britain last month to exchange notes on Afghanistan. The conclave assessed there were huge problems with the Karzai regime’s performance and the war might last for another 30 years, which is a hopeless scenario, as “war fatigue” is setting in among North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies and the tide of public opinion is turning against the war. But that isn’t all.

…though Indian rhetoric on Afghanistan is carefully couched in terms of countering terrorism, Pakistan doesn’t see it that way. Instead, it views it in much larger terms as an Indian thrust, supported by the US, as the pre-eminent regional power in South Asia. In recent weeks, Pakistani military raised the ante along the Line of Control bordering the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The resurgence of tensions seems a calibrated move. Islamabad is sending some signals.

Nasim Zehra, a relatively moderate, sensible voice in the Pakistani strategic community, wrote recently, “It is time for Pakistan to categorically state: enough of Pakistan bashing, enough of vacuous Kantian moralizing in a Hobbesian world, enough of the do-more mantra and enough of partisan analysis, enough of selective perceptions, enough of double standards … Pakistan will play ‘as clean as the world around it’. Take it or leave it. There is no ‘going it alone’ for any of Pakistan’s neighbors.”

…The message is simple: If Pakistan goes down, it will take India down with it. There is no such thing as absolute security.”

Indian meddling advances the interests of the United States and NATO in Afghanistan very little and, while Karzai may treasure India’s engagement as a foil to Pakistan, it is Pakistan’s help we need in Afghanistan.

 

Pervez’ Purported Perfidy

The father of the “Islamic Bomb” alleges that the Pakistani military, then under the command of Pervez Musharraf, supervised a flight of nuclear centrifuges to North Korea in 2000. From BBC News:

“Disgraced scientist AQ Khan has said that Pakistan transported nuclear material to North Korea with the full knowledge of the country’s army.

At the time President Pervez Musharraf was head of the army.

Dr Khan said that uranium enrichment equipment was sent in a North Korean plane loaded under the supervision of Pakistani security officials.

The BBC’s Barbara Plett, in Islamabad, says that Dr Khan’s latest claims contradict a public confession he made in 2004 that he was solely responsible for exporting nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

Our correspondent says that the comments are the most controversial accusation made by Dr Khan since he recently began defending himself in statements to the media.

His comments are also at variance with the oft-stated line of the Pakistani government that neither it nor the army had any knowledge of the exports.”

 

The Afghanistan War Spreads to Pakistan

Remember a recent clash at the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan in which the Pakistanis claimed American forces had attacked and killed a dozen of their soldiers and the United States insisted it had attacked Taliban insurgents?

Turns out they were both right.

A story in today’s Guardian claims Pakistan’s border troops have been massively infiltrated by Afghan Taliban insurgents:

“The Pakistani Frontier Corps has been heavily infiltrated and influenced by Taliban militants, sometimes joining in attacks on coalition forces, according to classified US ‘after-action’ reports compiled following clashes on the border.

According to those familiar with the material, regarded as deeply sensitive by the Pentagon in view of America’s fragile relationship with Pakistan, there are ‘box loads’ of such reports at US bases along the length of the Pakistan-Afghan border. Details of the level of infiltration emerged yesterday on a day when five more US-led soldiers were killed in southern Afghanistan. Four of the soldiers died in a bomb and gunfire attack outside the southern city of Kandahar.

Nato officials have reported a dramatic increase in cross-border incidents compared with the same period last year. The US documents describe the direct involvement of Frontier Corps troops in attacks on the Afghan National Army and coalition forces, and also detail attacks launched so close to Frontier Corps outposts that Pakistani co-operation with the Taliban is assumed.

‘The reality,’ said a source familiar with the situation on the ground, ‘is that there are units so opposed to what the coalition is doing and so friendly to the other side that when the opportunity comes up they will fire on Afghan and coalition troops. And this is not random. It can be exceptionally well co-ordinated.’

Frontier Corps personnel have in the past been implicated in the past in murdering US and Afghan officers. In the most high-profile case, a Frontier Corps member ‘assassinated’ Major Larry J Bauguess during a border mediation meeting. In another incident, an Afghan officer was killed. Since then the problem appears to have worsened as the Taliban renew their insurgency on the Afghan side of the border.

The allegation that senior Pakistani officials continue to offer lukewarm assistance to the coalition while offering help to the Taliban is also reiterated in Descent into Chaos, a new book by the veteran Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid.”

So, there it is. We now have Pakistani forces not only aiding the Taliban but joining them in firing on us. What are we to do? Help Musharraf stage a coup and restore martial law? Attack Pakistan?

We don’t seem to have any good choices left. Don’t count on NATO coming up with another two or three-hundred thousand combat troops. Don’t count on the US so long as it’s stuck in Iraq. We’re spread so thin we can’t even control our zones in Afghanistan. We hardly have the masses of troops it would take to extend our war into Pakistan. Perhaps the worst part is that we know it and so do they.