Bill, turns out there’s another option available that the state dept is very averse to trying out.
And that is the balkanization of Pakstan. The ‘country’ neatly divides into four squabbling provinces and the problem province of NWFP further cleaves into competing tribes. If Uncle sam cannot cleanup the mess in this part of pakstan, then there’s always the option of containing the mess to within pushtu dominated NWFP.
US contacts can always pump in ever more quantities of guns, drugs and grieviences among the hotheaded pushtu tribes and cause enough infighting there to contain the raging testerones to within their own loins.
But alas. Never credit the state dept with original thinking. Breaking up Pakstan also yields phenomela side-benefits apart from AlQ’s slow-roasting – that is that the so-called islamic bomb will effectively be defanged as no province of Pakstan can afford to organize R&D and military spending enough to keep the N-option alive. Also, India and Israel (and even Russia) will be all help in breaking up Pakstan. Besides, Pakstan has been broken up before (today’s Bangladesh was carved out in 1971 by India), so its not as if Pakstan will mind too much. They were overeager to surrender and compromise back then too.
Just my 2 pence and all that.
