“What happens now in [Pakistan] will be a the outcome of a bargain between Pakistani political forces and Washington”
Really? I get Mr. Fernandez’s premise, and the image of two captains attempting to steer the same ship is very vivid. I also understand the premise that a the time is long past for both a competent and a unified bipartisan position towards this Islamic hellhole from Washington. But if Pakistan’s rogue development of nukes, Musharrraf’s on-again off-again “anti-terror” measures, the injecting by the US of Bhutto into the stew, and the assassination of same (Bhutto, not the stew), don’t all prove how completely out of Washington’s hands Pakistan has been, and will remain, whatever will prove it? We exert an influence on Pakistan, but it’s only the thinnest veneer, and even that thinnest of veneers is rubbing away to nothingness before our eyes. You know you’re in trouble when only a few feckless and duplicitous Muslims stand between al Qaeda and The Bomb as we see in Pakistan, or between al Qaeda and the largest known reserves of oil as we see in Saudi Arabia and other Arab sewers.
The rest of the analysis is good, but it looks like the possibility of America or any Western power exerting much of anything over the seething stewpots of Islam in waning every day. Pakistan most of all.
Iraq may be the only exception, and that is a temporary arrangement. Our influence there comes by dint of billions poured into their greedy grasping maw, and also by brave Americans risking their all to make it so. Remove us from there, and the rat race of Islam re-asserts as it always has and always will.
