Mike: It’s now a waste of time and effort for Al Qaeda’s strategic theorists to write justifications for massacres of random infidel civilians in the USA or Iraq. No can do. Rather, we can expect to see a new cottage industry of justifications for targeted assassinations of Pakistani politicians.

The goal, of course, is for al-Qaeda to obtain control of the “Muslim bomb” by suborning the Pakistan military. This is the sum of all fears, and al-Qaeda may find a new urgency to their quest is added by Obama’s call for a nuclear-free world. But it didn’t help our cause very much to piss off the Pakistani people by supporting a strongman against the very principles of democracy we say we’re trying to spread in the region. I suppose geopolitics was working against us there. Pakistan airspace is literally the only way to supply our forces in Afghanistan without dropping stuff directly from orbit.