Unqualified Offerings

Leon Hadar, in an article completed before the Bhutto assassination, writes about the utter failure of Bush Administration Pakistan policy, and about the utter fraudulence of Benazir Bhutto as tribune of liberal civilian rule.

There is an Iraq angle here. Five and six years ago I understood that al Qaeda’s grand strategy centered on Pakistan, because Pakistan has the nukes and al Qaeda has leverage there. I wrote about this more than once. Then Pakistan fell out of the American news and I stopped paying attention. It was quiet for the most part, and only ever came up in the context of America’s failed hunt for Bin Laden, Zawahiri and the senior brain trust of al Qaeda. It was easy to treat Pakistan as a solved problem. It was no such thing.
So, when skeptics look at Iraq we see the current relative quiet optimists see, but when we also see the broken political fundamentals, we doubt the relative quiet’s permanence. Pakistan validates that distrust. During the period when I stopped looking, Pakistan solved none of its structural problems. It was still cursed with tribal friction and a brittle authoritarianism. Leon stresses the foolishness of America’s Bhutto push, but Pakistan was already heading for a succession crisis. The fundamentals were bad, so a blowup was just a matter of time. That’s how Iraq looks now.