By William S. Lind
".....Our attempt to contain the damage in Pakistan instead set the wreckage on fire. We forced our friendly local dictator, General/President Musharraf, to line up publicly with George Bush, to the point where his local nickname is "Busharraf." It is not intended as a compliment. Worse, we pressured him into sending the Pakistani army into the Northwest Tribal Territories, where it has gotten its backside kicked at the same time that it has brought more tribesmen into the fight. Defeat plus destabilization plus de-legitimatization, most of it American-inspired, has left Pakistan's government teetering on the edge of disintegration, with a real danger that the disintegration could spread beyond the regime to the Pakistani state itself.......
Again, the point to remember is that most of this is a side effect of the war in Afghanistan. Why is this important? Because it reminds us that the ill effects of bad strategy tend to spread. The bad strategy is invading, occupying and attempting to transform countries whose culture is vastly different from our own. That is the essence of the neocons' neo-Trotskyite vision of the world revolution, which the Bush administration has made its own. Nor is George W. Bush the neocons' only dupe: the same poisonous nonsense flows in the speeches of most of the presidential candidates.......
In statecraft as in war, side effects can prove fatal. If Pakistan collapses, turning into another stateless happy hunting ground for al-Qaeda and numberless other Islamic 4GW organizations, our position in Afghanistan will quickly become unsustainable......
How will the Bush administration respond to such a cascade of unfortunate events? By doing what it plans to do anyway: bomb Iran."
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