The real war in Pakistan....

A terrific Hitchens article on Pakistan...

One of the most creditable (and neglected) foreign policy shifts of the Bush administration after September11 was away from our dangerous regional dependence on the untrustworthy and ramshackle Pakistan and towards a much more generous rapprochement with India, the world's other great federal, democratic and multi-ethnic state.

Recent accounts of murderous violence in main cities of two of our allies, India and Afghanistan, make it appear overwhelmingly probable that the bombs were not the work of local or home-grown insurgents but were orchestrated by agents of the Pakistani ISI. This is a fantastically unacceptable state of affairs that needs to be given its right name: state-sponsored terrorism.

Meanwhile, and on Pakistani soil and under the noses of its army and the ISI, the city of Quetta and the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas are becoming the incubating ground of a reorganised and protected al-Qa'ida.

Barack Obama has been, if anything, the more militant of the two US presidential candidates in stressing the danger here and the need to act without too much sentiment about our so-called Islamabad ally. He began using this rhetoric when it was much simpler to counterpose the so-called good war in Afghanistan with the bad one in Iraq.

Never mind that now; he is committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy.

And that, I think, is another reason so many people are reluctant to employ truthful descriptions for the emerging Afghanistan-Pakistan confrontation: American liberals can't quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he has said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that, not less.