Qaeda Regroups?

It's hard to know what to make of the big NYT story today. Pakistan has long been the biggest shoe to drop in the Islamist terror war. If al Qaeda can use the remote regions of Pakistan for a new base, they don't need Anbar or Afghanistan. And the beauty of it, from their point of view, is that any Western attempt to coerce Musharraf into wiping al Qaeda out in Waziristan could backfire, and give the Islamist forces within Pakistan, and within its military and intelligence services, an opportunity to challenge the entire regime. So we're damned if we hang back; and we're damned if we go on the offensive. Meanwhile, the good news that Sunni Iraq might have more oil than once thought is tempered in my mind by an obvious worry. Will this one day be al Qaeda's oil-field? How will we guarantee that Anbar province, even under optimal circumstances, couldn't become a base for Islamist or Sunni terrorists, financed by oil? I guess our best hope is that they would attack Iran before the West. But it's a close call.