What Nobody Wants to Talk About

The Bush administration's biggest failing, in some sense, is probably its continued inability to get its Pakistan policy straight. At the same time, this is the area of national policy where most people, myself included, are probably disposed to cut them some slack: I'm not hearing tons of bright ideas for alternative policies.

And there's the rub. In a different sense, one of the ways the country as a whole has gone most badly awry is that thanks to the Bush administration's decision to drag us into a giant conversation about first Iraq and now Iran, people are spending very little time thinking about the harder problems of the country that already has nuclear weapons, whose government seems both unstable and not genuinely in control of its territory, etc. At any rate, I'm incredibly sick and may not post much today, so I'll blame my inability to devise an appropriate five point plan for Pakistan on the illness and let the rest of you figure it out.