Out and About

This whole business about the leader of the Pakistani Taliban running loose and making public appearances in Pakistan under the terms of a very lenient accommodation Pervez Musharraf reached with him kind of seems like a problem. I'm not sure statements like "there can be no deal with the United States" should necessarily be taken at face value, but it's clearly cause for concern.

Now I don't think withdrawing a couple of brigades from Iraq and throwing them into Pakistan is necessarily the correct way to express that concern, but given that the Afghanistan-Pakistan area is where our biggest problem seems to be, it would be nice for that region -- rather than Iraq -- to be the main focus of not only our material resources but perhaps most importantly of the time and attention of folks at CENTCOM, the NSC, the White House and so forth. Instead, this whole area is getting treated like an afterthought.