I'm no expert on Pakistan, so I asked someone who is, a native of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas who has an excellent track record of careful analysis of events here.

He does not regard the situation as hopeless, mainly because he believes the people of FATA are very much fed up with Al Qaeda. But he also thinks the Pakistani Army and the government in Islamabad have limited usefulness. Instead he points to the regional government in Peshawar, which he believes could assert control over FATA using the Pakistani police and frontier corps, with support from the Army. This should be accompanied, he thought, by a major change in the status of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, including elimination of their outmoded special legal regime, which is today much resented (and blatantly violates international standards of due process and respect for individual rights).

I can't offer expert testimony in favor of this "Peshawar" approach, but given the rather gloomy prognostications from the commentators, and experience elsewhere that suggests local people are a whole lot better at gaining control of their communities than outsiders, it is at least worth contemplating. It seems no crazier to me than suggesting in 2005 that the solution in Iraq's Anbar province would be a rising of Sunni tribes against Al Qaeda!

National Journal’s national security bloggers generally agree that the situation in Pakistan is dire. There has been less consensus on what Washington’s response should be, though the various suggestions include:

a) Taking a deep breath.

b) Redoubling efforts to prop up the Pakistani government and security forces.

c) Praying for a military coup.

d) Abandoning Neo-Colonial notions such as failed states and nation-building.

e) Just washing our hands of the entire quagmire.

f) All of the above.

To summarize:

Joe Collins notes that at this rate, in six-month’s time Pakistan could be divided into “Good Old Pakistan” in the major, secular urban areas, and the “Islamic Republic of Berkistan” nearly everywhere else. He notes that the United States can only help the Pakistani government if it is willing to help itself, primarily by stopping the political infighting that has distracted it from the growing threat of Islamic militancy, and abandoning the notion that Islamic militant groups are somehow a useful foreign policy tool.

Michael Vlahos posits that we are in a period of transition from Late Modernity to an Early Middle Ages model of society, with Pakistan as Exhibit A. By any standards of Western Modernity, he argues, “Greater Pakistan” is already a failed nation. He believes that the Neo-Colonial response of U.S. nation-building in such instances only makes matters worse by loosening the grip of Pakistani elites over their tribal clients. Best for the United States to just leave the region, hopefully allowing the elite “dukes” of Pakistan and Afghanistan to reassert their control and leverage over the local tribes.

Patrick Lang argues that the notion of Pakistan was a bad idea from the beginning, creating a nation founded on the premise that certain people cannot share a country with those of a different religion. He suggests we pray for a military coup.

Ron Marks notes that both Iran and India have a stake in avoiding a “radicalized” Pakistan, which could create some levers of influence, but he concludes that the United States will be stuck propping up an “anyone but the Taliban” government in Pakistan, almost regardless of its nature.

Michael Scheuer blames the quagmire in Pakistan on three U.S. errors: Insisting on nation-building in neighboring Afghanistan rather than just hammering Al Qaeda; turning on former Pakistani military strongman Pervez Musharraf when the going got tough for him; and adopting Cold War assumptions that Pakistan will obediently act as a U.S. surrogate in fighting our enemies, aka the Taliban. He suggests the Pakistani military could just bribe the Taliban and associated militant groups to just focus their violence on U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, which he thinks is a lost cause regardless.

Bruce Hoffman believes that if the U.S. government does not help Pakistan deny Al Qaeda an ever-expanding sanctuary, another 9/11-type attack on America is inevitable. He hopefully notes that the Obama administration has recognized south Asia as the central battleground in the war on terror, adopted a regional approach to a regional threat, assembled a very experienced team that has developed a comprehensive new strategy, and will benefit from a U.S. military steeped in counter-insurgency doctrine and experience. The Pakistan military, he argues, must now take advantage of that counter-insurgency expertise in shaping its own response to the militants. In the meantime, let the Predator’s missiles fly in the tribal areas.

Paul Pillar suggests we all take a deep breath. Screaming headlines that the Taliban are within 60 miles of the capital suggests a conventional battlefield where the militants are intent on taking and holding territory until they over-run and capture Islamabad. Instead, he notes, the secular, urban areas of Pakistan reject the fundamentalism of the Taliban, and the Pakistani army remains by far the most powerful institution and actor in the country. Recent Taliban gains and taunts may even helpfully awaken the army from its slumber. In the meantime, he cautions the Obama administration against putting too many eggs in the basket of Pakistan President Asif Zadari, and against indiscriminate Predator strikes that provoke anti-American sentiment.

That’s it to date national security bloggers. Feel free to enter the fray, the United States needs all the good ideas on this problem that we can muster!

International politics is essentially a self help system, so we should ask: what Pakistan can do to save itself?

First, it needs a good estimate of the situation. Ray Charles could see that the country is coming apart. Another 6 months like the last 6 months, and Pakistan will be, de facto, two states: Good Old Pakistan (Sind, Punjab, Parts of NWFP and Baluchistan), and the Islamic Republic of Bezerkistan (FATA, and parts of Baluchistan and NWFP). This cannot profit anyone except the masked men, wearing black turbans, and carrying AK-47s. Fix: Pakistan must go to war to keep the country in tact, playing one rival Taliban group against the other. Restore Order, and in the long run, turn the FATA into governed space where the laws of civilized nations rule.

Second, having scared themselves to death, Pakistan has to review the basics of geopolitics. President Zadari might ask his Generals and his diplomats a question. If the enemy of a US enemy is a US ally, than the ally of a US enemy is ....? The answer for those in Pakistan not paying attention is ENEMY. If you support the Afghan Taliban, you are the ENEMY of the United States and a friend of Al Qaeda to boot. Moreover, it might occur to those Pakistani officials who like movies that they are in the same pickle as Dr Frankenstein. They created the Taliban monster to have "their boys" in Kabul. Now the boys (and their cousins) are coming after them. Pakistan is in greater danger than Afghanistan. Fix: Pres. Zadari should, in addition to fighting all of the Taliban by the best means available, swear off the use of violent extremist groups as an arm of Pakistani policy. Radical groups should be rounded up or perhaps integrated into the Pakistani Armed Forces.

Third, to support the fight against radicals in the West, Pakistan will need to lessen the threat in the East. With US help, Pakistan should undertake confidence building measures with India. India, for its part, should wake up to the fact that Good Old Pakistan is highly preferable to Bezerkistan on its borders. Just as Pakistan has a vested interest in helping Afghanistan, India has a vested interest in a stable Pakistan. Both sides could afford to pull back dozens of divisions. India can use them for many purposes, and Pakistan could commit theirs to ending the Taliban insurrection.

Fourth, none of the above bits of commonsense are possible if Pakistani politics remains a set of games: democrats versus democrats; soldiers versus civilians; and opponents of radicals versus appeasers of radicals. The good guys in Pakistan must get their act together. I have no bit of alchemy to turn this base metal into gold, but a house divided will fall, and the Pakistani bungalow is already groaning on unprogrammed stress on the frame. One hopes that being sufficiently scared that somehow, someway the survival instinct will take over and the government of Pakistan will begin to act decisively in its own self interest.

If Pakistan does all of this, then the US job will be a piece of cake. Aid and advisors will work as planned, and economic aid will not end up in someone's desk drawer or diverted to military purposes having to do with a putative war with India. If the Pakistani's don't unite politically and begin to work for their own salvation, nothing Uncle Sugar does will amount to a bucket of warm spit. In the end, we may be able to save Afghanistan but have to watch the de facto partition of Pakistan.

Like congregant responses during a liturgy, incanting “failed state” has a ritual function. Its invocation highlights how we embrace a homiletic vision of American history.

The homily is intended as public celebration of our national sacred narrative. Listening, we hear blessed words like “destiny” — so jubilantly voiced after the invasion of Iraq — but also terms of dread sanction like “failed state.”

Notice how “failed state” represents a loss of virtue: a burning brand on nation states fallen from grace. Notice too how we have sculpted the gargoyle “failed state” — like Somalia or Sudan — as a place apparently so barbarous and primitive that even a whiff of global-public association is like an accusation of witchcraft: Hence Calderon’s plea and prostration — I am not a failed state! — But also Zardari’s anxious renunciations.

If we could only see this ritual exploitation of “failed state” then we might also see its instrumental purpose as liturgical bludgeon. “Failed state” is used like a truncheon to keep the nation-state order inline and intact. Our homily of history tells us that humanity must continue to progress toward a “liberal” nation-state world order.

But it is not progressing. Yet neither does the alternative represent failure. Pakistan is not a failed state, or Mexico or El Salvador or Iraq or Nigeria or ...

More and more human places that we herald as “failing” are in fact not in danger of failure. These are so often societies with tribal-national identities and titular elite-established regimes, and they work just fine, thank you.

Not so unlike societies that worked just fine in the Early Middle Ages: Because we are back to that future now, and we have arrived.

Pakistan is a perfectly well functioning early medieval society. What do I mean? First, please jettison all homiletic tropes about the Early Middle Ages. That epoch was not “dark” or even very rude compared to its slave-predecessor, the world of Late Antiquity. But the Early Middle Ages did function very differently, especially in terms of its disaggregated governance.

Read this wonderfully illuminating book: State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: The Middle Rhine Valley. Matthew Innes distills the transformation from Roman administration to what came after in the 7th century, to this:

"The state could not define the terms of local power … local elites … had to build up their power through the manipulation of personal relationships and social loyalties; the public domain therefore came to be defined by patterns of elite sociability, rather than the legitimacy of the state."

So what does this amazing insight tell us? We are living today in Late Modernity’s transition into another Early Middle Ages: As in, the onset and the spreading towards.

Look at the “politics” of Kenya or Iraq or scores of societies, and you will see worlds governed not by civic institutions but rather by “elite sociability.” Elite sociability rules: As it surely does in Pakistan. The civic institutions of Greco-Roman Antiquity — I mean, Western Modernity — have just about as much play in this spreading world scene as they did in 7th century Europe. Which is to say that lawyers in Lahore and Islamabad still leverage working civic institutions of constitutional governance: as they once did vibrantly in key Bishoprics, in city nodes like Rome or Pavia or Toulouse. But the rulers of Pakistan, like Zardari, draw their strength from the manicured Latifundial rural world of Sindh and Punjab or from the Army.

[I explore all of this and more in a series in The Globalist, based on my book, Fighting Identity. The first parts are here http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=7647 and here http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=7641 with more to come on Mexico and Pakistan.]

We want Pakistan — and everyone else — to keep moving toward our halo-vision. But they will not. Their world is on a different schedule, and it is going to a different place. Even knowing this we might do so much to mitigate security threats to us. But rather than mitigating, our earnest and energetic interventions are actually inflaming and growing the threat.

The problem with today’s Early Medieval Pakistan is that its dukes and senators have lost control of once-reliable but now insurgent tribal clients. Much of this is a consequence of longstanding and aggressive US intervention going back to 1979. Now the counts and dukes and senators at the center have lost the special leverage in tribal relationships that allowed them to achieve — for a moment — a Greater Pakistan. The army dukes and seigneurial senators have lost that vital authority.

What have we done? Our homiletic tropes of “stability” and of saving “failed states” reveal an American Neo-Colonial Mind. This is not a dishonorable provenance. British Victorians — our predecessors — did not roar in like plundering Conquistadores into Nigeria or Natal and Boer Africa or Egypt and Sudan. They were sucked in, worrying all the while about “national security threats” and “stability” and their own quaint lexicon of “failed states.” Yet “necessary” occupations turned ineluctably into nation building — and then the ongoing tutelage of rule.

We are going down that same path, but in an era — starkly hostile to a Victorian sensibility — where the world zeitgeist is not with us.

The issue is not whether Pakistan will soon collapse — It has already collapsed in the terms of Western Modernity. It is no longer a part of our homiletic vision of things to come. Pakistan has not and will never join the narrative we embraced as “The End of History.” If we have the courage to back out soon the dukes and senators of Pakistan might yet reclaim a dispensatory quid pro quo — and again rein in their tribes — just enough in media eye so that the “nation” of Pakistan continues to be believed in the United Nations and other bodies. That is how “Pakistan” will survive in the world mind.

Because even in the Early Middle Ages “states” wanted to be taken seriously, at least in the eyes of Constantinople or Baghdad — the world centers — even if their governance was rooted merely, if also effectively, in “elite sociability.”

Like the rest of you I have puzzled over what to do in Pakistan. To say that there are no good solutions for the growing menace of takfiri jihadism is so banal and obvious that it is embarassing to type the words. Nevertheless...

Pakistan, like Belgium was a bad idea. To create a state as a haven for those who can not accept the thought of abiding with those who differ religiously from them, is a poisonous idea, bound to lead to bitter and probably endless conflict, and, it has. Muslims could not have lived comfortably in an independent India? The example of today's India gives the lie to that.

Now we have a country (Pakistan) forever tempted by its founding ethos of intolerance that possesses deliverable nuclear weapons and an air force that could do the job. Avigdor Lieberman is quoted lately as saying that Pakistan is potentially much more dangerous to Israel than Iran. He is correct. A Pakistan controlled by Islamist clergy could probably find a few pilots interested in a one way trip to shihada. Afghanistan is a side show compared to the deadly menace that would be presented by a Pakistan under radically new management.

Earlier posters are correct in writing that the Pakistani Army remains the dominant institution in the country and the most important political chess piece. The COIN enthusiasts now emerging as the fad of the moment in American government should be ignored with regard to Pakistan. This problem is too important to be left to them.

We should pray that Musharraf or someone remarkably like him has sufficient support from the Pakistan Army to return to power and save the situation before it is too late

Well, I follow this august trio of colleagues with great trepidation. I am but a simple, humble intelligence and policy expert with no regional insights. But allow me some thoughts on the regional political end of this firecracker called Pakistan.

Mark Twain once said, an inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war. I think America is stuck trying to keep an inglorious peace in Pakistan and prop up whatever "non-Taliban" regime is in power in Islamabad. Sadly, we are the only power capable of doing it and are, as they say, already in the area. And, while we are certainly right to question what a stinking quagmire we have stepped into, I don't know what other choice we have. All my colleagues have run the horrid litany -- a potential Taliban influenced state, a radical state with nuclear weapons, etc., etc.

Let me suggest another not so nice thought -- neither neighbors India nor Iran are going to be thrilled by a radicalized Pakistan. While Iran loves its low key war against the US, it has been lukewarm at best about a radicalized Afghanistan. A Sunni Pakistan with a strong Taliban influence and nuclear weapons is not likely to make Tehran smile.

As for India, the other scorpion in the bottle of South Asia, I can't imagine them accepting a radicalized nuclear Pakistan. While it is probably unlikely, India might strike hard and fast militarily against such a perceived "clear and present" danger. Though, in the aftermath of a war (which India would likely win) whether New Delhi wants its own version of a FATA from the remains of Pakistan on its new border is up for question.

Bottom line: whether we like it or not, Washington is stuck with propping up the current government in Islamabad to prevent an area wide disaster. It is, however, going to be a long term "war of attrition" with a lot of perilous moments including the waxing and waning of Taliban influence and an ever changing Pakistan governments powered by an ever changing series of strong men.

The current situation in Pakistan is the result of three factors: (a) U.S. intervention in Afghanistan to build a democracy instead of simply obliterating al-Qaeda and the Taleban as quickly as possible after 9/11 with whatever force was necessary; (b) U.S. intervention to knife its best ally - General Musharraf -- in the name of democracy and the return to power of the Zadari family of spectacular kleptomaniacs; and, (3) residual Republican and Democratic Cold War thinking that believes Pakistan will be our surrogate in destroying America's enemies.

Today, we are watching the worm turn and the key, as Professor Pillar said, is the Pakistani army. There is no reason that the Army has to tolerate al-Qaeda, the Taleban, and the Pashtun tribes as enemies for much longer; indeed, they are only enemies of Pakistan at the moment because Musharraf chose to help his ultimate over-throwers in Washington. Having ample access to Saudi money and much pertinent experience, the Pakistani army and ISID can simply begin a broad covert effort to fund, train, and arm the Taleban and the Pashtuns in return for their agreement to turn westward against the U.S., NATO, and the Karzai regime. Over time this effort will ease violence in Pakistan's border regions; remove the West and India from Afghanistan; and restore a functioning Sunni Islamist regime in Kabul -- all of which are priorities for Pakistan’s national security policy.

The game is over in Afghanistan for the U.S. and NATO, and Karzai is a dead man walking. The most interesting question is how the current U.S.-NATO garrison; the Afghan military, police, and security services; and 26,000 new U.S. and NATO troops are going to be supplied when all resupply routes run through enemy territory in Pashtun tribal lands and the Commonwealth of Independent States? One wonders what course at West Point instructs America's generals-in-the-making to deploy an army in a geographic box surrounded by enemies and without full control over essential resupply routes? The planning that should be a priority at the moment is how to supply all those forces by airlift and/or how to withdraw from Afghanistan under duress.

Neither the Zardari government nor the U.S. has much choice in this respect. Our fates to an extent are intertwined. If 9/11 has taught us anything is that al Qaeda and its allies are most dangerous when they have a sanctuary or a safe haven from which to securely plot and plan terrorist attacks on a grand international scale. They manifestly already own that sanctuary in the FATA, an ever-expanding part of the NWFP and now a swath of territory nearing Islamabad. Al Qaeda’s most fervent, wildest dream (which seems not altogether unlikely) would be a failed state that they have actively helped to subvert and that would consolidate their influence in South Asia and in turn their undisputed leadership pretensions as the champion of global jihad. If allowed to continue to go unchecked, Pakistan’s current, continued drift into anarchy, disorder and religious totalitarianism ensures that the next 9/11 in either Europe or America will surely be only a matter of time. You don’t have to have seen the end of the film “Charlie Wilson’s War” to be able to write this scenario.

Accordingly, in these circumstances this is no time——in Margaret Thatcher’s famous admonition to George Bush senior in August 1990——to “go all wobbly.” In fact, while the situation in Pakistan is indeed grave, the U.S. in several respects is better placed to help Pakistan reverse the rising tide of jihadism submerging the country than at any time in the recent past:

• First, is the Obama Administration’s unambiguous recognition that, in contrast to the previous administration’s policy, south Asia is in fact (and, arguably, has always been) the central front in the war on terrorism;

• Second, is the belated, but necessary realization of the synergistic security implications of Pakistan-Afghanistan-India-Iran-the Central Asian Republics that was absent from the previous administration’s approach;

• Third, is the concerted, detailed high-level attention that this issue has received through the multiple reviews conducted by the NSC, DoD, etc and the appointment of special envoys like Ambassador Holbrooke (in contrast to the immediate past when south Asia was mostly ignored because of the Bush Administration’s preoccupation with Afghanistan);

• Fourth, is the continuity, experience, expertise and institutional knowledge of the national security team assembled over the past couple of years by General Lute at the NSC that remains in place;

• Fifth, is the superb in-country team at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad led by Ambassador Ann Patterson——who is no stranger to Herculean counterinsurgency tasks as former ambassador to Colombia——and Rear Admiral Michael LeFever——who is very familiar with Pakistan, and has close ties with the Pakistani military, as a result of his having commandws the U.S. military disaster relief assistance effort following Pakistan’s devastating 2005 earthquake; and,

• Sixth is the new, state-of the-art knowledge and experience in counterinsurgency and host nation training that the U.S. learned from Iraq and General Petraeus, its architect’s presence as CENTCOM commander, among other “plus-es” in an admittedly very fraught and worrisome situation.

None of the above, to be sure, is any guarantee of success: that is up to Pakistan and especially the hitherto ineffective government led by President Zardari. But even with respect to the most important Pakistani government institution at least, the situation, though grave, is not hopeless. Pakistan has an army of 520,000 personnel——with a reserve element of 500,000. With proper training, equipment and most critically motivation and will, it could be transformed into a military force capable both of countering the militant threat and engaging in attendant vitally important non-kinetic counterinsurgency operations. Its capabilities and resolve——and those of the government——require immediate and continued strengthening and U.S. support. This support should, inter alia, include or continue to include:

• An immediate surge of expanded U.S. military assistance in the form of additional training personnel, hardware (e.g., night-vision goggles, assault helicopters), and COIN training and COIN doctrinal assistance;

• Re-doubled efforts to focus the Pakistan military on a population-centric approach to counterinsurgency that seizes ground from the militants and effectively protects and secures the Pakistani people from the Taliban’s threats and depredations. Adoption of the famed “oil spot” strategy would be an essential means to jump-start this process by ensuring the security of areas threatened by the militants but still under government control; while simultaneously spreading outward to contested areas; and, eventually cauterizing and isolating the most hardcore militant areas;

• Pushing the Pakistan military towards equally critical non-kinetic COIN operations involving relief and reconstruction in regions such as Bajour where anti-militant operations last summer created massive population displacement and destruction of civilian infrastructure and areas of the SWAT Valley where recent Pakistani military operations similarly alienated the local populace and in effect drove them into the Taliban’s arms;

• Continuation, even intensification, of the Predator and Reaper strikes that have systematically eliminated nearly half of al Qaeda’s known senior leadership and are obviously impacting Pakistani militants as well given Beitullah Mehsud’s recent threats to attack the U.S. and up tick in Pakistan Taliban attacks in Lahore. Now is the time to step up those attacks——while ensuring that they target militants and not inadvertently killed civilians——and not ratcheting them down. Revealingly, polls of Pakistani in the frontier areas where these unmanned aerial attacks have occurred actually support them. More and better U.S.-backed Pakistani government and military information operations need to be done to highlight this and counter arguments from pundits in Islamabad and Washington who continue to claim that these unmanned are ineffective and counterproductive;

• Focused information operations in the SWAT Valley and elsewhere to counter the militant’s promiscuous and unhindered use of FM radio transmissions as a key instrument of anti-government propaganda and radicalization. In addition to the creation of more government FM stations and focused information operations to counter the militant’s messages, the Pakistani authorities need to be provided immediately with sophisticated technological means to jam and frustrate the militant’s use of the FM medium;

• Making clear to the Zadari government that there can be no more deals or no negotiations with the Taliban until the latter are broken and forced into talks from a position of abject weakness and not, as has been the case, from a position of perceived strength;

• U.S. assurances to press Pakistan’s case before the World Bank and IMF for loans and other financial assistance as a condition for the Pakistan’s full and effective embrace of the essential COIN approaches detailed above; and,

• Active U.S. engagement of key international and regional players like China, India, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, and European Union similarly to actively become involved in providing financial and other assistance because of the threat that a failed Pakistani state, controlled by militants, inevitably poses to them as well.

The above is just a sample of the initiatives that could and should be (and in many cases are currently being) pursued. They illustrate that there are still options to arrest Pakistan’s drift into anarchy and that, while dire, the situation is not beyond repair. Moreover, unlike Iraq six years ago, for the U.S. this is by no means a war of choice.

Updated at 12:25 p.m. on April 27.

Hyperbolic rhetoric on Pakistan—about it supposedly being on the verge of falling completely into the hands of crazed, turban-wearing fundamentalists who will push the country back to the dark ages while using its nuclear weapons for goodness knows what—may serve the purposes of getting Pakistani leaders’ attention and getting support for aid packages in Congress. But understanding what is going on in Pakistan requires a deep breath and some perspective. Headlines that the Taliban is now “60 miles from Islamabad” make conflict in Pakistan sound like a World War II-style battle front, with visions of Taliban tanks rolling triumphantly into the Palistani capital any day now. The conflict is nothing like that. And the Pakistani Taliban is not an advancing army but instead a loose collection of radical militias that have dominated the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and more recently have gained increased influence in some nearby portions of the Northwest Frontier Province and some parts of thinly populated Baluchistan.

Any further expansion of influence by the Taliban will bump up against two continuing and major Pakistani realities. One is the dominant sentiment in the much more heavily populated “settled areas” of Pakistan, including the politically central province of Punjab. That sentiment is predominantly secular and hostile to the medieval fundamentalism of the Taliban. Even the more moderate, nonviolent, legally recognized Islamic parties have not drawn broad support from Pakistanis except when a banning of the major secular parties left little alternative.

The other major reality is that the Pakistani army is still the strongest institution in the country, and shows no sign of acquiescing in a loss of its most important institutional prerogatives (including control of those nuclear weapons). The army’s disappointing operational tempo in confronting the Taliban is partly a problem of willingness: the army has never completely broken with the idea that radical militias whose ideologies may otherwise be anathema to most officers are nevertheless useful tools for hedging bets in Afghanistan and for keeping the Indians off-balance in Kashmir. It also is partly a matter of capability: the Pakistani army is trained, organized, and equipped to conduct armored warfare against India, not counterinsurgency in the northwest.

Paradoxically, the United States has more interest in some events in Pakistan—because of the possibility of terrorism emanating from them and hitting U.S. interests elsewhere—than the Pakistanis themselves do. As in other cases, responses from the government in question depend on their leaders seeing action as in their interest even without any interest or pressure from the United States. In this regard, some of the Taliban’s recent gains may have a silver lining in that they increase the likelihood that Pakistani leaders will be more likely to see a fresh attempt to crack down on the Taliban as in their interests.

The U.S. administration appears to be taking a sound approach in offering Pakistan military equipment but only on condition that counterinsurgent capabilities will be improved, including through the requisite training and not just equipment. While pursuing this course, the United States needs to avoid two pitfalls. One is to place too many chips on any one leader, as the previous administration tended to do with Pervez Musharraf. Asif Zardari is a slender reed on which to lean, as an accidental president with plenty of personal baggage. We should be willing and prepared to work with any Pakistani leader who matters, be it the president, prime minister, or chief of army staff.

The other pitfall involves focusing too narrowly on the direct kinetic benefits of missile strikes in the northwest, and too little on the indirect effects, including resentment and anger among Pakistanis from the collateral damage. The issue already has complicated whatever hope there is for more forceful action against the Taliban, by providing an issue for more Pakistanis to be upset about than the latest inroads in Swat or Buner.