I'm not for Obama (or anyone else, yet) and don't want to invade Pakistan...BUT...

[WilliamPitt]

This isn't meant to be an Obama defense (and I'm noting that because I have chosen no candidate yet), but the issues he raised regarding Pakistan are legitimately dangerous, and we'd be sub-smart to lump it in with Bush's Terra War gibberish. For reference, his entire statement is here:

http://www.barackobama.com/2007/08/01/the_war_we_need_to_win.php

The situation in Pakistan and that region isn't just more fear-noise, but is actually and seriously perilous on many levels and on a global scale.

Basically, Musharraf is holding on to his coup-snatched power by the skin of his teeth. There is a strong contingent of Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan who enjoy ideological ties to the Taliban across the border, they're a big reason why the region is again a safety zone for that crew. Oh, yeah, and also Bush took all our bombs and planes and guns and stuff out of there and sent them to Iraq, which helped to reform that safety thing, you could sorta say.

The fundamentalists in Pakistan do not like Musharraf at all, and it is basically a miracle he held on this long after making nice with Bush about attacking Afghanistan. His enemies don't hold much separation between themselves and their like-minded friends in Afghanistan, so Musharraf's cuddle with Bush as the bombs flew was a Musharraf atack on them all. About two weeks ago, some guys fired missiles at Musharraf's plane and barely missed; there have been riots and near-revolts all over, because they want him out and a Tali-sorta fundamentalist government in.

Pakistan has several nukes.

How nervous does this make our military guys?

Just after the Afghanistan attack, we stationed a special-ops team in Pakistan who had only one mission. It was a great big mission, though. If Musharraf's regime falls, their mission is to grab up all those nukes and fly them the whole entire Hell out of there, and do so before anyone else can.

If Musharraf falls, and our guys lose that nuclear footrace, things get bleak in a hurry. We won't even get a chance to deal with the idea of Taliban-allied fundamentalists possessing nukes, because three seconds after Musharraf goes down and nine seconds after "They have the nukes," the whole world will hear India throw down a roof-raising moon-cracking supernova freakout, and they also have nukes, and don't like Pakistan at all, and what is merely a very dangerous flashpoint today will become An Unmanageably Terrifying And Deadly Thing...oh, and psssst, China's right up there, too, so factor them in.

We have to factor this into any comprehensive analysis of the Terra War, because this is the stuff that isn't baloney. Any serious mayhem in Pakistan could set off a chain of events that may quickly bloom into multiple no-bullshit horrorshows and a lot of un-fun consequences for pretty much everyone on the planet. That entire region - Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Kashmir, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, China, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan - is a great big cask of old TNT, and old TNT weeps nitroglycerine, which is so unstable that even small vibrations can cause detonation...

...and, yeah, the vibrations in that region might be considered a point of concern, maybe, seeing as how insurgent Islamic radicalism, prickly Indian nationalism, Tamil Tiger terrorists, Bangladeshi poverty, Uzbeki proto-Stalinism, Afghani opium gluts, bi-annual Pak-India warfare for Kashmir, the sediment of resentment from the Pak-India split, still thickly layered over the bedrock of post-colonial havoc, that whole China deal, Black Sea pipe dreams, mineral rights, natural gas, Unocal and friends, buried riches to beggar avarice, positioning for possible resource war between China, Russia and us, three tiers of combat on Zbignew's Grand Chessboard, all this is a ball of immesurable tensions only scantly described here, and of course, mustn't forget those oh-so-spicy nuclear arsenals and very large armies. If Pakistan goes postal, we will be presented with the potential for Worst Case Scenario Nos. 1-7 to unspool themselves into some no-bullshit sniffs of catastrophe.

NOTE WELL that I'm not talking about, or buying into, any of those Feith-Cheney fantasy scenarios involving cardboard Iraqi gliders flying off fishing boats to gas Nantucket, or that "No one could have anticipated" our commercial airplanes getting menaced by block cheese. That's what they use to make people afraid, to make people stop thinking, to make them fall in line and go shopping and obey.

The stuff I'm talking about, the stuff Obama mentioned, is the stuff those Bush guys don't talk about, not ever, maybe not even among themselves, because it is the Real Stuff. If they tell us about it, and we start to understand how fragile the deal is, it'll dawn on everyone that these galactically inept dunderheads are the ones laying hands on the dynamite, and we'll flip all the way out, so they don't talk about it, because they're terrified of it, too.

Tease it out, just a sketch.

Musharraf falls, the radicals beat us to the nukes, India hits whatever the threat level is beyond Defcon 1, China bristles, armies roll, the possibility of an exchange of nukes rises exponentially with every bullet fired, but the whole world is under the bed because no one can say where the Pak nukes are, and every city trembles, Israel considers glassing every neighbor within reach of the fuel tanks on their bombers, Bush starts flexing his Executive Order muscles in a push towards martial law here, because these people don't like us, and the borders are porous...

...And a day comes when some Osama-like person gains posession of a Pak bomb and orders the Saudi government to dissolve and flee or face the nuke, and the Wahabbist hard-core in Saudi Arabia swarms into power, and now it's their oil, the global economic nutsack is in a vice, we stagger towards invasion, someone else invades, everyone invades, and you can see the fires from space, our economy falls apart as oil prices surpass madness and produce doesn't ship and restaurants shutter and supermarkets are barren and China gets wobbly with war in their sphere which means China's massive stores of our debt go wobbly, the constitution is over and there are troops in the street...

...and that's one of the good-news versions where no American city gets nuked, but nothing needs to get nuked for this to become a nightmare.

Lots of "if" and "maybe" and "could" in there, no doubt, but only when the worst potentials are rolled out. This isn't plastic sheeting and duct tape stuff. This is what they don't talk about, for while they do deliberately instigate chaos and violence, they know any chaos in that region is chaos beyond their skill set.

Should we invade Pakistan? Jesus, no...but I'm not exactly comfortable with putting a "Never" stamp on that, and respect that Obama didn't do so, because some of this stuff is fully real and deadly dangerous, and the lesson of Poland still has some merit.

Hoo. Went long. Thoughts?