Not A Messiah, But A Prophet?

As bizzaro worldish as this sounds, could Light-Bringer have seen something last summer that the rest of American officialdom is only recognizing now?:

US troops in Afghanistan massed close to the border yesterday for a possible attack on al-Qaeda and Taleban bases in the lawless North Waziristan tribal belt in Pakistan.

Reports from the area said that hundreds of NATO troops were airlifted across the mountains from the village of Lowara Mandi, which has been an important base for cross-border attacks in Afghanistan. Heavy artillery and armoured vehicles were also being moved into position.

The deployment followed a claim by the Afghan Government on Monday that the Pakistani Army and its spy agency had become “the world’s biggest producers of terrorism and extremism”. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry accused Kabul of creating an “artificial crisis to satisfy short-term political expediencies”. …

Western commanders say there has been a marked increase in cross-border infiltration in the past few months, fuelling the insurgency in Afghanistan. NATO troops have clashed with Pakistani units along the South Waziristan border.

Well, this would seem to stand to reason.  Pervez Musharraf only barely managed to keep his pro-Islamist intelligence agency (which, if you'll recall, originally installed and propped up the Taliban in next-door Afghanistan in the first place) on a leash of any sort, much less a tight one, and his power as de facto military dictator was practically unrestrained.  Since he yielded to the return of "democracy," and subsequent elections brought Obamaesque pacifists to power, Pakistan has ceased being an ally in the war on terror, and its spooks have slipped their leash and gone back into the terrorism business in earnest.

I ask again the rhetorical question I've been asking periodically over the past seven months: Is Middle East "democracy" that we don't personally oversee really the boon it's been made out to be?  At least before the war has been won?  Because the popular will of Pakistanis was neutrality (at best), now we're confronted with the burgeoning nightmare of al Qaeda having not only a better sanctuary than they had next door, but a bunch of weak-willed, empty-headed fools in Islamabad that will be easy pickings for bin Laden, Mehsud and company.  If we do nothing, the terrorists are free to at the least establish their new base of operations in Waziristan and resume their overseas offensive against the West; if we whine to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani - um, sorry, "practice tough diplomacy" - we'll look even weaker than if we just remained mute and passive; and if we do intervene anything less than decisively, we'll stampede the Pakistani electorate right into al Qaeda's hands, and they won't even have to overthrow Gilani to get their hands on the Pak nuclear arsenal.

It's all well and good for Darth Queeg to propose an Afghanistan "surge" adapted from the Petraeus model that succeeded in Iraq.  But we've already made great strides towards stabilizing Afghanistan over the past couple of years along those same lines by the simple expedient of taking the war to the "insurgents" and massacring them en masse.  The problem is less how the "insurgency" is being fed from Pakistan than that, as was the problem in Iraq, the sanctuary they are being bequeathed from which to wreak all manner of other, more dangerous havoc.

Iran was masterminding the overall undermining of Iraq, but they have other ways (their terrorist networks, their nuclear weapons program) to "exert their regional influence."  And that country was lost to the West thirty years ago.  Pakistan is teetering in the balance, and if it falls, all kinds of worm cans will open like Pandora's boxes - a formal alliance with newly nuclear Iran, regional nuclear war against both Israel to the west and India to the east, a horrifying escalation of the terror war against the west.

What would President Obama do about this doomsday scenario?  Or President McCain, for that matter?  Both claim to favor redeploying U.S. troops to Afghanistan as they're able to be safely drawn down from Iraq, but how would that stabilize Pakistan?  Would the Iranians even allow us to do so, whether by re-upping their meddling in Iraq or Afghanistan or even a move against Pakistan itself?  Hell, will Democrats allow an escalation, ANYwhere?

What will happen?  What else?  We'll get sucked into it piecemeal between now and next January, after which Lucifer may or may not pay lip service to his version of an escalation.  If he does, congressional Dems will whip his ass and restore his lib orthodoxy for him.  Either way, there'll be two pell-mell American retreats going on side-by-side, as Pakistan slides into Islamist darkness, and the Middle East, and the planet along with it, plummets ever faster toward catastrophic war.

I hope the Avatar is stocking up on his magic wand supply.  He'll be burning through them in one helluva hurry.