Our Half-hearted Ally

In my first post I stated that Pakistan is at best a half-hearted supporter in our war on terrorism. We cannot count on them to capture Osama Bin Laden, because they view the Taliban and the terrorists more favorably than Hussein's Iraq did.

An article in The Week magazine this week pretty much confirms my opinion (see the Musharraf link in my side bar). No doubt Musharraf believes that if he is too hard on the Taliban he risks a coup that would put his nuclear weapons in the hands of the terrorists. He is probably right. So there he is, doing just enough to convince President Bush that he is helping us against Al Qaida, but just little enough not to enrage the Taliban hard liners.

This is typical of Middle East leaders--they offer only half of a solution. We saw the same thing in Jordan with Palestinian terrorists, and in Lebanon with Hezbollah. Dictatorship or democracy, the governments pretend to be everyone's friend and nobody's enemy. Yet they cannot understand why Westerners do not trust them.

Musharraf has put President Bush in exactly the same position. Bush stated that a nation who harbors terrorists is just as much our enemy as the terrorists are. But he has allied with Musharraf's Pakistan, which harbors terrorists. It's very little consolation that Pakistan is a democracy and Iraq was a dictatorship. There does not seem to be a better alternative.