I am a rock

The “rock-solid” go-to guy in the Bush Administration’s grandest of grand strategies… our-man-in-Islamabad… Generalissimo Presidentissimo Pervez Musharaf of Pakistan… has just tendered his resignation in the face of an almost certainly-successful impeachment initiative in Pakistan’s newly resurgent democratically elected parliament.
While the machinations in Georgia are of concern to Americans, events in Pakistan, for those who haven’t been paying attention, are the freaking ballgame. Pakistan is the tip of the hub of the axis of the axis of evil: it is Pakistan that has been at the center of nuclear proliferation to North Korea, Iran, Libya, and God knows where else. It is Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) that has helped prop up al Qaeda and the Taliban both in neighboring Afghanistan. And it is in Pakistan’s own wild-west tribal agencies where OBL, al-Zawahiri and the rest of A.Q. central command has safe haven to this very day.
The Bush Administration’s grand strategy has been having old Pervez do the heavy lifting (it was actually content just to pay lip service to the Bush Administration, while sucking up American cash with which, among other things, it has continued to burnish its own nuclear program and prop up our friends… the Taliban and A.Q.!)… Pakistan’s cooperative policy included rounding up any Arab in sight… many of whom made their way to GTMO or Bagram or God knows where else… and an occasional foot-soldier did indeed get picked up while OBL and closest minions remain laughably free in South Waziristan under the protection of Pakistani sovereignty.
Well, well. What to do? Damned if I know. Let orderly democracy take its course: the Pakistani military seems content to sit this one out, and Musharaf is overwhelmingly unpopular. It’s quite possible that a new government in Pakistan will be more conducive to overall American interests, and might deemphasize its nuclear proliferation operation and it might help us hunt down OBL and top minions. Or it might be business as usual. Or things might be worse: after all, Pakistan itself actually contains all the necessary ingredients in the recipe for Armageddon.
Since this is a presidential election year… don’t look for anything intelligent on the subject out of our candidates, and after 7 1/2 years, we know better than to even think we’d get anything intelligent from our own government.