Yeah, I know. For a long time after 9/12/01 I often thought of what a President Gore would have done, something along the lines of pumping all the money we spent on the stoopid intial Iraq invasion into Mushie's Pakistan for education and business development or similar (not weapons,) with all kinds of tight strings attached, of course.

But I am so beyond that now. Learning more of the totality of the perfidy and complex web of rot within that country over the years following, I wonder now whether that might have ended up badly, too, ending up with us being at war in Pakistan.

I don't know if there ever was a nice or good way to handle that mess once the "jihadi" decided that the west was the next target. The Iraq invasion did ramp things up terribly, but the mess was still there without it, as long as the west was determined to have a presence in the area of Saudi Arabia to protect and/or process the oil. And once Osama bin Laden promoted the idea that we would just cut and run like from conflict like we did with Vietnam, I don't think leaving Saudi Arabia and stopping being best buds with Israel at that late point would have helped us much. They would have seen a new isolationism as a major victory and therefore continued with attempts at their dreams of the new caliphate or whatever. Happily assisted by factions in Pakistan. (Even now, after 10 years, they still seem to somehow find an unending stream of those willing to do suicide missions.)

And yes, India doesn't just distrust Pakistan, many Indians fear and loathe it, and did way before 9/11 and "26/11". And yes the nukes on both sides are not going away. But I wonder in some ways had a President Gore tried to get at the real source of the troubles soon after 9/11, it could have been we might be in worse shape as regards our relationship with India then we are now.

Yeah, well, it's difficult to know how this will shake out at this stage of the game. I read into Dawn's insertion of this sentence:

The decisions, though sounding tough, apparently kept the window for negotiations open

as basically saying the following:

folks, this is probably more of the typical faux outrage we have seen many times before. Though I could be wrong.

There was this intriguing CSM piece quoting Afghanis having schadenfreude over this, but I don't know whether to believe it, as I don't know how good the correspondent is, whether he really knows Afghanistan or is just listening to Karzai supporter types around his hotel.