[mburbank]

I'm not advocating abandoning Mushariff. We have little choice but to stick by him, which he knows, which is why he acts so freely.

My objection was getting so chummy with him in the first place, but like everything else, it's far too late now.

Did we need his support to route the Taliban? It was helpful, but that first step was mostly bombing. We could have used him as a wall at Tora Bora, we tried, it didn't work. After that we absolutely needed whatever he cared to give us since we took the war to Iraq.

It's ironic that weapons of mass destruction, and passing nuclear knowledge to terrorist regimes, the supposed reasons we had to invade Iraq, are things we looked the other way for with Pakistan, because they were our allies.

Realistically, we have about zero levarage with Pakistan. They can do whatever they want.

However, I don't think we should beg for table scraps we're not going to get anyway. Mushariff has his own reasons to fear Al Quaeda. He's got a pretty narrow choice to make right now. Either go up against the tribal areas in a very ugly way he hasn't been willing to do this far, or make a deal with them. If he makes a deal, we are so in the shit it costs us little to cut off his cash. If he doesn't, we finance a nuclear military dictatorship in the cause of spreading democracy. But those were almost certainly the choices we'd end up with from the moment we chose to make Mushariff a lynchpin of our foreign policy.