Smells kinda Fishy...

There has been some talk in the past few weeks, both in the blogs and in the dead tree media, that the reason we let the Pakistan off the hook when it became public knowledge that its Robert Oppenheimer, A Q Khan, had been selling nuke secrets to the Axis of Evil and associated unpleasant governments was that there was some sort of Osama-related quid pro quo at work. Namely that Pakistan had let US Special Forces into its Western wildernesses in order to round up al Qaeda and other Islamist militants that might be hiding there in exchange for our keeping quiet. My response to a lot of that talk was along the lines of "No, the Bush administration wouldn't do anything so odd and potentially provocative with Pakistan." After all, Pakistan is home to a reasonably large number of al Qaeda's ideological allies, some of whom are empowered within Musharraf's government, particularly its intelligence services. And Pakistan is otherwise unstable, its president the occasional target of assassination. It would be a terrible thing if there were a coup in Pakistan leading to, say, a nuclear war with India or the proliferation of WMDs to terrorist groups bent on destroying the US.

As much as it would be a great thing to dissolve the leadership of al Qaeda by sending commandos into western Pakistan, it's a delicate thing. And I don't expect delicacy from the current leadership in Washington. Yeah, I think such a quid pro quo sounds unwise. What would I do differently? I don't know. That's why I'm a keyboard jockey and not the Secretary of State or the National Security Advisor. But I think any action that tolerates WMD proliferation to America's enemies is probably unwise.

And today I heard about this.
It makes me nervous. We should not be selling advanced weapons to a country that cavalierly accepts the passing of nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya, and North Korea, or one whose intelligence services had fostered the Islamist Taliban government in Afghanistan. Why is it that the only sticks and carrots this White House cares to use in its foreign policy are military?

I, a yahoo without real foreign policy chops, figure there are better ways to deal with Pakistan. If we want to get Bin Laden and Zawahiri and they are in Pakistan, where we don't have easy access, why don't we give Pakistan non-military economic incentives to capture them themselves? Why would we, instead, give this award to a proved nuclear proliferator while invading Iraq because of its imagined WMDs?

Of course, my mutterings assume that there are quid pro quos in effect, that America's special forces, contrary to my linked article's contention, are in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. But with this exceedingly untrustworthy bunch, is this really that loony an assumption?