Jihad Central

After starting out the column with his usual light-as-air show-biz chatter, Mark Steyn in the last two paragraphs offers a chilling summary of the metastasizing global disaster that is Pakistan:

Pakistan is both a nuclear power and a nation that cannot enforce sovereignty over significant chunks of its territory. Large tracts are run by the Taliban…. The air routes between Karachi and Heathrow, Birmingham, Manchester, and Glasgow are the vital conduit between the jihad’s ideological redoubts and the wider world. What do the perpetrators of the Daniel Pearl beheading and the London Tube bombing and the thwarted martyrs of innumerable other plots all have in common? Pakistan….

[A] mere couple of generations [after the disasterous creation of Pakistan], a regional afterthought is not only a nuclear power that has dispersed its technology around the planet but also a driving force of the world’s first global insurgency. If General Musharraf is shooting without a script, what would you do stuck in a toxic soap opera where the incoherent plot twists pile up with every passing decade?… [G]iven the last 60 years, the real question is how bad things will be after Musharraf. This thing can’t be scripted, in Washington or anywhere else.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 12, 2007 04:52 PM | Send