Martial Spirit Is So Ephemeral

Am I the only one who was heartened to learn that the Colin Powell State Department, via the mouth of the infamous Plamegate leaker Dick Armitage, threatened Pakistani ruler Pervez Musharraf with being "bombed back to the stone age" if he didn’t cooperate with our post-9/11 retaliatory invasion of Afghanistan to crush al Qaeda and the Taliban regime that Pakistani intelligence installed into power in Kabul?

Sure made the man knuckle under awfully damn quick, didn’t it?

In a memoir released on Monday, President Pervez Musharraf recounted how he decided it would have been suicidal to confront a U.S. attack after being threatened by Washington a day after al Qaeda's strikes on September 11, 2001.

With the United States demanding Pakistan's help to launch attacks on al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan, Musharraf recalled how the then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had telephoned him with an ultimatum: "You are either with us or against us."…

Elaborating on how he decided to take a foreign policy U-turn by dumping support for the Taliban, Musharraf described how he first weighed the option of fighting the United States.

"I war-gamed the United States as an adversary," he wrote, saying he assessed whether Pakistan could withstand the onslaught.

"The answer was no, we could not, on three counts."

Pakistan's military would have been wiped out, its economy couldn't be sustained, and the nation lacked the unity needed for such a confrontation, Musharraf wrote.

Furthermore, Musharraf was worried that if Pakistan did not accede to Washington's demands, the United States would take up an Indian offer to provide bases….

He also expected the United States would seek to destroy Pakistan's newly developed nuclear weapons. And he feared the infrastructure built since Pakistan's formation in 1947 would be decimated.

Finally, Musharraf said he had to answer whether it was worth Pakistan destroying itself for the sake of the Taliban, though Pakistan had supported the Islamist militia's government.

"The answer was a resounding no," Musharraf concluded.

What is present throughout Musharraf’s narrative that is most missing from today’s dismal foreign policy debate? Isn’t it obvious? Will. Resolve. Courage. Determination. Anger – of the righteously indignant variety. We were the United F’ing States, dammit, and those demonic ragheads had just attacked us on our own soil and slain three thousand of our countrymen. We were pissed as hell, we had every right to be, and anybody who tried to stand in our way was going to get steamrolled. And Musharraf knew it.

That is what is missing from the foreign policy landscape - fear of the United States. From 9/11/01 through the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003 the global bad guys got the message loud and clear: You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, or you’ll get a lot worse than being pulled out of a spider hole. Muammar Khaddafy couldn’t turn over his WMD stocks and specs fast enough, and Syria’s Bashar Assad and the Iranian mullahs kept a VERY low profile.

The last of that "Behold our works, ye rogues, and tremble" momentum petered out in early ’05 with Syria’s retreat from Lebanon. The Democrats’ never-ending jihad against the Bush Administration continued unabated, escalating to the seditious serial leaking of national security secrets, open defeatist sedition from top Democrat leaders, and agitation for the bloodless coup de’tat of impeachment. And the Bushies themselves made it abundantly clear that Iraq was the end of the war rather than the mid-point, emboldening Iran to clinch their nuclear weapons status and move toward an apocalyptic endgame against the West that looms in the very near future.

This re-encroaching flaccidity and weakness has had its effect on the man who once pissed himself with fear at our potential wrath: the formal surrender of an entire Pakistani province to al Qaeda and the Taliban, which has already more than doubled the number of jihadi attacks against NATO and Afghan troops. Does Musharraf fear U.S. retribution for his thinly-veiled double-cross?

Judge for yourself:

At a news conference at U.N. headquarters Wednesday, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told a reporter that his government "would not give permission" to the U.S. military to enter Pakistan even if it meant capturing Osama bin Laden.

"If we know where he is, we will go and get him ourselves. We need no help," professed Musharraf.

I can’t help but have a bit less confidence in that attempt at reassurance than I once would have. I also can’t take much satisfaction in seeing my predicted scenario unfolding pretty much to the letter:

The implications of Musharraf's surrender are....unpleasant to consider. "Pakistani lawyers" notwithstanding, it seems unlikely that the Pakistani strongman would have openly betrayed his patron – us – and turned loose thousands of jihadis unless he felt that his own position was sufficiently untenable as to leave him no choice. Taken in concert with the now evidently concurrent truce with the Taliban over the northwestern Pakistani province of Waziristan, it appears that, whatever the conditions on the ground in Afghanistan, it is Pakistan – nuclear Pakistan – which is in significant Islamist jeopardy.

The best case scenario is that we have several thousand theocratic psychopaths to round up again (or, better yet, just liquidated en masse). But this will be made a great deal more complicated by Musharraf’s de facto ceding of Waziristan to bin Laden. If we respect Pakistani territorial integrity, al Qaeda has a secure base of operations once more, and we already know how that tends to turn out. If we begin attacking into that province to try and clean it out once and for all, we either force Musharraf to turn against us to save his own ass or kiss his ass goodbye in an Islamist coup, yielding us the worst case scenario of twin Islamic nuclear theocracies, one Shiite, one Sunni, possessed of annihilation fantasies and competing against each other to see who can trigger Armageddon first.

Small wonder, then, that Tony Blankley echoed my words a few days ago:

Whatever is going on in Pakistan (and we must hope that the men who replace Musharraf sooner or later will not be more sympathetic to the Taliban and al Qaeda, and will be at least as careful in controlling their nuclear weapons) [fat chance – ed.], our effort to stand up Afghanistan and suppress the Taliban and al Qaeda in the region has suddenly taken on an even more formidable dimension.

There are no ready solutions to the dilemma. With Pakistan now hors de combat, our already undermanned forces in Afghanistan will soon have to engage the tribal regions of northwest Pakistan - fighting some of the world's most resourceful and cruel fighters in the most unforgiving lands on Earth.

We ask a lot - and we get even more - from our brave and smart young warriors. But from Iraq to the Horn of Africa to Afghanistan and now to northern Pakistan, there is a limit to what our current number of active forces can possibly accomplish. And the list of danger spots will only grow in the coming years. Whether we like the fact or not, the ranks and lands (and confidence) of the enemy are growing. And they can't be sweet talked-out of taking the fight to America.

We must come to terms with reality - and soon. We are going to have to substantially increase the size of our army and Marines to face the growing threats to our national security.

We also must come to terms with why the enemy’s confidence is growing: They no longer fear us. They believe that our decadence guarantees our attention span will always be vanishingly short, and that belief is reinforced daily in and by the Enemy Media. And they think that We, The People, don’t really believe in our hearts that we’re at war, desperately do not want to internalize that reality, and will do anything to escape it.

The inevitable consequence of that line of reasoning is another big bang; here; and soon. The only way to stop it is the resurrection of a "neo-September 11th mentality": If Musharraf crosses us, the mullahgarchy defies our demand that they abandon their pursuit of nuclear weapons, Syria doesn’t stop subverting Iraqi democracy….prepare for our bigger bangs to land first.

I fear the resurrection of that martial spirit will need another devastating "helping hand" – if it can be resurrected at all.