It’s a thing we know must be controlled; it is that part of our nature we know must not be rewarded by ego; it’s just the way our collective mind works. Perhaps, we tell ourselves it is God’s way of providing a safety fuse of reason before it’s too late. It is from that knowing and seeing-intuition a war-thinker must task himself to seek alternatives for humanity’s sake and his own sanity’s sake. We see the most probable outcomes and so do the inflicted Pakistani citizens who fear us.

Pakistan is about to lose control of their country to a UN approved occupation force. If President Roosevelt needed a Pearl Harbor to override his campaign promises to keep the US out of war, President Obama needs a captured Nuke Base in Pakistan to motivate Europe and his own radical left wing base. Where are the needed, staggeringly high body counts of enemy dead produced by the Pakistan forces and verified by our own observers?

To save their country, Pakistan has to deliver verified, staggeringly high body counts of dead enemy terrorists and violent-radical fundamentalist-Islamacists to the foot of the alter of human reason, and they are not.

10-years of war-on-terror is validating the West’s dualistic view, black and white views, of Islam and blurring our sensitivities to its dominant, beautiful, historic truth. Failure to take care of their own, failure to handle their own violent, radical fundamentalists within their own society now seems to be a complicity wrought by systemic corruption within the Muslim power structures of the world.

This Gordian Knot of complexities of corruption can only be untied with the sword of human rath severing this ancient knot with a single well placed blow. Shock and awe will seem trite in comparison.

A classical war tactic of full blown Pincer Movement of total envelopment, containment, and irradiation with such high body-counts of the dead, verified by international forces, inflicted upon the noble Pashtun regions on both sides of the Duran Line, along the entire Kush is the most likely war scenario. It must (or will) be so severe as to give pause to the high-most ruling Pashtun Jirga to re-think their ancient, well vested sense of demographic invulnerability.

Considering that Pakistan has only existed for about 60 years and has always been, like many post-colonial states in the Middle East/Near East and Asia, an artificial and somewhat arbitrary creation (as TCJ has observed with regard to the Durand Line), perhaps it is time to think about un-doing things, i.e., what could replace Pakistan, the state?

Perhaps Afghanistan and large parts of Pakistan can simply be kept, for the time being, in a sort of protectorate status, with the understanding that the Locals can govern their affairs as they see fit and receive some economic aide so long as they do not harbor, aid or otherwise abet terrorists, in which case outside forces descend, wipe out the terrorists and the economic aid is suspended. Pakistan would be reduced more or less to the Punjab and the FATA would cease to be under Pakistani control (since it never has been anyway) and perhaps Baluchistan would get independence under the same keep-out-the-terrorists deal. No occupying armies, no sprawling FOB’s. Just the sword of Damocles hanging there. If the Afghanis show any real interest and commitment to joining even the 20th century, then help is there. Otherwise, if they are content to live the medieval life, so be it.

Key to anything like this would be to heavily engage India. They will be a critical player in Asia (and an important counter-weight to China) and have all the makings of a good partner for the U.S., economically, politically, culturally and militarily. We were well on the way to doing this until Jan. 2009 (but that is another discussion altogether). If the Pakistani people are so unhinged from reality that they view the U.S. as an enemy, then the U.S. had better start lining up an alternative to Pakistan. Indeed, a Pakistan with nukes may require direct intervention to prevent the arsenal from falling into the wrong hands, something that India has an over-riding interest in as well.

If we are not going to go after the enemy on both sides of the border, then all the talk of surging troops into A-stan is ultimately futile.