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The people of Pakistan would certainly prefer it to our current policy of COMPLETELY banning most of their textile exports to us

That would be the logical feeling, but you and I both know that logic rarely has an effect on such sentiment.

The people of Pakistan would certainly prefer it to our current policy of COMPLETELY banning most of their textile exports to us -- at the same time that we've been trying to solve the terrorism problem instead by playing kissy-face with Musharraf, whom they detest. (Those same TFT polls also show him less popular in the country than Bin Laden -- although I suppose he can console himself with the thought that he's still more popular there than Bush is.)

Human nature is to procrastinate. We had neighbors who would wait until the populations were creating a great deal of damage. Only then would they be motivated to act. We would tell them that they need to hit them early, hard and fast. Their reply usually would be “but it such a hassle and a few aren’t really that bad.” Which is true but that “attitude” usually resulted in some very out of control populations.

It is the same way with the terrorist. We were saying they needed to be dealt with back in 80’s and 90’s. Others were saying it before then.

True, but immaterial, no? I know a few well educated people from many countries where the rest of the population isn't very educated. It's a self selecting system, since the poorly educated will rarely venture outside their country and if they do, almost certainly won't travel in the circles I do so there's zero chance of me meeting them unless I visit the country in question. The "I know educated people from X" is the fallacy of the biased sample.

As to assessing Pakistan's education, even the Heritage Foundation sees the need for us doing massive work here and the benefit it will produce.

Start allowing Pakistani textiles into the US in large quantities -- but with those quantities contingent upon how well Pakistan behaves itself, and how well it cooperates with us both in swatting al-Qaeda and ceasing to wave nukes at India. Then sit back and chuckle while al-Qaeda and the Taliban, to an increasing degree, have to run for their lives from the Pakistani military -- and the people of Pakistan actually approve of the fact. THAT is a genuinely effective way to deal with the little creep.

I'm not sure that overtly using our economic power to dictate Pakistan's foreign and domestic policies will boost our popularity over there. The people who will benefit from such a policy, or at least directly recognize the benefit, are already pro-democracy and anti-terrorist.

What Pakistan needs is popular support for military action against extremists within their borders.

What I hear consistently is that we're simply doing jack there from a social perspective - i.e. all our funding is going straight to the military and likely the source of funding for those nukes and their expeditions in Cashmere. The pay off, even in the short term, from heavily investing in education in Pakistan is likely tremendous. The only reason the religious schools have the influence they do is because there simply is no other alternative.

I've known several Pakistanis, and their education seemed on par with that of most Indians I've met. Pakistan is a far cry from Afghanistan in terms of educational institutions.

Obviously you haven’t dealt with prairie dogs. Small group of them are hard to find. You have to look hard and cover a great deal of ground in order to find most of them. If you’re not careful you can waste a great deal of money battling them. Their presence causes a great deal of damage and if you’re not careful with the poison and shooting, you can kill livestock, although usually it is the family pets and what not that get killed by accident.

Sounds quite a big like Iraq actually. So, for prairie dogs, how do you determine when you've reached the point where continuing to battle them costs more money that it is worth?

As for the terrorist, yes we need to find them. Once that is done we need to kill them. We need to dry up their resources. Yes we should limit and be concern about actions that would cause a large recruitment but we can’t let fear about any new recruitment keep us from doing anything. We can’t be so fearful of angering anyone that it keeps us from taking action.

You'll notice that I don't take the "creating AQ sympathy" line as a reason to leave Iraq. Yes, action must be taken. Action in Iraq wasn't necessary in 2003, because it wasn't a resource to AQ. Once AQI became significant, then yes, action against them was necessary. Now that AQI is not longer a threat, and their operational capabilities have been significantly rolled back, I don't believe that continued US action against them is worth the cost.

Okay, Dr. B. Tried to be kind, tried to make the effort to actually figure out what you were talking about. It's all just political posturing to you.

You really don't know?
Or you wre hoping perhps for a place where you could give your argument some traction. Failing that, it's 'conversation over'.

What was the line you used on me when I said that, again?

Oh, never mind.

I'm hardly the first to propose this; the NY Times and the New Republic did so years ago. But have we heard a peep about it from any of the presidential candidates? Nope; musn't run the risk of alienating enough American textile workers to lose North or South Carolina! (The fact that compensating and retraining those workers and employing them in other professions would be somewhat less costly than a nuclear-terrorist attack on the US doesn't seem to have occurred to any of the muscle-flexing candidates, or for that matter to Bush.)

In fact, an organization called "Terror-Free Tomorrow" has taken a whole series of recent polls of Pakistanis, providing chilling confirmation of how much more popular al-Qaida is in that country than the US at the moment -- but also confirming that "[A] majority of Pakistanis said their opinion of the United States would improve if, among other things, there were increases in American aid to Pakistan, American business investments and the number of visas issued for Pakistanis to work in the United States."

TFT's president, Ken Ballen, has done a whole series of articles over the last two months on the subject of catching lots more Moslems with brotherly help than with threats -- including two that appeared in the LA Times and the Washington Monthly, and one co-authored with Peter Bergen. The most remarkable thing, however, is that TFT's board of advisors at the moment includes one Sen. John McCain (along with Bill Frist, Lee Hamilton and Tom Kean) -- but I don't think he's ever said a word about TFT's views.

Point three is spot on, and it's pretty clear that our military has been lobbying hard for just this. I think, with the new govn't and Musharraf on the wane, we really should do a serious push on the education front in Pakistan.

What I hear consistently is that we're simply doing jack there from a social perspective - i.e. all our funding is going straight to the military and likely the source of funding for those nukes and their expeditions in Cashmere. The pay off, even in the short term, from heavily investing in education in Pakistan is likely tremendous. The only reason the religious schools have the influence they do is because there simply is no other alternative.

On another note, though, there still is the huge opium production elephant in the room WRT Afghanistan... I find it hard to believe that the two issues aren't linked and the amount of corruption caused by being the largest opium supplier in the history of the planet has got to be a serious issue. So it may be that we're just squeezing the balloon if we don't tackle that issue head on simultaneously...

(1) Now that even Iraq's Sunnis have decided that they detest al-Qaeda, it's flatly impossible for a-Q to operate any large bases there. (In that ABC/BBC poll, the Sunnis -- at the same time that they want most US troops to leave instantly by 61-39 -- still favor allowing small numbers of US troops to assist with operations against a-Q by two to one.)

(2) But there are still two places where a-Q CAN operate large bases with the tolerance of the locals. One is east Afghanistan. The other is the Northwest Province of Pakistan -- where they're operating now with the full permission of "our ally Pakistan" (as McCain calls it), but where (contrary to Obama's muscle-flexing) we can't attack them without dangerously provoking a country with 100 nukes and a very wobbly government. So:

(3) The only place on Earth where a large US military presence is both necessary and possible against large a-Q bases is east Afghanistan -- which bin Laden's forces will try to flee back to if the Pakistanis ever get off their asses and throw them out of the Northwest Province (and from which we can invade that Province if the Pakistanis ever decide to allow us to do so).

Which only the naive believe is not the case. After all, how well is a Sunni terrorist group going to function in a Shiite dominated country when both the Shiite and the Sunni have a common thorn in their side called the occupation by the US?

It's a self fulfilling cycle and the only way out is to simply withdraw in a responsible fashion.