A few days ago it was reported that te government of Pakistan signed a deal with tribes in the Northwest Frontier Province enabling Sharia law to take effect there.
This deal shows the serious lack of power the Pakistani government has. On the surface this might seem like a deal done out of goodwill but it is nothing more than just giving up more power to people who are going to do nothing but abuse it. This is not getting even close to the root of the problem in Pakistan.
There are a multitude of things wrong in that country and it all starts with the weak national government. The government in pakistan has no power and influence to get anything effective done. Many times all they do is bicker about weak societal argumnets and splinter themselves around relgious groups. On top of that the main spy agency, the ISI functions as a rogue paramilitary organization, an organization within an organization, with many strong ties to terrorist organizations. Add to that the people with whom the deal was struck have sympathies with those in the Taliban. We really need to do soemthing about Pakistan because in his foolishness, Bush went to go start a dubious war instead of concentrating on the central front front of Islamic terrorist activity.
President Obama needs to back up his words on this. What we need to do is secretly start giving support to the Pakistani national government. People already have conspiracies there about the US doing this, the US doing that, so having people doing something there won't matter much. We need to win over the people first in order to obatain information on terrorists and we are not going to be able to do that with drone bombings. I do agree there is a time and a place to strike but we need to do more. I applaud the decision to appoint Richard Holbooke special advisor and i think that is a good place to start. But we need to do more to combat the extremism that is in that region and giving up power is not the way to do it.