Registan.net

Nothing says “we’re aware of a delicate political situation” like unliateral strikes on an unstable country:

Independent actions by U.S. military forces on another country’s sovereign territory are always controversial, and both U.S. and Pakistani officials have repeatedly sought to obscure operational details that would reveal that key decisions are sometimes made in the United States, not in Islamabad. Some Pentagon operations have been undertaken only after intense disputes with the State Department, which has worried that they might inflame Pakistani public resentment; the CIA itself has sometimes sought to put the brakes on because of anxieties about the consequences for its relationship with Pakistani intelligence officials.

U.S. military officials say, however, that the uneven performance of their Pakistani counterparts increasingly requires that Washington pursue the fight however it can, sometimes following an unorthodox path that leaves in the dark Pakistani military and intelligence officials who at best lack commitment and resolve and at worst lack sympathy for U.S. interests.

Top Bush administration policy officials — who are increasingly worried about al-Qaeda’s use of its sanctuary in remote, tribally ruled areas in northern Pakistan to dispatch trained terrorists to the West — have quietly begun to accept the military’s point of view, according to several sources familiar with the context of the Libi strike.

“In the past, it required getting approval from the highest levels,” said one former intelligence official involved in planning for previous strikes. “You may have information that is valid for only 30 minutes. If you wait, the information is no longer valid.”

I believe that last bit is a not-so-subtle reference to the well-known incident of a Predator tracking Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the late 90’s, and approval for an American strike did not come through in time and the trail went cold (Ahmed Shah Massoud’s men were contracted to hit a nearby training camp, and though they transported missiles and guns on mule-back, the secondary strike was ineffective).

It is also an historically unique situation; amongst the locals in Waziristan, the whereabouts of Taliban militants is no secret. While the ability to bomb a supposedly allied country at will with robots has a pleasing, gee-whiz aspect to it, those sorts of strikes pose a very grave risk, which Joby Warrick and Robin Wright note: Washington loves technological, low-risk solutions to its problems, but in Pakistan itself we lose support every time that path is chosen.

Look at it from a broader perspective: years of bowing before Musharraf’s parlor games have created a situation in which there is no reliable HUMINT in western Pakistan. Rather than looking at a top-down review of U.S. policy, and how a sustainable, long-term solution might be crafted (even if that meant abandoning our precious, yet deeply unhelpful Musharraf), we rely on robots armed with anti-tank missiles.

Sounds to me like a bigger problem than just picking off a few bad guys. know what I mean?

Note: kudos to Warrick and Wright for calling the tribal areas “tribally ruled,” rather than “lawless.” The latter is a particularly unctuous term that has evolved, alongside “Spring Offensive,” into a pet peeve.

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