November 4, 2007
The New York Times on Pakistan
The title is "Musharraf Leaves White House in Lurch":
For more than five months the United States has been trying to orchestrate a political transition in Pakistan that would manage to somehow keep Gen. Pervez Musharraf in power without making a mockery of President Bush’s promotion of democracy in the Muslim world.There is no sense here at all that there is anything objectively good about a stable, democratic Pakistan or progress against terror. Everything is couched in terms of the presumed political strategy of the Bush administration. Some things have a significance that goes beyond domestic politics. Not in the world of the Times, though.On Saturday, those carefully laid plans fell apart spectacularly. Now the White House is stuck in wait-and-see mode, with limited options and a lack of clarity about the way forward.
General Musharraf’s move to seize emergency powers and abandon the Constitution left Bush administration officials close to their nightmare . . .
. . . after the declaration on Saturday, there was no immediate action by the administration to accompany the tough talk . . .
. . . even as she criticized General Musharraf’s power grab, Ms. Rice stopped short of outright condemnation . . . That seeming contradiction highlights the quandary in which the Bush administration now finds itself . . .
Whatever happens, experts say that General Musharraf’s decision was not good news for the Bush administration . . .
Crossposted on Judeopundit
Posted by Judeopundit at November 4, 2007 11:47 AM | TrackBack
