Taliban to Pakistan's elected govt .. 'thanks but before we discuss anything else, kiss my scrotum also, please'

LAT:

Writing From Lahore, Pakistan -- Maulana Sufi Mohammed, a radical cleric who was freed last year after spending six years in jail for leading 10,000 Pashtun tribesmen in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, has begun a new campaign. He is leading a peace march through the strategic Swat Valley in an attempt to persuade his son-in-law, Maulana Qazi Fazlullah, to accept the government's offer of a cease-fire and enforcement of an Islamic system of justice in the valley.

The fact that Mohammed has embraced the government's offer is a sign of how fully Islamabad has capitulated to the demands of extremists in the region. And the fact that the peace deal has not yet been accepted by Fazlullah, who leads the Swati contingent of the Pakistani Taliban and is closely allied with Al Qaeda, is a sign of how radicalized some of the region has become.

Any doubt why Rasmussen found that only a minority think we are winning the war against these bastards?
Our allies in NATO simply want out of the whole thing, with even the Canadians now leaving.
Our allies in south asia, don't even want to fight for their own nation.
WE OURSELVES elected a man who thinks that there is a difference between the war (and the enemy) in the Mahgreb, Somalia, the Sudan, Iraq, Gaza, Qandahar, and Swat.

At the moment an under covered election in Iraq heralds the victorious denouement, like an England electing Attlee in the middle of Yalta, we seem to be sliding from purpose, to quandary, to boredom, to being simply tired of it all, and in danger of justifying it with an economy imploding as we discover that the entire world's fortune has been based on the rising values of the American homeowner's real estate.

We have a lot of problems, and as we can see from the reaction of Mohammed son in law, who demurs in nearly complete victory, from talking, the enemy KNOWS IT.

Pakistan's concessions to the Taliban in the Swat Valley, located just 80 miles north of Islamabad, are a watershed in the country's steady slide toward chaos. The situation there has added to the prevailing sense of public gloom in Pakistan that the Taliban is rapidly making inroads into the world's second-largest Muslim nation -- and the only one armed with nuclear weapons.

Fazlullah's men have fought bloody battles with the army over the last two years, finally driving it out and taking control of most of Swat last year. The fighting has led to about 1,200 civilian deaths and the forced exodus of an estimated 350,000 people out of a population of 1.5 million. Fazlullah has blown up 200 girls schools, hanged policemen, set up Sharia (Islamic law) courts and established a parallel government.

Now, rather than order the army to retake Swat, the Pakistan People's Party government in Islamabad led by Benazir Bhutto's widower, President Asif Ali Zardari, and the Awami National Party (ANP), a Pashtun secular party that runs the provincial government of the North-West Frontier Province, have capitulated to the Taliban's demands in order to avoid more violence.

One of the ways to achieve victory in this war is to deny the enemy a homeland. We did it in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are still battling in Afghanistan, the Mahgreb, Somalia, the Sudan and other places.
But in Pakistan, if clear and total victory is not achieved we may find ourselves facing a change as quick as 1979, and an instant nuclear caliphate.

Fazlullah is, right now, a winning son of a bitch.

WHAT'S IT GONNA TAKE?