WHAT TO DO IN WAZIRISTAN? Dana and Ezra's posts earlier today about David Igantius's column are both pretty skeptical about the actual plan he describes. Dana is right that we should be extremely skeptical of any military intervention run by this administration, but Ignatius is right that the overthrow of the government of Afghanistan went pretty well and thus it isn't quite right to say that "all Bush administration military interventions are ill-planned and heavy-handed." So, what should we think of Ignatius's plan?

As Ezra pointed out there is a real problem that it would be very good to be able to address -- al-Qaeda now has a safe base of operations and a reliable source of funding (Iraq) and Bin Laden is still at large. Ignatius's plan (designed by a CIA officer involved in the Afghan war) is modeled on the approach used to overthrow the Taliban. The plan relies on the cooperation of local leaders who, allegedly, are hostile towards al-Qaeda. Is this true? When we overthrew the Taliban we knew the Northern Alliance was at least willing to work with us, though we weren't sure of its quality. The plan also basically calls for bribing them, which makes me somewhat skeptical:

In Waziristan, U.S. and Pakistani operatives would give tribal warlords guns and money, to be sure, but they would coordinate this covert action with economic aid to help tribal leaders operate their local stone quarries more efficiently, say, or install windmills and solar panels to generate electricity for their remote mountain villages.

Ultimately, I doubt this would work, in part because one of the major advantages we had in Afghanistan was air support. That, as I understand it, is what really turned the tide more than arms in the fighting against the Taliban. Ignatius also doesn't address the political implications in Pakistan. Musharraf is in a rather precarious position at the moment, and an American military intervention could easily do more harm than good.

--Sam Boyd