It depends on what defusing the Iraqi situation means. So far the U.S. administration has resorted to more violence to achieve some sort of military victory. Without a vision for a future Iraq and clearly defined objective of ending the occupation, the unproductive debate between simply managing the crisis and withdrawing troops will never achieve a better Iraq.

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President Musharraf seems to be damned if he does continue cooperating with the U.S. -- and damned if he does not.

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Pakistan today is the outcome of first the disastrous collusion of the eighties and early nineties followed by the bloody collision between American foreign policies and self-declared Islamic extremism. Both the collusion and the collision are costing Pakistan dearly.

Pakistan was the world’s most dangerous laboratory for the cold war, and now for the so called U.S. war on terror. It was the U.S. that masterminded the use of an armed political Islamic movement as a counter for Communism. Once the Cold War was over these former fighters, mujaheddin, turned against the Western infidels whom they had never trusted.

Pakistani rulers acquiesced to becoming a recruiting ground for anticommunist Islamic fundamentalism. They fanned the flames of fanaticism, using it to consolidate their legitimacy and prove useful to American foreign policy. Instead of building and consolidating Pakistan’s democratic institutions, they fostered control, repression, fanaticism and subservience: first to American cold war policies, then to the "war on terror.”

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