Pakistan's generals: Turn off the tap

The slow-motion suicide of Pakistan in the decade since 9/11 is a story that has seemed to lay at a low boil for most Americans, only to periodically rocket (if you'll pardon the expression) into our headlines with spectacular Today Show-friendly events: The video-taped beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002, the return and murder of Benazir Bhutto in 2007 and finally, the Navy SEALs' dispatch of Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani military cantonment of Abbottabad earlier this year.

The past three weeks have added fresh milestones on the road to an alarmingly possible (and alarmingly nuclear) Armageddon.

First, Adm. Michael Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asserted before Congress that Afghanistan's most formidable anti-government insurgents--the 'network' of Jalaluddin Haqqani -- serve as a veritable "arm" of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence agency (ISI), and that its agents had actively assisted in the Haqqani network's recent spate of high-profile attacks in the Afghan capital of Kabul.

This rather open secret (the Haqqani clan has been a favorite cat's paw of Pakistani intelligence since the anti-Soviet struggle of the 1980s) was only extraordinary in light of its senior, universally respected source. The real revelation was in Carlotta Gall's Sept. 26 expose for the New York Times, which chronicled a May 2007 incident in which uniformed Pakistani soldiers and irregulars murdered U.S. Army Maj. Larry Bauguess as his unit departed from a cross-border parley meant to settle an Afghan-Pakistani border dispute.

From the above, it would be possible to gain the impression that Pakistan's troubles had their roots in 9/11 and the American war effort in Afghanistan. In fact, Pakistan's current nadir has been gestating since its troubled birth in the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent.

Since that moment, according to Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid's 2008 book, "Descent into Chaos," "Pakistan has grappled with an acute sense of insecurity in the midst of a continuing identity crisis.

"As a result, it has developed into a national security state in which the army has monopolized power and defined the national interest as keeping archenemy India at bay, developing nuclear weapons and trying to create a friendly government in Afghanistan."

Thus, contemporary Pakistan is a country whose armed forces can manage a strategic nuclear arsenal of 80 to 100 nuclear warheads, while the weak civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari is unable to maintain electrical power for the Punjab region (the wellspring of the Pakistani officer class) for periods of up to 18 hours a day.

The literacy rate for Pakistani males hovers at 54 percent; for women, that rate is less than 30 percent. On an achingly related note, U.S. aid to Pakistan (both civil and military) has constituted about $20 billion.

In return for such largesse, the U.S. since 2001 has received a stream of calumny and bad faith from the Pakistani generals and intelligence chieftains who steer the country's weevil-ridden ship of state.

Ensconced in their headquarters in Rawalpindi while growing fat off of our tax dollars, they have offered us nothing more than the occasional token Al Qaeda operative and plaintive moaning about the "sovereign territory" of their conjured, penurious nation on those occasions when our uniformed officers and government have dared to trace the fundamentalist bacilli back to its primary host in Pakistan's tribal regions.

It is time for our government to cease making a mockery of the American taxpayers' dollar and restrict the tap for the military clique that shelters the terrorists who plot our destruction and that of Pakistani and Afghan civil society.