A country is not really a business

A country is not really a business

[keep repeating until it sinks in]

Having his country's credit rating downgraded puts some pressure on Musharraf, but it is not at all similar to the Citigroup situation. There are no stockholders that can just vote him out of his job. As long as he has the guns on his side, the ratings can get way down, credit become hard to get by, the economy hurt, etc., and he is still not going to give up power. And the downgrade is only for the possibility of instability: there are plenty of dictatorial governments that enjoy good credit ratings.

Whether Musharraf will be able to hold onto power or not will be determined by the internal resistance in Pakistan, not but what Moody rates his country at the moment.

In an interview I was just listening to, journalist Lawrence Wright was talking about why the US continues to give Pakistan so much money....and, more specifically, why neither the US nor the Pakistanis themselves have been willing to root out Bin Laden from the tribal areas.

For the Bush administration, the math looks like this: the stability of the Pakistani regime is more important than whether or not we bring Al Qaeda to account. The worry is that if Musharraf fell, an Islamic-Military government would take over and suddenly, Pakistani nuclear weapons might be available to groups like Al Qaeda. Washington sees Musharraf as the last barrier between Pakistani nukes and Zawahiri supervising the transport of one of those nukes to an American city for detonation.

So, we will keep right on giving money to the Musharraf, and we'll keep right on doing whatever else it takes to keep him in power.

Wright had a number of very interesting observations to make about our relationship with Pakistan. Makes me want to go read his book "The Looming Tower."

He observed, for instance, that one very compelling reason that the Pakistanis have not found Bin Laden, or have not really tried all that hard to find him, is that there's a lot of *money* in looking for Bin Laden, but not in finding him. As long as he's loose and free somewhere in Pakistan, the US government will keep sending billions to the Pakistani Army... and, as Wright pointed out, the Pakistani Army *owns* that country, lock, stock, and smoking barrel. And the Army wants to keep right on owning it.

This tactic of supporting Musharraf at all costs seems like it has real potential to backfire though. As it seems to do with nearly all Bush foreign policy, the law of unintended consequences will likely play havoc with insufficiently thought-through alliances..

Moody's can do anything it wants. It seems clear enough that no matter what happens, we're going to keep right on sending billions to the Pakistani Army, and prop it, and Musharraf, up as long as we can.

So there's that.

We tend to hear a lot more about Taliban sympathizers in the Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan than we do about foreign purchases of chunks of Pakistani banks and telecommunications companies. But Musharraf's status quo could be under just as much threat from one sector as the other, if Pakistan's credit continues to deteriorate.

Good point.

But remember -- the problem in the north of Pakistan isn't just that Pakistanis who live in the north of Pakistan sympathize with the Taliban.

The Taliban were born in northern Pakistan. They were born out of decades of global political games played out in Afghanistan that pushed the most fundamentalist Afghan Pushtuns into the north of Pakistan -- land that many Pushtuns already believed belonged to Afghanistan.

When the Taliban took over -- they were like an invasion from Pakistan. Most of the Taliban leaders only got their first glimpse of Afghanistan when they came over the border to rule.

So the problem is much worse than a problem of Pakistanis feeling sympathy towards the Taliban.

It looks like desperate times ahead for Pakistan.

This to me provides an urgent reason why we should pull out of Iraq and come up with a much better strategy for Afghanistan. One that doesn't just drive the problems from Afghanistan into Pakistan, which is what everyone has been doing since 1973.

We should hand over the nuclear keys because 'that's the will of the people'?

My passport is current, thank god.

"Oh My Goodness Gracious Me...Moody's, you mean to tell me that my Home Equity Loan was DECLINED? BUT I'M DICTATOR of PACK-WHACKY-STAN!!!!!" So said Pervez, blinking his OWLISH orbs behind his THICK PEBBLE-LENSED GLASSES.....

Moody's: "Sorry Mr. Musharraf, right now, you don't qualify as a Gila-Monster catcher in out ESTIMABLE ESTIMATION..."