America's present focus may be intensely Yemen-oriented—in response to the underwear bomber's links to al Qaeda cadres based in that Arab state—but the Obama administration would err gravely in 2010 if it were to shift its primary, anti-terrorist attention away from Pakistan, without question America's biggest strategic headache.
A nuclear-armed Muslim country with a fragile democratic government, Pakistan is our ostensible ally in the Afghan war against the Taliban and al Qaeda. The problem is, however, that the Pakistani military—which is not under civilian control, and which chafes continually against the democratically elected president, Asif Ali Zardari—wishes for nothing more fervently than the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan. The Obama administration cannot continue to ignore this obscene dance, in which the army of an allied state gives succor to the very enemy that young American soldiers fight daily in bloody battle.
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