he'll find a war in there somewhere...

Nov. 4, 2007 — The Pakistani leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, declared a state of emergency on Saturday night, suspending the country’s Constitution, blacking out all independent television news reports and filling the streets of this capital city with police officers. … The emergency declaration was in direct defiance of repeated calls this week from senior American officials, including Secretary of State Concoleezza Rice, not to do so. NYT A1

Oct. 20, 2007,— The scenes of carnage in Pakistan this week conjured what one senior administration official on Friday called “the nightmare scenario” for President Bush’s last 15 months in office: Political meltdown in the one country where Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and nuclear weapons are all in play. … other current and former officials cautioned that six years after the United States forced General Musharraf to choose sides in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, American leverage over Pakistan is now limited. Similarly, they and Pakistan experts said that a series of policy miscalculations had left the administration with few good options. NYT A1

Nov. 4, 2007, NYT A12--— Guided by American legal advisers, the Iraqi government has canceled a controversial development contract with the Russian company Lukoil for a vast oil field in Iraq’s southern desert, freeing it up for potential international investment in the future.

In response, Russian authorities have threatened to revoke a 2004 deal under the Paris Club of creditor nations to forgive $13 billion in Iraqi debt, a senior Iraqi official said.

NEW REPUBLIC, Oct. 22, 2007, HOW OSAMA BIN LADEN BEAT GWB, Peter Bergen: …America's most formidable foe--once practically dead-- is back. This is one of the most historically significant legacies of President Bush. At nearly every turn, he has made the wrong strategic choices in battling Al Qaeda. … According to a study by RAND, "Afghanistan has received the least amount of resources out of any major American-led, nation-building operation over the last 60 years." … You get what you pay for, and, today, Afghanistan resembles nothing so much as Iraq in the fall of 2003, when the descent into chaos began. In 2006, IED attacks doubled, assaults on international forces tripled, and suicide bombings quintupled. In fact, last year saw the highest number of U.S. military and NATO casualties since the fall of the Taliban. And 2007 is shaping up to be even worse, with suicide bombings up 69 percent from last year. What's more, Afghanistan is now supplying almost all of the world's heroin. In Helmand and Kandahar--provinces in southern Afghanistan--more than a quarter of the population supports the Tali- ban, according to a poll released in March. Just one in ten Afghans has access to electricity, while the capital, Kabul, only has electricity for a few hours a day. Amer ica's neglect of Afghanistan since 2001 can only be described as an enormous missed opportunity.

And the reason for that missed opportunity was simple: By the time the Taliban fell, the Bush administration's attention was already elsewhere. …

The removal of Saddam Hussein would prove to be a boon to Al Qaeda--creating a base for the terrorist organization where none had existed before, energizing jihadists around the word, and confirming for many Muslims bin Laden's contention that the United States was at war with Islam. …

Paul Cruickshank of New York University and I compared the period after September 11 through the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 with the period from March 2003 through September 2006. Using numbers from the authoritative rand terrorism database, we found that the rate of deadly attacks by jihadists had increased sevenfold since the invasion. And, even excluding terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, fatal attacks by jihadists in the rest of the world have increased by more than one-third since March 2003.,

…. Bush's approach to Pakistan: showering Musharraf with affection and largesse, only to receive progressively less in return with each passing year. America has handed $10 billion to the Pakistani government since September 11. Yet the Taliban and Al Qaeda remain headquartered in Pakistan.

… Daniel Colman [former] FBI special agent regarded as one of the nation’s leading Al Qaeda authorities] thinks the Bush administration's treatment of captured terrorists--holding so many outside the traditional justice system at Guantánamo while authorizing interrogation techniques that some observers would consider torture--has been largely a bust. He told me that most of the information he saw coming out of Guantánamo until his retirement in 2004 "was of no particular value." …Coleman isn't the only one who feels this way. Michael Rolince, who, from 2002 to 2005, was special agent in charge of counterterrorism in the FBI's Washington field office--which handles not just threats to the capital region, but also many overseas cases--told me, "I don't recall any information that was relevant [to my office] coming out of Guantánamo." He also points out that "torture and coercion gets you, in the vast majority of cases, wrong information that takes you off on wild goose chases." And Brad Garrett, a former FBI agent who obtained uncoerced confessions from two notorious terrorists--Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Mir Aimal Kansi, killer of two CIA employees outside agency headquarters that same year--told me that "coercive interrogation techniques have proven to be ineffective in producing reliable intelligence."