MSNBC TV talk show host Rachael Maddow has expressed alarm that the U.S. theater of war is 'expanding' into Pakistan and so she's analogizing Pakistan to Cambodia; this on the misinformed theory that the Afghan War can be likened to the Vietnam War....
Ms Maddow, as with every American news-talk personality from every part of the political spectrum,
knows nothing about South Asia and cares even less. And what she understands about the war on terror could fit in a teaspoon; again, she has plenty of company among America's commentators. 
So the only reason I'm taking up your time and mine to mention her comments is that John Batchelor has also gotten on the Cambodia kick. And while John's reasons for alarm are far more complex than Ms Maddow's, he too is concerned about signs that disagreements between Rawalpindi and Washington are escalating into an open armed conflict that will result in a declared war between Pakistan and the USA.
Before John and Ms Maddow burst into tears, the editorial [WaPost today] correctly points out that the Obama administration has plenty of cards to play without sending the Marines into Pakistan... The problem is the Obama administration (and its predecessors during the past half century) understand only slightly more about the Pakistanis than Ms Maddow, which is to say almost nothing at all -- a failing shared by military advisors to General Petraeus and his predecessors in Afghanistan and going back to the dawn of the Pakistan state .....
Thus, I have sympathy for Ms Maddow's alarm, and John's....
There is Pundita blog;
I've been told by several Indian readers who're very knowledgeable about Pakistan that they learned things about Pakistanis from my writings that even they never knew before.
There's no American, no Westerner, writing about Pakistanis who knows them the way I do. T
hat explains why, with all the harsh things I've written about Pakistan, I've never received as much as one letter of protest from a Pakistani, even though this blog is read in Pakistan. They are silent because they know I really know them.
Yet there is not one single academic in the entire United States of America who will present credentials, and who is sufficiently knowledeable about Pakistan ....
If you believed me, you might be shocked at the dearth of reliable advisors on Pakistan. I've asked my readers several times to study Nils Gilman's Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. The history details how a small group of American academics who found favor in official Washington sowed havoc on a horrific scale because they understood nothing about peoples in parts of the world they were trying to modernize. Nothing. They understood nothing.
These lunatics were replaced by economists ...then with COINistas -- a group of military advisors who somehow found in the Malay and Vietnam counterinsurgencies guidance for how the U.S. should proceed in Afghanistan, and who knew nothing about the Pakistanis ....And here we are today.
.. the above is one way of saying that the current search for a new American grand strategy is a joke.
Washington defense policymakers are the only people on Earth who whap themselves on the back of the head then yelp, 'Who hit me?' ...
The cards that President Obama is holding should have been played at least as early as 2002. Instead, the Bush administration struck a bargain with Pakistan's military because it didn't want to open up a full-scale theater of war on three fronts. This, despite the fact that
within weeks of the 9/11 attacks U.S. intelligence had clear indications that Pakistan's military had been involved in the planning for the attacks.
As Bob Woodward's newly-published book on Obama's wartime decisions indicates, officials in the outgoing Bush administration warned him that Rawalpindi had stabbed them in the back. (Obama might have been warned even earlier, which could explain his fiery remark about bombing Pakistan.) ..
<snip>
Through a convergence of incredible flukes .., it quickly came to light that the Pakistan military and their fig-leaf intelligence branch, the ISI, was the master planner behind the Mumbai terrorist attacks. It was then that Washington and it's allies in NATO had consider the possibility that Pakistan's military, in the manner of a serial killer who becomes overconfident, was using terrorist outfits it controlled to get its way with Afghanistan. This included the stark warning to the United States and India to roll back India's influence in Afghanistan.
The warning was a smashing success ....-
The blunt reality was that while the economies of India, the United States, and Canada might absorb one or more Mumbai-style attacks, small EU countries couldn't. So the Obama administration continued to placate the West European members of the ISAF. This included fresh attempts to bribe Pakistan into better behavior and instructing Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke and General Stanley McChrystal to fawn over Pakistan's military leadership.
As we know real terrorists don't set bombs just to threaten. So, given the career history and connections of Shahzad's father, eyes turned again to Rawalpindi. Thus, SecState Hillary Clinton's strange public warning that she sincerely hoped for Pakistan's sake that there was not a successful terrorist attempt on U.S. soil....
....
Then came intelligence reports about planned Mumbai-style attacks in West European capitals -- attacks that were being prepared in Pakistan.
That's when Europe's NATO leaders finally confronted the truth about their dealings with Pakistan's military, which is that it's unwise to treat a tiger like an overgrown house cat. And so we return to The Washington Post editorial of today. I'll leave things here and pick up again tomorrow.
2:30 PM ET UPDATE
Regarding my contention that there are no academics willing to talk openly about Pakistan who are well-informed enough to give sound advice to Washington: A reader sent a quote from Mosharraf Zaidi's 10/4 opinion piece (Reading Woodward in Karachi) with the words, "I didn't believe you until I saw this."
Before 9/11, Pakistan's hot and cold relationship with the United States was the object of obsession for three generations of Pakistani foreign-policy analysts, but there were hardly a dozen serious Pakistan scholars in the United States. The imbalance was for good reason. America was a massive ATM for corrupt and lazy Pakistani governments -- especially military dictatorships.
Yes, and scholarship on Pakistan's history doesn't automatically equate to an understanding of Pakistanis.
Their game plan to cause takleef to US is so obvious. Things are fast spiralling out of unkil's control and they will be forced to openly confront TSP. But trust the GUBO biatch to downhill ski pretty fast before reaching the tipping point. Any way good fun to watch.