Pakistan is the Problem

It is now quite apparent that Barack Obama will be our next president. McCain could still win, I suppose, but at this point it seems highly unlikely. As president, he'll have to deal with the Afghanistan / Pakistan problem, and I'm happy to say that this is one area of foreign policy where his thinking is largely correct. Watching the second presidential debate, a few things struck me. First, Obama is dead right that the fight in Iraq distracted us from the fight in Afghanistan and we let Bin Laden slip through our fingers. The Pakistan / Afghanistan border is and has always been the center of the fight on terror and that's where our troops should be, not Iraq.
Of course McCain knows it too (though I'm not sure he did when he sided with Bush on the Iraq war) and to be honest I don' think the positions of the two candidates vis-à-vis Pakistan are really that different. Obama, of course, should have kept his mouth shut about sending cruise missiles into Pakistan to kill Bin Laden and McCain is right to have criticized him for "telegraphing his punches". It is not a good thing for the next president of the United States to declare on national television that when he gets elected he's going to send the army into a sovereign country that is presumably (but not really) our ally. I doubt that it matters though, because McCain would do the same thing, and Bush is already doing it and everyone knows it.
Hopefully Obama realizes that in dealing with Pakistan he’s walking on egg shells. Pakistan is a small and relatively insignificant country that just happens to have nuclear weapons and enough lawless mountains to hide the world’s most-wanted terrorists. The ideal situation would be for us to march into Waziristan and kill every rogue element that conspires against the U.S.A. and our Afghan mission, but that is not necessarily possible and trying might result in a mushroom cloud over New York City.
I think what most people don’t realize is that Pakistan has much to lose if the USA defeats the Taliban. Christopher Hutchins, writing for slate magazine, explains it in his article here:

http://www.slate.com/id/2200134/

There are many good points in this article that deserve examination, the most salient being that Obama’s presidency will be a war-time presidency and he’ll be fighting a nuclear-armed enemy. Unfortunately, it has come to that: there is little doubt at this point that the powers-that-be in Pakistan (which does not necessarily mean the government) are supporting the Taliban and intentionally allowing Osama Bin Laden to live on Pakistani soil. Our attempt to install Benazir Bhutto as President was ill-considered and it failed terribly and there don’t seem to be any options left other than to fight a secret war against the ISI and its terrorist recruitment network.
I think Obama is well-suited for the challenge, more because he seems willing to surround himself with competent advisors than because of his own convictions or character. His tough talk against Pakistan is a campaign tactic designed to give the peace candidate a tough guy edge. That being said, the line he’s taking is, in my opinion, the correct one. Hopefully he’ll follow his rhetoric with the action and conviction the situation deserves.