Joe Klein assesses the situation in Pakistan, where it appears the government may be serious about cracking down on the Taliban:
The Pakistanis have promised to take action against the Taliban before. This time, however, the U.S. should help the process along with a concerted and targeted aid package: military aid that can only be used to fight the Taliban (counterinsurgency training and equipment like up-armored humvees etc.) as opposed to untargeted military aid, plus civilian assistance to build local institutions (especially schools, to provide an alternative to the madrassas). Perhaps most important, as President-elect Obama indicated to me a few weeks ago, a high-powered special envoy should be named–someone like Bill Clinton–to try to solve the eternal dispute between Pakistan and India over Kashmir. If India recedes as a threat, the Pakistani military’s imagined need for a guerrilla counterforce in Kashmir and Afghanistan should also recede.
The Dish 