The Taliban have been allowed to march to within 70 miles of Pakistan's seat of power before the Government decided to take muscular action. Now the situation is at a critical juncture
Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, has told U.S. officials the next two weeks are critical to determining whether the Pakistani government will survive, FOX News has learned.
"The Pakistanis have run out of excuses" and are "finally getting serious" about combating the threat from Taliban and Al Qaeda extremists operating out of Northwest Pakistan, the general added.
But Petraeus also said wearily that "we've heard it all before" from the Pakistanis and he is looking to see concrete action by the government to destroy the Taliban in the next two weeks before determining the United States' next course of action, which is presently set on propping up the Pakistani government and military with counterinsurgency training and foreign aid.
Pakistan has been the focus of the Obama Administration's foreign policy in recent weeks, but the effort doesn't seem to be paying many dividends.
This first big test has been something of a slow-burner, often neglected by media distracted by pirates and swine flu. Nevertheless, the accelerating power of Islamic extremists in a nuclear-armed state is as big and as scary a threat as any president has faced since the end of the Cold War -- and the administration has responded with an aggressive array of military, political, diplomatic and economic initiatives, in Pakistan, Washington and elsewhere.
The administration began by treating Pakistan as an adjunct to its strategy for Afghanistan, because Pakistan's western tribal territories serve as bases for the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda. Yet in the past month Pakistan suddenly has seemed to tip toward collapse as the Taliban rapidly expanded toward Islamabad while the country's army and weak civilian government dithered.
Not to mention Iran currently.
But back to Pakistan, the President has called both Afghanistan's and Pakistan's Presidents to a crisis meeting in Washington
" 'It had gotten significantly worse than I expected as the Swat deal unraveled,' Mullen explained in an interview. He was referring to a truce brokered in February in the Swat Valley, about 100 miles north of Islamabad. The Pakistani military had expected that the cease-fire would subdue Taliban fighters in Swat. Instead, the Muslim militants surged south into the district of Buner, on the doorstep of the capital.
"Listening to Mullen's report at the White House were two senior officials - Defense Secretary Bob Gates and special envoy Richard Holbrooke - who were serving in government back in 1979, when a Muslim insurgency toppled the Iranian government, with harmful consequences that persist to this day. The two policy veterans 'made the argument that it's worth studying the Iran model,' recalls a senior official who took part in the White House meeting.
"This was Pakistan week for the administration's foreign policy team, behind the self-congratulatory hubbub over the first 100 days. At a news conference Wednesday, Obama said that he was 'gravely concerned about the situation in Pakistan.' He said his biggest worry was that 'the civilian government there right now is very fragile.'"
They are, and the next two weeks will tell the story as to whether this is the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning for the Islamists.
