With allies like these....

One of the current administrations oft repeated distortions concerns the Coalition of the Willing, and the inclusion of Pakistan as an example of "how far we've come" in the GWOT.

I've always contended that Republicans have a very very poor understanding of the region, but their insistence that Pakistan is a friend represents a genuine miscalculation of dangerous proportions. While the elite segment of society, encompassing the wealthy and the powerful, may be outwardly friendly to the United States, it is the very same segment's unwillingness to engage the far more numerous and dangerously populated segment of Pakistani society that should be troubling to Americans.

James Risen and David Rohde of the New York Times write about how Pakistan has subtly foiled our quest to find Bin Laden, infiltrate his new core group of followers, or gather any sort of intelligence in Pakistan since the GWOT began. Money quote:

More than three years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and New York transformed Osama bin Laden into the most wanted man in the world, the search for him remains stalled, frustrated by the remote topography of his likely Pakistani sanctuary, stymied by a Qaeda network that remains well financed and disciplined, sidetracked by the distractions of the Iraq war, and, perhaps most significantly, limited by deep suspicion of the United States among Pakistanis.

If anyone believes that brute force alone can overcome this need only read the following:

On Sept. 9, for example, an air raid near the village of Dela in South Waziristan killed as many as 80 civilians. Young men from the Mehsud tribe, many of whose members died in the incident, began flocking to the militants. "That was a turning point," said Rahimullan Yusufzai, a Pakistani journalist. "Their friends, their relatives and people they knew were killed."

But the US is sitting on its laurels. There is apparently a secret plan to reinstate a dormant propaganda unit within the Pentagon aimed on winning over "Hearts & Minds" in foreign lands.

Pentagon and military officials directly involved in the debate say that such a secret propaganda program, for example, could include planting news stories in the foreign press or creating false documents and Web sites translated into Arabic as an effort to discredit and undermine the influence of mosques and religious schools that preach anti-American principles.

Does anyone there have a brain? Even if this were true, how could let something like this leek out.