The roots of the crisis go back to the blind bargain Washington made after 9/11 with the regime that had heretofore been the Taliban’s main patron: ignoring Musharraf’s despotism in return for his promises to crack down on al-Qaeda and cut the Taliban loose. Today, despite $10 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan since 2001, that bargain is in tatters; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has set up another haven inside Pakistan’s chaotic border regions.The problem is exacerbated by a dramatic drop-off in U.S. expertise on Pakistan. Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State’s policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney’s office. Anne W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin American "drugs and thugs"; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia. "They know nothing of Pakistan," a former senior U.S. diplomat said.Current and past U.S. officials tell me that Pakistan policy is essentially being run from Cheney’s office. The vice president, they say, is close to Musharraf and refuses to brook any U.S. criticism of him. This all fits; in recent months, I’m told, Pakistani opposition politicians visiting Washington have been ushered in to meet Cheney’s aides, rather than taken to the State Department. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/15/AR2007061502073.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

This is what happens when you allow insecure, sociopathic and emotionally malformed ideologues with second and third-rate minds that effectively stopped developing decades ago and no particular expertise in anything of real importance in today’s world to run the government of the most powerful country in the world, at a time of particularly huge global upheaval and transformation .
It’s like putting a pyromaniac in charge of the fire department, or a serial murderer in charge of the police department. And who could possibly have anticipated what has ensued?

I don’t like Musharraf much but the notion that his resignation will play in the hands of the progressive and freedom-friendly rather than the enemies of humanity and freedom is absurd.

There is no way that Musharaff wanted Bhutto dead and gone—but his enemies [and Pak destabilizers] did.