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America's military policy is following its foreign policy which follows the smell of oil. Forget freedom and democracy. That's for fools. Pakistanis are fooling themselves if they think President Obama will be able to change this. Let's pray he does. The Karachi-Torkham-Afghanistan supply route and the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline means that U.S. will have to take effective control of Balochistan, Gwadar and Karachi. This will also help deny Iran and China any stake in their own pipelines across Pakistan. America can't do this by going to war with a strong Pakistani military. Destabilization is part of the plan, with some margin for unintended consequences. Now you understand the game . ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Publicly, America's most immediate challenge after the government change is Afghanistan and Pakistan. Privately, in Washington's power corridors, it is oil. Oil, and not al Qaeda, is threatening to knock America off global leadership. Preside...

Pirates in Somalia are at it again. Over the weekend they claimed their biggest prize to date: a Saudi oil tanker the size of three football fields, laden with $100 million in crude oil. Before you summon romantic images of rum-soaked swashbucklers gallivanting "Pirates of the Caribbean"-style, consider this: The sophistication of the most recent attack has the attention of U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On Monday Mullen said he's "stunned" at the pirates' ability to hijack a vessel in the open ocean so far from the coast (though most attacks occur closer to the Gulf of Aden, this one took place 450 miles off the coast of Kenya). "[The pirates are] very well armed. Tactically, they are very good," Mullen said. Indeed, the seizure of the Saudi tanker is the latest in a series of high-stakes incidents in recent months. Piracy has long plagued the waters off the Horn of Africa, but attacks this year have spiked 75 p...