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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...

The time has come to carefully assess the U.S. motivations in widening the gyre of the Afghan war, which commenced seven years ago. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States armed forces, Admiral Mike Mullen, has lent his voice to the incipient idea of a "regional" approach to the Afghanistan problem. He said the over-arching strategy for success in Afghanistan must be regional in focus and include not just Afghanistan but also Pakistan and India. The three South Asian countries, he stressed, must figure a way to reduce tensions among them, which involves addressing the "long-standing problems that increase instability in the region." Adm. Mullen then referred to Kashmir as one such problem to underline that if India-Pakistan tensions decreased, it "allowed the Pakistani leadership to focus on the west [border with Afghanistan]." He regretted that the terror attack in Mumbai raised India-Pakistan tensions , and "in the near term...

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...