With friends like these, who needs insurgencies?

Economist:

The army’s progress is encouraging. On May 23rd it entered Swat’s biggest city, Mingora, where only 20,000 of around 375,000 inhabitants are estimated to remain.

Financial Times:

In a stark reminder on Thursday that the threat of further terror attacks still looms across the country, a bomb went off on a train in Baluchistan, the south-western province at the centre of a past separatist insurgency, killing one person and injuring 35.

As I mentioned earlier, Pakistan was not initially keen on making several million people homeless in order to get at several thousand Taliban fighters.

"Humanitarian crisis" is not the stuff of reelection, for one. But perhaps President Zardari was moved by Barack Obama's soaring oratory; alternatively, a large wad of cash and the chance to add Obama to his Facebook friends.

2.5 million refugees later, the West celebrates its crimes as evidence of success, and the relative impotence of the Taliban as portending disaster.