Things are looking more dicey every day. The indispensible Ahmed Rashid tells the story and it's not a pretty one.

American officials are in a concealed state of panic, as I observed during a recent visit to Washington at the time when 17,000 additional troops were being dispatched to Afghanistan. The Obama administration unveiled its new Afghan strategy on March 27, only to discover that Pakistan is the much larger security challenge, while US options there are far more limited. The real US fear was bluntly addressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Baghdad on April 25:

One of our concerns...is that if the worst, the unthinkable were to happen, and this advancing Taliban...were to essentially topple the government for failure to beat them back, then they would have the keys to the nuclear arsenal of Pakistan.... We can't even contemplate that.

Rashid doesn't see much hope either in our former failed policy or our current failing one (although, to be fair, he points out the U.S. is only one of many competing interests in a tangle that includes the Pakistani elite, the Army, the Taliban, the Baloch nationalists and India. To which I'd also add: the invisible but omnipresent players of the "great game": the Chinese, the Iranians, the Russians.)

Among Rashid's many depressing observations, this fact had somehow escaped my notice:

Under Bush, the US poured $11.9 billion into Pakistan, 80 percent of which went to the army. Instead of revamping Pakistan's capacity for counterinsurgency, the army bought $8 billion worth of weapons for use against India—funds that are still unaccounted for, either by the US Congress or the Pakistani government. Not a single major public development project was initiated in Pakistan by Washington during the Bush era.

Just like Iraq. Well at least you can say they were consistent.