Andrew C. McCarthy on Benazir Bhutto on National Review Online

A recent CNN poll showed that 46 percent of Pakistanis approve of Osama bin Laden.

Aspirants to the American presidency should hope to score so highly in the United States. In Pakistan, though, the al-Qaeda emir easily beat out that country’s current president, Pervez Musharraf, who polled at 38 percent.

President George Bush, the face of a campaign to bring democracy — or, at least, some form of sharia-lite that might pass for democracy — to the Islamic world, registered nine percent. Nine!

If you read nothing else today, read McCarthy’s clear-eyed dissection of American policy in Pakistan and, implicitly, in the entire war on Islamofascist terror. Especially this:

For the United States, the question is whether we learn nothing from repeated, inescapable lessons that placing democratization at the top of our foreign policy priorities is high-order folly.

Precisely.

UPDATE: Former Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain is blabbering on Fox to the effect that we need to meet terrorism in that nation with better medical care and increased democracy. She was a George W. Bush employee, so I guess that is to be expected. (She now works for the United Nations).

A true Pakistanian democracy would cheerfully see Ambassador Wendy raped to death as an infidel whore.

UPDATE: More from McCarthy:

But we should at least stop fooling ourselves. Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they’ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.

This has been the approach here at Daily Pundit for more than six years. You start by killing the regimes that support, finance, arm, train, protect, and use Islamofascist terrorists.

UPDATE: The Corner on National Review Online

My friend and colleague Andy McCarthy makes points that are both powerful and disturbing in his piece on “the real Pakistan.” But let me add this: Back in the 1980s, when I was last in Pakistan, I don’t think the country was seething with anti-Western hatred. Certainly those I knew, military men in particular, seemed sincerely pro-Western.

What changed? The Saudis embarked on a global effort to stread Wahhabism, their religiously based ideology. In particular they financed madrassas in Pakistan. These madrassas have not turned out scholars. They have instead produced warriors eager to kill infidels and apostates as a part of a jihad to establish the global supremacy and dominance of Islam.

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