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Monitoring Pakistan from her beat at the State Department, NBC's Andrea Mitchell hailed "an historic victory for opponents to the embattled president." Pervez Musharraf's decision to fire the nation's chief justice was repudiated by the courts in "an unprecedented show of independence." Mitchell noted a "growing pro-democracy movement" against the military strongman. Over the past six years, the United States has spent $10bn to support Musharraf's regime and now critics of the Bush Administration say "he may not survive politically and the US has no Plan B."
So NBC anchor Brian Williams sat down with Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Haass pointed not to the democratic activists but to the recent wave of protests and suicide bombings from radical Islamists: "The military is unhappy with him increasingly because he cannot keep order." Haass added that all that aid from the US gives him the image of "a puppet." He called this "the beginning of the end of the Musharraf era" and predicted his replacement, not by civilian democrats but by "another senior military man, a member of the army, the most powerful institution in Pakistan."
Why did NBC decide that Pakistan matters so much to make it its lead? Haass used an odd phrase--the "nightmare that keeps me and others up at night"--to introduce his answer: "the loss of political control, of central government control, over its nuclear weapons."
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