Do they miss Musharraf?

We finally know what the big news from Wikileaks is all about. They have not shaken the market, but they do raise some serious issues.

Murder on the Khyber Pass express

The "everybody" involved in this case seems to exclude whomever actually leaked the documents, presumably some element of the US military, which has to absorb the effect of Pakistan's double game in the region in the form of body bags for enlisted men and shattered reputations for commanders. Like the Rolling Stone magazine interviews that led to the firing of General Stanley McChrystal, the America commander in Afghanistan, the WikiLeaks documents suggest a degree of disaffection of the American military with civilian leaders deeper than anything in living memory.

To exit the Afghan quagmire in a less than humiliating fashion, the United States requires Pakistani help to persuade the Taliban not to take immediate advantage of the American departure and evoke Vietnam-era scenes of helicopters on the American Embassy roof. The politicians in Washington know they have lost and have conceded to the Taliban a role in a post-American Afghanistan. They can only hope that once the country plunges into chaos, the public will have moved onto other themes, much as it did after the Bill Clinton administration put Kosovo into the hands of a gang of dubious Albanians in 1998.

He goes on:

With 170 million people - more than Russia - and a nuclear arsenal, Pakistan is too big to fail, that is, too big to fail without traumatic consequences for its neighbors. Whether it can be kept from failure is questionable. Half its people live on less than a dollar day, and half are illiterate. It is riven by religious differences - a seventh of Pakistanis are Shi'ite - as well as ethnic ones.

Spengler goes over the top with a World War I reference, but a lot of oil is shipped from the Persian Gulf (a short trip from Pakistan) and all the major global and regional powers are here (Iran, China, India, U.S., Russia).