Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf is a perfect politician. And now, that’s got himself into a perfect mess. His mouth can’t find where the money is - so he’s not sure what to do with it.

Previously, years of inaction escaped his benefactors–both foreign and domestic–about as easily as $1 billion of annual U.S. aid escaped Congress and dissolved into the ranks of his army. But with increasing pressure on the U.S. to rectify a “mismanaged war” trickling down into increasing pressure upon the Pakistani general, Musharraf has to do something. And that puts him in, well, foreign territory.

His surge a few weeks ago against the staunch fundamentalists at the Red Mosque was supposed to be a relatively safe news bite and a testing of the waters. But instead, the outlier has proved to be a part of the majority. A nation has been aroused in its discontent. For the first time, a terrorist attack sprung up in Southern Pakistan. Upwards of thirty people were killed in a car bombing in Hub. Combine that with the attacks in a northwestern mosque and another car bomb in Hangu–all in the same day–and you have a nation splitting at the seams, leaking its people.

What do they want? Are they fighting for ideology? Then why all of a sudden, and all at once? And everywhere?

Could it not be they are sending a signal: No one believes they are being represented by this perfect politician and headless chicken? Could it be that they are voicing their vigilance for survival in the only way they’ve known of it? By the only example they’ve been shown?

Chew on this: Less than 7% of U.S. aid to Pakistan ($66 million) is devoted to education and civil development. Yet each year, we give them $1 billion in total, and package it nicely with a lesson on building the Military Industrial Complex.

By that logic, destruction is paving the way for progress in Pakistan.

If you feel the need to take a look at how Pakistan has gotten here, a Gulf News editorial by Husain Haqqani–Boston University’s Director for the Centre for International Relations–chronicles Musharraf’s every inconsistency and political blunder for the last five years leading to this spike in violence. It’s harrowing.

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