The Koran

The Koran

When the first reviews of Luxenberg's Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache appeared, it seemed like an intriguing and potentially revolutionary work. I didn't have the expertise to know whether Luxenberg's claims were valid or not--and some of the negative reviews, because of both location and tone, made me suspect that some of the hostility was driven more by the general pro-Islamic tone of much of the academic world.

Since I am teaching Western Civilization this semester, and Islam is most definitely part of that class, I thought I would go ahead and read the English translation: The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran. This is probably the most exhausting book that I have read since calculus. Whoever translated it from German either was not a native speaker of English, or was trying to capture the fussy, pedantic nature of how I would expect a book like this written in German to be.

Regardless of style or tone, this is intrinsically a demanding book to read--not light entertainment, by any means! It must have been a proofreader's nightmare, because it includes not only sections in Arabic (as well as transliterations into English), but also in Syro-Aramaic. This is another Semitic language, written in Kufic script--in which the very oldest manuscripts of the Koran are also written. In addition, Luxenberg highlights the problems of how to read the standard Arabic version of the Koran by showing how various scholars have translated particularly troublesome passages into English, German, and French.

Now, let me start out by saying that I don't know Arabic, I don't know Syro-Aramaic, and I have no intention of learning either. There is no chance that I will become sufficiently fluent in both languages to know whether Luxenberg is right about his claims. Still, he makes a rather clever solution to what seems to be a very real problem: the Koran is full of bizarre contradictions.

For example, the Koran says that Islamic paradise will have couches with perpetual, black-eyed virgins--and it also says that paradise has "boys of perpetual freshness" or in some translations "boys of eternal youth." (The count of 72 perpetual virgins, while traditional, seems to be extra-Koranic.) Nothing in the Koran says that the boys are there for the sexual use of Islamic men in paradise--but you would have to be blind to the context to not figure that this is reason that the boys are perpetually "fresh." If Islam were reasonably tolerant of homosexuality, this wouldn't be too shocking--but Islam is at least as hostile to homosexuality as Judaism and Christianity used to be.

According to Luxenberg, since at least the 10th century A.D., Muslim scholars have been wrestling over problems with the Koran's text, including words that don't seem to be of Arabic origin, and that do not appear elsewhere in Arabic. Complicating this matter is that there is very little written Arabic before the Koran is traditionally written down in the 7th century (Luxenberg, 23).

One of the core problems is that the earliest Koranic text lacks written vowels—as did other Semitic languages in their earliest forms. The use of diacritical marks solves the problem—but these marks are very easily damaged during copying—and Luxenberg argues that the Koran’s text was perhaps written at least partly in Syro-Aramaic. Trying to read Syro-Aramaic as Arabic produced some of these contradictory verses.

As an example, imagine if Icelandic and Danish were both written with consonants, and only little dots to indicate what the vowels should be. Now, imagine that someone gave an Icelander some Danish text with only funny little vowel dots—and told him, “This is Icelandic.” He would find a lot of words that are the same (because these languages are in fact, quite close). He would find a lot of words that had the same consonants, and some of the vowels would match, and some would not (for example, for fish and bread). It would not take long, however, before the subtle differences would produce something that did not make much sense—and the Icelander would start to modify those vowel dots, and change some consonants to fix the original text’s “mistakes.”

Luxenberg argues that if read as Syro-Aramaic, the Koran’s paradise is not perpetual virgins, but grapes (a symbol of Heaven commonly used in Syrian Christian writings of the time), and not “boys of perpetual freshness,” but iced fruits—which seems like an apt metaphor for paradise if you live in a desert. (Luxenberg, 272-288)

Perhaps most astonishing of all is that Luxenberg argues that much of the text of the Koran appears to have been written as a Christian missionary text aimed at the pagan Arabs of the desert. I find myself wondering if, a century or more later, it was misread, perhaps intentionally, as a method of providing a unifying text for Arab nationalism. (There is considerable scholarly agreement that the Koran’s final text was not codified for at least a century after Mohammed.)

As I said at the beginning, I don’t have the expertise to know whether Luxenberg is right or wrong. But I do know that there are parts of the Koran that are shockingly contradictory—and Luxenberg’s theory is certainly thought provoking. If Luxenberg is right, Islam is built on at best a severe misreading—and at worst, a cynical manipulation by Arab political leaders more than a thousand years ago. It would certainly force a great many Muslims to rethink their faith—and wonder if Mohammed was actually trying to Christianize the polytheistic desert dwellers of Arabia.

Preventing Entry Into Paradise

Preventing Entry Into Paradise

I mentioned a few days ago the man who ran a TV station trying to promote a positive image of Muslims, now charged with beheading his wife. When the subject came up over at Volokh Conspiracy, the usual liberals of course argued that this wasn't specific to Islam, and making a big deal of this domestic murder was just stereotyping and bigotry. One very PC sort argued:

Setting that aside, some sources have suggested that the guy wasn't even a particularly devout Muslim. So it's not automatically an honor killing or what have you. I don't think there's enough information to know whether it was a religious thing, a cultural thing, or simply a domestic violence thing. You don't have to be a Muslim to have anger issues.

Another commenter, rather full of the political correctness that was starting to grab hold, observed:

Maybe it was an *accidental* decapitation? I know *I* hate it when that happens.

For that matter, is there any proof she didn't decapitate herself? Eh?

Anyway, more recent news coverage does suggest that, no, the beheading really did have something to do with Islam, and wasn't just domestic violence that got a little carried away. From February 20, 2009 Canada Free Press:

Information obtained exclusively by the Northeast Intelligence Network and Canada Free Press by a source close to the investigation during a telephone interview yesterday provides additional insight into the savage murder of the young and once vibrant Aasiya Zubair (Hassan).

Doug Hagmann, director of the Northeast Intelligence Network and contributor to Canada Free Press, interviewed this police source by telephone, who agreed to speak on the strict condition of anonymity. According to this source, Aasiya Zubair was stabbed multiple times, suffering perhaps as many as three dozen stab wounds with a steak knife in what was described as a “frenzied killing.” She was then beheaded by the same instrument.

Also according to this source, Mr. Hassan told police that because she was beheaded, she would not be permitted entry into paradise, an alleged reference to his Islamic beliefs. “It was all about honor, and the dishonor she [the victim] was bringing upon him and his family,” stated this source. “There was definitely a cultural if not a religious aspect to these incidents,” added this source.

A steak knife? I want you to think long and hard about that. (You probably don't, however.) Can you imagine the effort and time that it would take to behead someone with a steak knife?

The notion of beheading her so that she can't get into Islamic Paradise may seem like a remarkably vicious thing to do--but hardly unknown. A couple of years ago, I posted a review of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, a powerful memoir of a woman watching Iran's Islamic Revolution--which she had supported--turn into one of the great barbarous tyrannies. She told how one of her students spent time in prison for participating in anti-Revolutionary demonstrations, shortly after Khomeini came to power. Many of the women who were arrested were passed around by the guards to be raped before being executed, so that there could be certainty that they were "dishonored" and therefore unsuitable for Muslim Paradise. Ditto, for the al-Qaeda affiliates in Indonesia that raped and then beheaded Christian schoolgirls there a few years ago, and the rape of little girls at Beslan by Chechnyan terrorists.

There is a misogny in Islamist radicalism that makes "barefoot and pregnant" look positively feminist.

I Think He Just Failed His Goal

I Think He Just Failed His Goal

From the February 13, 2009 Buffalo News:

Orchard Park police are investigating a particularly gruesome killing, the beheading of a woman, after her husband — an influential member of the local Muslim community — reported her death to police Thursday.
Police identified the victim as Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37. Detectives have charged her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, 44, with second-degree murder.
"He came to the police station at 6:20 p.m. [Thursday] and told us that she was dead," Orchard Park Police Chief Andrew Benz said late this morning.
Muzzammil Hassan told police that his wife was at his business, Bridges TV, on Thorn Avenue in the village. Officers went to that location and discovered her body.
Muzzammil Hassan is the founder and chief executive officer of Bridges TV, which he launched in 2004, amid hopes that it would help portray Muslims in a more positive light. [emphasis added]

I can understand why in the passion and anger of divorce (she had filed for divorce recently) a man with a short temper might escalate an argument to hitting. I would not approve, but I can understand passion getting carried away.

I can even understand why the sense of loss and betrayal might escalate to murder. When police officers investigate a murder, and they find multiple knife wounds, for example, they start out by assuming an intimate relationship between victim and killer--because this shows that someone cared very deeply, and felt very betrayed.

But beheading her? Wow. There are cultural differences between Islam and the West, and they show up in some pretty amazing ways.

Need The Pants Scared Off Of You?

Need The Pants Scared Off Of You?

This November 22, 2007 Middle East Times discussion of recent examinations of the consequences of an Iran/Israeli nuclear war should do it just fine:

Anthony Cordesman may be the most influential man in Washington that most people have never heard of. A former director of intelligence assessment for the secretary of defense and director of policy and planning in the Department of Energy, he is now the top strategic guru at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Most serious politicians and journalists have for some years based their analyses of the Iraq war and its aftermath on his universally respected research. Cordesman is a facts man who likes and reveres good data and cool, clinical analysis as the keystones of policymaking.
He has now turned his laser-like research and forensic intelligence skills to studying the real implication of the endless diplomatic minuet at the United Nations over Iran's nuclear ambitions. In the real world, this matters mainly because an Iranian nuclear capability would transform the power balance in the wider Middle East, and leave the region and the rest of us living under the constant prospect of a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel.
This would mean, Cordesman suggests, some 16 million to 28 million Iranians dead within 21 days, and between 200,000 and 800,000 Israelis dead within the same time frame. The total of deaths beyond 21 days could rise very much higher, depending on civil defense and public health facilities, where Israel has a major advantage.

Yet another good reason to not be dependent on Middle Eastern oil.

A Divorce Of Which I Can Approve

A Divorce Of Which I Can Approve

This case, unfortunately, wasn't a kooky bunch in a compound in Texas. From AFP:

SANAA (AFP) — A Yemeni court on Tuesday granted a divorce to an eight-year-old girl whose unemployed father forced her into an arranged marriage this year, saying he feared she might be kidnapped.

"I am happy that I am divorced now. I will be able to go back to school," Nojud Mohammed Ali said, after a public hearing in Sanaa's court of first instance.

Her former husband, 28-year-old Faez Ali Thameur, said he married the child "with her consent and that of her parents" but that he did not object to her divorce petition.

In response to a question from Judge Mohammed al-Qadhi, he acknowledged that the "marriage was consummated, but I did not beat her."

Yemen, one of the world's poorest countries, has no law governing the minimum age of marriage.

Nojud was a second grader in primary school when the marriage took place two and a half months ago.

"They asked me to sign the marriage contract and remain in my father's house until I was 18. But a week after signing, my father and my mother forced me to go live with him."

Nojud's father, Mohammad Ali Al-Ahdal, said he had felt obliged to marry off his daughter, an act he claims she consented to.

He said he was frightened after his oldest daughter had been kidnapped several years ago and later married to her abductor. He said the same man then kidnapped another of his daughters who was already married and had four children, resulting in him being jailed.

Dressed in traditional black, Nojud said she would now go to live in the home of her maternal uncle and did not want to see her father.

The girl's lawyer, Shadha Nasser, said Nojud's case was not unique. "I believe there are thousands of similar cases," she said, adding that civil society groups are pressing parliament to set the minimum age for marriage at 18.

All cultures are equally valid, right? Thanks (I think) to Ann Althouse for bringing this to my attention.

Islam's Decline

A very interesting article from Pajamas Media about Islam's decline. Quoting an article by an Islamic scholar:

Islam used to represent … Africa’s main religion and there were 30 African languages that used to be written in Arabic script. The number of Muslims in Africa has diminished to 316 million, half of whom are Arabs in North Africa. So in the section of Africa that we are talking about, the non-Arab section, the number of Muslims does not exceed 150 million people. When we realize that the entire population of Africa is one billion people, we see that the number of Muslims has diminished greatly from what it was in the beginning of the last century.
On the other hand, the number of Catholics has increased from one million in 1902 to 329 million 882 thousand (329,882,000). Let us round off that number to 330 million in the year 2000.

As to how that happened, well there are now 1.5 million churches whose congregations account for 46 million people. In every hour, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity. Everyday, 16,000 Muslims convert to Christianity. Every year, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity. These numbers are very large indeed.

Pajamas Media goes on to point out that some of the conversion of Muslims to Christianity represents a repudiation of tyrannical state religion in places like Iran and the former Soviet Union:

Although al-Qataani points to Africa, there is another phenomenon based on repulsion from Islamist dictatorship, corruption, and terrorist violence. In Iran as many as 1 million people have surreptitiously converted to Evangelical Christianity in the last five years. Pastor Hormoz Shariat claims to have converted 50,000 of them through his U.S.-based Farsi-language satellite ministry. He contrasts the upswing to the efforts of evangelical missionaries in Iran between 1830 and 1979, whose 149 years of work built a Christian community of only 3,000. One Iranian religious scholar believes youth are abandoning Islam because it is identified with the corrupt Iranian government. Now the Iranian Majlis (parliament) is debating the death penalty for conversion.

...

In southern Russia the same pattern is emerging. According to Roman Silantyev, executive secretary of the Inter-religious Council in Russia, freed from atheist control, two million Muslims converted to Christianity. Repulsed by bloody terrorist attacks, those living in areas such as Beslan have converted to Christianity in the greatest numbers of all. As many as 100,000 have converted to Christianity in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.
After decades of Islamist war, evangelicals report thousands of sub-rosa converts in rural areas of Kashmir. Says one churchgoer: “I am interested in this religion. I hate violence. I hate fundamentalists in Islam. I come here to seek peace.” An Indian newspaper headline reads: “Urban Muslim Youth Out to Junk Faith.”

I guess that I can't claim to be surprised; intellectuals and academics in America make increasing excuses for Islam, and if they are picking this horse in the race, it's a pretty good bet that they are picking the loser, not the winner. Worth reading in full.

Just Imagine If Fundamentalist Protestants Asked For This

Instapundit points to the situation where Harvard has set aside some hours at their formerly co-ed gym as women-only. Now, there's nothing objectionable to me about that--as long as there are men-only hours (and just as many of them) as well. I am not even particularly upset that Harvard has done this to make Muslim women happy. But as Instapundit points out, what if "some Catholic or evangelical mother urged 'girls-only' campus workouts in the name of modesty"? I think we know what the reaction would have been.

You can tell how far to the left an institution is by examining how far it will go to make Muslims happy--while going out of its way to insult Christians.

Britain's Future

The intellectuals of Britain are working overtime to make Muslims feel comfortable in Britain. Why am I not surprised by news stories like this one, from February 11, 2008 BBC?

A man has been remanded in custody accused of murdering another man whose headless body was found in London.

Mohamed Boudjenane, 45, of Kingsgate Road, Kilburn, appeared before Highbury Corner magistrates on Monday and will appear at the Old Bailey on 19 May.

Lakhdar Ouyahia, who was 43 and an Algerian national, was found wrapped in a blood-stained duvet in a supermarket goods cage in Kilburn last Wednesday.

His head was found in the Grand Union Canal in St John's Wood on Saturday.

Mr Ouyahia, who lived in Kilburn, was discovered by a member of the public.

Over at Gateway Pundit, where I found this disturbing news story, commenters are falling all over themselves to engage in parody of multiculturalist idiocy, like this:

Before we condemn the beheading, we need to step back from our parochial views and ask some questions. Fundamentally, did the headless man deserve it? In every culture, there are countless ways to deserve to be killed. But the UK is no simple mono-culture. So, to answer these questions we need to understand sharia.

Unfortunately, there are at least four major schools of sharia in the Sunni tradition, plus the Shiite approach. There is the Quran (some passages of which are abrogated by other passages) and all the haddith (with their varying degrees of authenticity.) It makes no sense to think that white Englishmen can apply that law effectively!

We should turn the culprit over to the legal process within his community. They alone can decide whether the dead man deserved to be beheaded and dumped in the street.

and:

For all we know the fellow may have deserved it. Perhaps is was an honor killing of some sort or perhaps this man was involved with the selling of pork or perhaps he was a pet shop owner trafficking in dogs. He may have just completed a provocative public reading of "The Three Little Pigs". He may well have been drunk at the time and because of that just asking for it. Let's keep this in perspective until we know the facts.

and:

Why is everyone blindly assuming that the perpetrator of this act was a Muslim?

We all know that Lutherans are notorious for this sort of thing ...

To which the only appropriate response was this:

"Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Theo Van Gogh, Paul Johnson, and Kim Sun-Il were not immediately available for comment on this case."

If you move to America, you should do so with the expectation of accepting American values of tolerance. If you want to live in an Islamic country, move to an Islamic country.

Welfare Benefits for Polygamous Marriages

Good news--this is only in Britain--not the U.S. (so far). From the February 3, 2008 Telegraph, thanks to JammieWearingFool:

Husbands with multiple wives have been given the go-ahead to claim extra welfare benefits following a year-long Government review, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Even though bigamy is a crime in Britain, the decision by ministers means that polygamous marriages can now be recognised formally by the state, so long as the weddings took place in countries where the arrangement is legal.

The outcome will chiefly benefit Muslim men with more than one wife, as is permitted under Islamic law. Ministers estimate that up to a thousand polygamous partnerships exist in Britain, although they admit there is no exact record.

The decision has been condemned by the Tories, who accused the Government of offering preferential treatment to a particular group, and of setting a precedent that would lead to demands for further changes in British law.

New guidelines on income support from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) state: "Where there is a valid polygamous marriage the claimant and one spouse will be paid the couple rate ... The amount payable for each additional spouse is presently £33.65."

Income support for all of the wives may be paid directly into the husband's bank account, if the family so choose. Under the deal agreed by ministers, a husband with multiple wives may also be eligible for additional housing benefit and council tax benefit to reflect the larger property needed for his family.

The ruling could cost taxpayers millions of pounds. Ministers launched a review of the benefit rules for polygamous marriages in November 2006, after it emerged that some families had benefited financially.

The review concluded in December last year with agreement that the extra benefits should continue to be paid, the Government admitted. The decision was not publicly announced.

Four departments - the Treasury, the DWP, HM Revenue and Customs, and the Home Office - were involved in the review, which concluded that recognising multiple marriages conducted overseas was "the best possible" option. In Britain, bigamy is punishable by up to seven years in prison.

Islamic law permits men to have up to four wives at any one time - known as a harem - provided the husband spends equal amounts of time and money on each of them.

As I have previously mentioned, the ACLU's president several years ago indicated that the ACLU would defend polygamy. I really don't see how the courts will say no once the ACLU files suit to demand legal recognition of polygamy. After all, other countries are doing it--and for the U.S. Supreme Court, that's certainly more important than our Constitution.

The Real Danger To Homosexuals

It isn't traditionalists in America who believe that the government should not recognize same-sex marriage, or add homosexuals to the list of protected groups. It is the emerging Islamist movement. Bruce Bawer has a column here about how homosexuals like himself used to feel reasonably safe in European cities--but not anymore:

One day last month, I gave a talk in Rome about how the supposedly liberal ideology of multiculturalism has made possible the spread in Europe of the highly illiberal ideology of fundamentalist Islam, with all its brutality and – among other things – violent homophobia. When I returned to my hotel, I phoned my partner back home in Oslo only to learn that moments earlier he had been confronted at a bus stop by two Muslim youths, one of whom had asked if he was gay, started to pull out a knife, then kicked him as he got on the bus, which had pulled up at just the right moment. If the bus hadn’t come when it did, the encounter could have been much worse.
Not very long ago, Oslo was an icy Shangri-la of Scandinavian self-discipline, governability, and respect for the law. But in recent years, there have been grim changes, including a rise in gay-bashings. The summer of 2006 saw an unprecedented wave of them. The culprits, very disproportionately, are young Muslim men.
It’s not just Oslo, of course. The problem afflicts most of Western Europe. And anecdotal evidence suggests that such crimes are dramatically underreported. My own partner chose not to report his assault. I urged him to, but he protested that it wouldn’t make any difference. He was probably right.
The reason for the rise in gay bashings in Europe is clear – and it’s the same reason for the rise in rape. As the number of Muslims in Europe grows, and as the proportion of those Muslims who were born and bred in Europe also grows, many Muslim men are more inclined to see Europe as a part of the umma (or Muslim world), to believe that they have the right and duty to enforce sharia law in the cities where they live, and to recognize that any aggression on their part will likely go unpunished. Such men need not be actively religious in order to feel that they have carte blanche to assault openly gay men and non-submissive women, whose freedom to live their lives as they wish is among the most conspicuous symbols of the West’s defiance of holy law.
Multiculturalists can’t face all this. So it is that even when there are brutal gay-bashings, few journalists write about them; of those who do, few mention that the perpetrators are Muslims; and those who do mention it take the line that these perpetrators are lashing out in desperate response to their own oppression.

It is well worth reading, because he points out that for all the whining about religious conservatives in Europe (what, all five of them?) from the left, the greatest hazard to homosexuals there isn't going to be disapproval, but the willingness of multicultural leftists in Europe to tolerate shari'a law being applied there:

Yet politicians, journalists, activists, and others who cling to the multicultural mindset can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the Islamic foundations of all this bullying. Instead, they offer the same kind of nonsense that was served up by a Human Rights Watch spokesman after the Chris Crain incident. “There’s still an extraordinary degree of racism in Dutch society,” that spokesman said. “Gays often become the victims of this when immigrants retaliate for the inequities they have to suffer.”
So powerful is the determination to turn away from the plain and simple truth that Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen recently commissioned a study by the University of Amsterdam. Its purpose? To try to figure out what motives underlie the increase in attacks on gay men and lesbians by Dutch-Moroccan men in Amsterdam. “Some researchers,” wrote a reporter for UPI, “believe they [Muslim gay-bashers] lashed out at local gays after feeling stigmatized by Dutch society.” In other words, as the straight-talking Norwegian immigration expert Inger-Lise Lien put it sardonically when I showed her the article, “it’s the assailant who’s the real victim.”
As for Cohen, he would appear to be operating out of pure cynicism. This is the same mayor, after all, who has called for the Netherlands to reach some “accommodation” with its male Muslim residents that would allow them to oppress their wives, sisters, and daughters – though he hasn’t been entirely clear as to just where he would draw the line. (Beatings? Rape? Forced marriage? Genital mutilation? Honor killing?) Given such an extraordinary record of pragmatism, it seems safe to assume that Cohen would also be more than willing, in the name of peace in our time, to turn away with respectful discretion when Muslim gangs beat the living daylights out of the occasional flikker.
In any event, another mayor, London’s Ken Livingstone, has already blazed that trail. In 2004, playing host to Sunni scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has supported the execution of gay people, Livingstone hailed him as a “progressive.” When gay activists called him on this ridiculous assertion, Livingstone retaliated by putting out a dissertation-length report whitewashing Qaradawi and smearing his critics as racists.

The fact is that as Muslims become a sizable fraction of the population of European cities, politicians like Livingstone and Cohen decide that it makes sense to play to that crowd. America isn't at that stage yet--but I am beginning to think that it may be time to find some way to discourage Muslims from moving to the United States, perhaps by revival of the national origins quotas used until 1965.

Obviously, a lot of Muslims come to America because they do not want to live under shari'a law--but there are a lot who come here to enjoy the economic benefits of living in a free society, while retaining attitudes that are contrary to the American values of relatively minimal government and tolerance for differing religious beliefs.

Ah, you say, discouraging Muslims from moving here isn't very tolerant. There comes a moment when you have to draw some lines--and tolerance for intolerant philosophies is societal suicide. In Europe, Islam is going to take over because non-Muslims Europeans have stopped reproducing, while Muslims are having kids. In America, we are not quite to that level, but the combination of immigration and reproduction means that we have to worry, in a couple of generations, of Muslims being such a major voting bloc that our foreign policy is driven by Muslim interests, not American interests. The left end of the Democratic Party is already controlled by a mixture of multicultural delusion, the desire to make Muslims happy (especially terrorist front organizations like CAIR), and the Michael Moore/Noam Chomsky collection of America-haters. There are disturbing signs that the Republican Party could similarly be infected.

What To Do Next In Pakistan

What To Do Next In Pakistan

I can't believe that this is being leaked to reporters out of anything but a calculated effort to either prepare public opinion here for it, or to warn Musharraf that it is time to roll the dice--while he still has some dice to roll. From the January 6, 2008 New York Times:

WASHINGTON — President Bush’s senior national security advisers are debating whether to expand the authority of the Central Intelligence Agency and the military to conduct far more aggressive covert operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
The debate is a response to intelligence reports that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are intensifying efforts there to destabilize the Pakistani government, several senior administration officials said.
Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a number of President Bush’s top national security advisers met Friday at the White House to discuss the proposal, which is part of a broad reassessment of American strategy after the assassination 10 days ago of the Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. There was also talk of how to handle the period from now to the Feb. 18 elections, and the aftermath of those elections.
Several of the participants in the meeting argued that the threat to the government of President Pervez Musharraf was now so grave that both Mr. Musharraf and Pakistan’s new military leadership were likely to give the United States more latitude, officials said. But no decisions were made, said the officials, who declined to speak for attribution because of the highly delicate nature of the discussions.
Many of the specific options under discussion are unclear and highly classified. Officials said that the options would probably involve the C.I.A. working with the military’s Special Operations forces.
The Bush administration has not formally presented any new proposals to Mr. Musharraf, who gave up his military role last month, or to his successor as the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who the White House thinks will be more sympathetic to the American position than Mr. Musharraf. Early in his career, General Kayani was an aide to Ms. Bhutto while she was prime minister and later led the Pakistani intelligence service.
But at the White House and the Pentagon, officials see an opportunity in the changing power structure for the Americans to advocate for the expanded authority in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country. “After years of focusing on Afghanistan, we think the extremists now see a chance for the big prize — creating chaos in Pakistan itself,” one senior official said.

Part of what has made Pakistan a rather peculiar ally is that while Musharraf got on board after 9/11 with our concerns, there are substantial factions of the Pakistani intelligence services and military that are either sympathetic to, or actively supportive of al-Qaeda. Musharraf, understandably, was afraid to push too hard in trying to crush al-Qaeda operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan along the Afghani border--areas that the central government doesn't really control. Push too hard, and al-Qaeda might successfully overthrow Musharraf, and gain control of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, with enormously destructive results.

But it would appear that al-Qaeda may be reaching the point where Musharraf has nothing to do lose by pushing harder in the tribal areas, and allowing us to engage in operations against al-Qaeda inside Pakistan. Of course, that risks pushing neutrals within Pakistan into the al-Qaeda camp. This could get really ugly. But an al-Qaeda dominated Pakistani government would require us to either destroy their nuclear arsenal (which almost certainly can't be done in a subtle and bloodless way) or risk having them arrive in the U.S. via shipping containers.