One a year  

The hometown paper breaks this story about the Bush admin's plans to launch an operation in Pakistan, although apparently the Pakistanis aren't on board yet.

The Bush administration, deeply concerned about recent assassination attempts against Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and a resurgence of Taliban forces in neighboring Afghanistan, is preparing a U.S. military offensive that would reach inside Pakistan with the goal of destroying Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, military sources said.

Does it strike anyone else as strange that recent assassination attempts on Musharraf are motivating this action, while the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center and Pentagon that took the lives of thousands of Americans didn't? Certainly taking out the al Qaeda leadership was more urgent than an elective war in Iraq - and yet we've apparently waited two and a half years to start thinking about a deathblow.

Musharraf is in a hard spot on this issue - the assassination attempts are clearly coming from al Qaeda operating within his borders, but letting the US military operate in Pakistan would mean dealing with the domestic perception that he's impotent and colluding with the US - and then he's got to worry about Bush's imperial designs. I have a hard time imagining a scenario in which he'd cooperate.

Also interesting that Bush's timetable for this was moved up from 2005 to the middle of this year - I wonder what that could be about...