As reliably shoddy as analysis often is at NR, one can count on John Derbyshire to inject an invigorating contrarian opinion, which, while also oversimplifying, is a tonic against the hysterics otherwise found there.

Today, on Pakistan:

On balance, I think we should be sanguine about Pakistan — or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or Iraq — going jihadist. Jihadism is a sure route to national poverty and inconsequentiality. If you have oil, you can keep something going for a while, as Iran has demonstrated, but the next Soviet-sized threat to the U.S.A. will not be a jihadist power.

For a place like Pakistan, the choice is really:

1. Poverty, stagnation, and mischief under jihadist rulers, or

2. Some kind of halting progress towards modernization and secularization, with some occasional mischief, under a gangster-dictator like Saddam, or

3. A moderately open and modernizing government, probably run by the military, that is not hostile to us but can’t actually help us much against jihadist mischief because too many of their people are sympathetic to it.

It’s not a happy selection of choices, but it seems to me that is the complete menu. We of course have to deal with the mischief as it arises, to the degree that it impinges on us and our interests. I don’t know any reason to think we are incapable of doing so. The third option actually makes it harder, though — as we have learned in Pakistan.

Indeed. Un-bunch thy panties, oh stalwart warriors of the right. Pakistan’s a mess, to be sure, but there’s no need to start calling for the genocide of its peoples.