Two quotes that sum up the Pakistan situation quite well from a recent TIME article, "The Blunt Instruments of War,"one because it's from a Pentagon official who seems to get the gist of the problem of the region and the second because it's from Bruce Hoffman, an highly knowledgeable analyst on terrorism:
"I've seen intelligence reports that have the top al-Qaeda leadership all over a huge geographical area out there," says a senior Pentagon official. A lot of the intelligence, he notes, "comes from people who are deliberately trying to deceive us."
Operations that kill innocents make things worse. "It alienates precisely the population whose support you need," says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Rand. "And it provides propaganda to our enemies--that our violence kills innocent women and children, so how is it different from theirs?"
They're fairly straightforward and highlight the exact two problems that the US has in prosecuting it's war against terror or, even simply, getting Al Qaeda:
1. We've got poor information and our "allies" either aren't helping or can't help us get the information (and, therefore, I'd argue, aren't our allies). Sounds like his analysis is very similar to early retribution disinformation that various Afghani warlords gave us in 2002.
2. Our public perception is our Achilles Heel, for both the domestic and international audience: our PR is really wearing into a thin gauze-like material that's almost on par with "faith"