The real reason Washington isn’t too fussed about Pakistan’s further descent into dictatorship:
The Bush administration’s muted reaction to the dictatorial rule of Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf has nothing to do with its stated goal of promoting democracy in Asia and the Islamic world. Instead, it’s all about fuel supplies in Afghanistan. Without the Pakistanis, the 24,000 U.S. troops who are stationed in Afghanistan would likely run out of fuel within a matter of days.
The U.S. military is burning about 575,000 gallons of fuel per day in Afghanistan, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the Defense Energy Support Center, the Defense Department agency that manages the U.S. military’s fuel supplies. And about 80 percent of that fuel comes from five refineries in Pakistan.
Without the support of Musharraf and the Pakistani military, U.S. forces in Afghanistan would have to rely on a precarious logistics line that extends more than 1,000 miles from northern Afghanistan all the way to refineries in Baku, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan.
Who said martial law couldn’t be fun?