I think David Ignatius’ column on Pakistan today is pretty insightful. He makes the Iran analogy, and also makes the point that even with 20/20 hindsight it’s really not clear how Jimmy Carter should have handled that situation. Similarly, “changing Pakistan is a job for Pakistanis, and history suggests that the more we meddle, the more likely we are to get things wrong.”

The trouble, though, is that while it would be easy for us to not “meddle” if political protests started to rock Laos or Belarus, we’re already eye-deep in Pakistan-related meddling in the form of our huge post-9/11 aid packages. To pull the aid carpet out from under Musharraf would be a kind of meddling. To continue the unconditional aid policy, however, is a different kind of meddling. And to continue the aid but attach more strings to it — to make it clear that a violent crackdown on peaceful demonstrators would result in aid cuts, say — would also constitute a kind of meddling. Similarly, if Pakistani officials ask American diplomats what they think about the situation and they don’t say anything, that’ll likely be read as a green light for harsh measures.

Basically, we’re in a position where “don’t meddle” doesn’t mean anything. In the medium-term, what we need to do is shift our overall posture to one where we’re doing less meddling in other countries’ internal political problems (as Ignatius says, we don’t seem very good at it) but we’ve meddled so much in Pakistan that there’s no non-meddling option for the short-run.

Tim Lee complains that “The general point that violating the constitution is wrong even if it leads to results we like is a position that hardly anyone in mainstream politics takes seriously” and there follows some fulminating about liberals who are “perfectly willing to countenance tortured readings of the First Amendment in the name of ‘campaign finance reform,’ of the Second Amendment in the name of ‘gun control,’ and of the Fifth Amendment in the name of ‘urban planning.’”

Color me unconvinced. It’s easy for a libertarian who’s convinced that a non-tortured reading of the constitution would enact libertarianism to assert that the country’s vast non-libertarian majority ought to be less concerned about our policy preferences and more concerned about non-torture of the constitution. The reality, though, is that where the constitution is really ambiguity-free then people are happy to abide by provisions they don’t approve of. I think, for example, that judicial terms should be long, but fixed, rather than lasting until death or retirement. It’s clear enough, though, that that’s not the law.

Meanwhile, had the US Constitution not been written by a small and unrepresentative minority of wealthy individuals working in the 18th century, it’s possible that it would do something like guarantee a right to health care. Folks on the left would read that as a straightforward constitutional enactment of a universal health care system. More libertarian-minded people, though, could probably devise “tortured” readings of the provision indicating that “after all just go to an emergency room” plus the status quo is good enough:

Meanwhille, from where I sit it’s Tim’s reading of the Fifth Amendment that seems tortured to me — why shouldn’t urban planning count as a public use? But leaving that aside, I suppose it does take some torturing of the Second Amendment’s text to explain why the “right to keep and bear arms” doesn’t guarantee people’s right to keep and bear, say, weaponized forms of the VX nerve agent but I’d rather offer a tortured reading of the amendment than have deadly neurotoxins sold at the corner store. Obviously, there are some constitutional provisions I think should be very strictly adhered to, but those are just the provisions that I think enact morally worthwhile principles of justice. Maintaining the rule of law requires us to show some fidelity to precedent and to efforts at textual exegesis but whether or not we’re “getting the text right” as such pretty little bearing on the issue.

The real problem is simply that the constitution is too hard to amend so that when provisions become outdated or unworkable or produces ludicrous results (VX gas, again) it’s unduly difficult to change things around. Meanwhile, undue reverence for the constitution prevents people from recognizing that a lot of the procedural aspects of the constitutional mechanism are clunky and absurd (see for example what happens if there’s no majority in the electoral college, a lurking time-bomb that’s bound to go off one of these days) and ought to be changed.

Several smart correspondents have made the point that one of the other oddities of western press coverage of Benazir Bhutto is that you tend not to hear about how she’s a huge crook. Corruption in a middle-income country, of course, is nothing new and Pakistan in general is not a paragon of good governance. Still, the best of my knowledge Bhutto and her husband stand out as unusually corrupt by Pakistani standards, which is precisely how she wound up ejected from power.

The Bhuttos, naturally, claim that all of this is politically motivated, but if you look at John Burns’ account from early 1998 when the investigations were going down you can see that it’s grounded in some pretty solid evidence and involves lots of European banks and corporation that are hardly going to be under the control of her political rivals in Pakistan. And we’re not talking small change here, either, this one scam seems to have netted tens of millions of dollars. Back in the late 1990s, she even had Swiss authorities looking to get her indicted which, again, seems like a beyond-the-ordinary level of corruption rather than domestic political gambits. That’s not to deny that she has a real constituency in the country, but Pakistani politics shouldn’t be reduced to Bhutto versus Musharraf as there’s more forces in play than just that:

Sharif urged the West to abandon Musharraf but also ruled out teaming up with Benazir Bhutto, another key opposition leader, unless she cut off talks with Musharraf. Sharif told The Associated Press that Pakistan was heading deeper into chaos and his archenemy had outlived his usefulness in fighting terrorism.

I’m not sure what the takeaway is here, but it’s worth keeping in mind.