The Brutal Rule

clipped from www.nypost.com The rule is brutal, but ironclad. If you don't kill the killers, the killers will kill you. Musharraf, who should've known better, has learned that lesson the hard way. But the price has been radicalization and violence in Pakistan's major cities, hundreds of soldiers taken hostage, the torture and beheading of military prisoners, growing casualty lists - and frontier tribes more confident than ever that they can resist the central government. What's the worst thing that could happen now? That would be if Musharraf folded and, faced with mounting casualties, called off the current military offensive. But Musharraf is hardly alone in his dilemma. The worst thing that the United States could do would be to imagine that, if we quit the fight, we could find an accommodation with Islamist terrorists. Appeasement has never worked, and it never will. This is a war to the death.