Christopher Kremmer’s column in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Alas, our new brothers-in-arms resemble more a freaks’ gallery than a stable family. The British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, heads off today to Iran to ask its government – which is on an American list of countries that support terrorism – to join the war against, that’s right, terrorism. Perhaps Tehran’s contribution could be to explain exactly how it’s done. The same twisted logic applies to Pakistan’s Lazarus-like return from beyond the realm of civilised nations. Islamabad has escaped sanctions – and will no doubt breeze through debt-rescheduling talks – precisely because, having sponsored the Taliban, it knows all about them and is willing to sell that information for 30 pieces of silver. As a former US envoy to Afghanistan, Peter Thomsen, noted: “In the last 15 years Pakistan has been both the fireman and the arsonist in Afghanistan.”

The important thing here is that everyone else in the world knows what we’re up to here. It’s not like people in Pakistan and the rest of the Muslim world are ignorant of the fact that Pakistan was a pariah state and that the West disapproved of their military government until they could give us something that we wanted.