“It’s an insane dream to expect anything different from the Pakistani government,” said Ali Wazir, a South Waziristan native and a politician with the secular Awami National Party. “The Taliban are the brainchildren of the Pakistan army for the last 30 years. They are their own people. Could you kill your own brother?”

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy, to Pakistan and Afghanistan, has a well-constructed quote that makes Pakistani delays in launching the offensive seem like smart counterinsurgency measures:

Although Holbrooke said it could be beneficial to have simultaneous offensives — the U.S. Marines on the Afghanistan side of the border and the Pakistani army in the tribal regions to the east — the greater concern is unfinished business elsewhere. “Why would I push them to start an offensive when they have 2 million people they have to protect first?” Holbrooke said.

Savvy diplomatic statement, to be sure, but if Wazir is right, Holbrooke is deluding himself.

An FBI whistleblower claims that the lead FBI agent on the Stevens case, Mary Beth Kepner, was having an affair with the prosecution’s star witness, Bill Allen, who admitted under oath to giving the longest-serving Republican senator some $250,000 in gifts that Stevens never disclosed on his Senate disclosure forms.

Stevens’ case is winding through the appeals process at the moment, on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct — separate from today’s revelations. If it’s true that Stevens’ conviction hinged on a sexual relationship between an FBI agent and an oil services company CEO, well, maybe it won’t matter that President Bush passed him over in the end.