Last week, Taliban-affiliated forces launched an attack on the national headquarters of the Pakistani Army. The result was a firefight followed by a standoff with hostages that ended earlier today. This attack represents a game-changing moment for Pakistan, and by extension for the US-led coalition in Afghanistan. Here's why.

In the past, the Pakistani military and intelligence (ISI) establishment have allowed the Taliban considerable freedom of operation inside Pakistan, and either turned a blind eye or provided support to Taliban and Al Qaeda forces operating across the border in Afghanistan who are based inside Pakistan, primarily in South Waziristan.

The toleration of Pakistani Taliban wore thin in May, when Taliban forces seized control of the Swat Valley, ending a truce with the Pakistani government. That action prompted the Pakistani military to engage in an extended campaign over the Summer to unseat them, leading to a formal declaration of surrender by Taliban forces in September. During the course of that campaign, Pakistani forces massed on the border of South Waziristan, the province that is home to the bulk of the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces, but never actually went in. Invading South Waziristan would be no small undertaking. There are an estimated 10,000 Taliban fighters in that province, and previous military incursions have been beaten back with significant losses.

Despite the crackdown on the Taliban inside Pakistan, the military and the ISI have continued to allow Al Qaeda and Afghan Taliban forces to operate with impunity, presumably as a check on Indian influence in Afghanistan. India's influence is largely in the form of infrastructure investment. Pakistan simply does not have the economic resources to compete on that basis, so it relies on Pashtun proxies. As recently as this past week, in fact, Afghan government sources allege that the ISI was directly involved in a Taliban attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

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Back in the mid-1990s, American seniors were mobilized into action to resist a plan to reform the Medicare system - in fairly modest ways - by scare tactics and misrepresentations.  That time, of course, the losers of the exchange were the Republicans, who wanted to look for ways to cut down on fraud and waste, slow the rate of payment increases, and impose some level of cost-benefit analysis into the process of decision-making for Medicare funded procedures (sound familiar?)  At one point, a proposal to slow the rate of increased spending was being publicly presented as a plan to slash Medicare spending.  Some movies are criticized for being derivative - this kind of argument is a second derivative.

The Republicans called it "Mediscare," and no one did it better than Clinton during the 1996 election.  I vividly remember the outrage of a friend of mine, at the time a Republican Party operative in an East Coast state known for its colorful politics.  He was incensed at the dishonesty, the bare primacy of politics over policy, the use of appeals to raw emotion to stifle any serious discussion of a critically important policy issue.  (Side note:  the friend in question later moved from politics to banking, switched to the Democratic Party, and converted to Judaism.  Um, I think I feel good about it.)  Of course, the Republicans got their turn with Hillarycare, and Harry and Louise.  I just saw a really sad story about the actress who played Louise in those commercials; apparently she later couldn't get work because directors would say "I'm not hiring the woman who killed health care reform."

And now we have the Obamacare "debate."  In one sense, this is just another chapter of the bipartisan tradition of demagoguing social policy in the name of party politics.  And Americans in large numbers go for it every time.  On a side note, what is it about us?  I'm not actually sure Americans are capable of meaningful rational collective except in the face of imminent and total disaster.  I think it's part of the anarchic strand of Romantic madness in the American character that comes down to us from Tom Paine and Daniel Shays.  Perfectly sober Bohemian Socialists, well-disciplined Italian Anarchists, long-suffering Slovak peasant farmers, decent, hard-working Irish nationalist - they all came to America, abandoned their Left revolutionary roots, and turned into populist whack jobs.  And then they became Nativists, which is even more miraculous.  I remember a news story about a controversy over a mosque in Hamtramck, Michigan.  One local resident, in particular, complained that the call to prayer being broadcast from the minaret was un-American - "if they're going to live in America, why can't they be more American," she asked?  I saw a video of the interview.  While the video shows, that the newspaper interview does not, is that she made this statement standing in front of a church whose lettering was in Ukrainian.  But I digress.

So there is nothing new about Mediscare-style arguments, rambunctious and easily manipulated populists, or Astroturf-style mobilizations.  But there is something about this debate that feels different, something more intense.  I kept trying to put my finger on it, to find a phrase to capture the elusive qualitative difference between these scare tactics and those of political operatives past.  And then Samantha Bee capture the zeitgeist of the moment in a single pithy phrase:  "universal single-payer shamanistic death panels."

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Dear Santa,

I know I haven't written in a while, but something has come up.

Sarah Palin, through her attorney, is threatening to sue blogger and radio personality Shannon Moore for reporting the existence of rumors about a pending investigation of Palin’s dealings in connection with the construction of the Wasilla Sports Complex and the Palin residence.

oh please, oh please, oh please

The basis for such a suit is clear.  For too long we have witnessed the politics of personal destruction, the bloodsport of smearing a persons’ reputation.  The courts are the last resort, the place where the innocent can avenger her honor, save her reputation, and take some measure of revenge on her tormentors.

oh double please, oh double please, I’ll be good for a whole year, I promise

Remember the lengthy list of hit jobs on Hilary?  The accusations that Bill hired killers to murder his opponents and ran planes full of cocaine up from Latin America?  Remember black helicopters?  And how about the current President - have you heard any false accusations about him?  Well, Sarah Palin stands ready to ride tall into the sagebrush of the mountaintop … wait a minute, I lost my metaphor.

remember that time I was ten and I really wanted a pony?  I want this more.  Much, much more.  Please-please-please.  I’ll never ask for another thing, I promise.

Okay, I suppose I ought to make some pretense of a serious point.   Here goes.  The standards for a public figure suing someone for libel are set by New York Times v Sullivan, as modified by Gertz v Welch.  The original Sullivan rule applied to political figures; the gloss extended it to “public figures” generally.  The standard is that for a public figure to prevail in a libel suit, they have to prove that the statement in question was made with “malice,” or at a minimum with “reckless disregard for the truth.”  In practice, that “reckless disregard” standard has been pretty well abandoned; the only way for a public figure to win a libel suit is to show that the party making the statement knew it was false.

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The courage and determination of the protestors in Iran are inspiring, and the brutality of the regime’s response is revolting.  The reminder that, as Fareed Zakaria recently put it, “What you know about Iran is wrong” could not be more timely. 

All that being said – with absolute heartfelt sincerity – it is worth looking ahead and thinking about what is likely to come next.  There are two things to think about here.  First, how long can the opposition sustain itself?  Four, five, or six weeks from now, will the protests still continue? Will the world still be watching Youtube videos being recycled on CNN?  Second, if a revolution were to occur, what would it look like?  The catchphrases of this opposition are “death to the dictator” and “Allah u Akhbar.”  Both are religious arguments: a Muslim ruler is expected to rule justly, so a “dictator” cannot be a legitimate Muslim ruler.  But the religious language in which this uprising is being conducted should make us cautious in assuming too much about the consequences of even a dramatic change in the ruling regime.

Start with the cause of the protests, the stolen election. If there was any remaining doubt on that question, this statement by Guardian Council spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadhodaei should settle the matter:  "Statistics provided by Mohsen Rezaei in which he claims more than 100% of those eligible have cast their ballot in 170 cities are not accurate -- the incident has happened in only 50 cities” and that no more than 3 million votes  are likely to have been affected.  Ah, well, in that case … (Kadhodaei points out that Iranians are not prevented from voting outside their home districts so that some occurrence of greater than 100% turnout is not impossible.  That argument is not remotely persuasive.  For a very fine statistical analysis confirming the conclusion that the election was fraudulent, see Walter Mebane’ paper here.

But the fact that the election was stolen does not mean that Ahmedinijad lacks widespread support.  There is good reason to think that Ahmedinijad would – or at least could -- have won a clean election. There is an unlikely but not impossible scenario in which new elections are called … and the outcome is the same.  (I assume here that the effects of the protests themselves on a subsequent election would be mixed; repeated reports that the basijis being bused into Tehran come from other parts of the country suggest that in this as in all things, “the Iran people” is not a singular, monolithic entity.)

As everyone involved recognizes, however, the protests and the initial government reaction have raised the stakes to the point of a challenge to the legitimacy of the governing regime.  The government’s responding violence should not have come as a shock to anyone.  But it remains the case that that violence is being carefully kept within limits.  Some Western observers are reacting as though there has been slaughter in the streets:  the announcement that European embassies are considering opening their grounds to provide sanctuary to injured protestors reminds me of the “unauthorized acts of decency” that were reported during the massacre at Smyrna in 1922.  But that’s hardly an analogous case:  the massacre at Smyrna involved the murder of tens or hundreds of thousands of Armenians  (150,000 is one common estimate) by Turkish forces.  The current analogy – the one we’re hearing over and over -- is Tiananmen Square. 

The problem is that that, too, is a weak analogy.  Tiananmen Square started with a million people occupying a central location on April 15; thousands participated in a lengthy hunger strike; tens of thousands remained there seven weeks later when the tanks rolled in on June 4.  The Chinese Red Cross estimated that 2,600 people were killed in a matter of hours. The issue at Tiananmen was stark:  particularly against the background of the ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union, the future of Communism itself seemed to be in the balance.  And the world was watching closely, fed reports and images by western correspondents right up to the end.

The Iranian protests don't seem to be going that way.  First, neither the protestors nor the government – especially the government -- seem to be looking for a pitched confrontation.  After the biggest marches, on Monday, everyone went home.  Day after day the protestors have come back for more in the face of teargas and batons and frequent live fire … but there has been nothing like the sustained seizure of public space that set the battle lines at Tiananmen Square.  Saturday would have been an opportune moment for an all-out confrontation:  many protestors were ready to face death, and in some cases the government obliged, making the tragic death of a young woman named Neda the signature moment of the conflict thus far.  But even on Saturday the government forces did not unleash full-scale military repression.

The government’s strategy appears to be Tiananmen in slow motion:  the application of low-level but steady violence in the hopes that the protestors will eventually give up. There are some signs that the strategy is working.  Protests continued Saturday night and Sunday, but the numbers are down.  Tactics like using the police to bar access to public squares and forcing people to keep moving are making it much harder to mount large-scale sustained marches.  Using police and basiji forces to prevent gatherings or disperse them before they grow too large – rather than trying to disperse them by force after the fact -- and the widespread arrests of perceived or potential leadership figures are strategies aimed at turning a flashpoint confrontation into a sustained low-level counterinsurgency operation, a strategy should sound familiar. 

The Iranian government is dominated by a generation that remembers not only the Revolution of 1979, but more immediately the Iran-Iraq War with its million Iranian dead.  The basijis who are doing the skull-cracking and shooting now are the same force that launched suicidal human wave attacks against much better (American) armed Iraqi forces in the marshes.  In other words, this is a regime that has no trouble accepting casualties and has the forces available that are ready to both inflict and absorb much, much more.

Meanwhile, the extensive efforts to curtail the use of cell phones and cameras, the government’s Youtube propaganda strategy, the effective exclusion of direct reporting by Western agencies, in turn, are aimed at preventing the world’s attention from focusing around a symbolic object like the Lady Liberty statue.  (What a triumph Nico Pitney’s live blog has been for Huffpo; and how pathetic has the MSM been in comparison?  Is anything sadder than CNN’s putting up videos they got from Youtube?)  The world is trying to watch what is happening.  Will they still be trying just as hard after a month without direct news reporting?

We hear that there is a fierce power struggle going on in the meantime, between clerics aligned with Rafsanjani – these are real ayatollahs, which Khamenei is not – and others loyal to the regime, but nothing thus far suggests that a revolution will emerge from Qum. The move are complicated, and hard to read – presumably Rafsanjani and Khamenei are each trying to line up support.  Khamenei recently spoke well of Rafsanjani, suggesting the he wants to avoid an outright split.  At the same time, The New York Times has a story today detailing  efforts to discredit Moussavi as an agent of foreign powers in the government press, a move described as suggesting “that the government may be laying the groundwork for discrediting and arresting Mr. Moussavi.”  The story also quotes Iranian politicians calling for retrenchment and “reconsidering relations” with European nations.   The worst outcome could be a power-struggle that Ravsanjani loses, leading to retrenchment and reconsolidation.  The best outcome appears to be some incremental steps or revisions in power-sharing arrangements, at the most; nothing to turn the unrest in the streets into a top-down revolution. 

Finally, even if revolutionary change does come, it might be well to be cautious in predicting its consequences.  As I noted previously, the language of the protests has become religious.  Some of this is an attempt to enlist popular support rather than a reflection of the protestors’ underlying beliefs, but the result is the same:  they are protesting in the name of Islam.  That is part of what makes the opposition's appeal so powerful, which should be yet another reminder of the simplistic American public understanding of Islam – particularly Shiite Islam -- in the Middle East.  But as we have learned time and again, “democracy” does not necessarily equal “Western,” let alone “secular” or “liberal” (this is as true in the U.S., Israel, and Europe as anywhere else.)  And certainly “democratic” does not mean “pro-American.”  Khamenei’s government earned its unpopularity by staggering economic incompetence, not by its belligerent nationalism; very broad support for that nationalism remains.  In other words, a new or revised regime might be one that features considerable reforms internally but that is no less eager to be involved in regional affairs, particularly with respect to Shiite Iraq.  It is ridiculous to assert that Mousavi would not govern Iran differently than Ahmedinijad in terms of its internal affairs, but it is far less clear that Mousavi would be an Iranian Gorbachev, as some have suggested.  (Ironically, this is a fear that has been expressed by both Israeli and Palestinian leaders:  officials in Netanyahu’s government fear that a reformed government would be just as ambitious but less isolated, while Palestinians fear that a reformed government would be less inclined to make their cause a central concern in its dealings with Western nations in order to maintain good relations.)

Most likely the protests will continue through this week, and so will the low-level violence and the clampdown, the obvious acts of violence by government provocateurs, and the equally obvious propaganda.  Down the road?  Something powerful is moving in the streets of Tehra, but (to mix my metaphors) it is not clear that this new bird will be ready to hatch and take flight for some time yet.  And we can have only the dimmest idea as to what kind of bird it will be turn out to be.

[cross-posted at Huffingtonpost.com]