Great news coming out of Pakistan’s new democratically elected leaders regarding the war on terror. The strategy being reported out today, now that the new government is in place, is one which attempts to replicate “The Awakening” phenomena that washed across Iraq last year – which made al-Qaeda and their ilk enemies to the local Muslim community and dealt AQ a serious blow:

here has been much talk of a public backlash against the military operations orchestrated by President Pervez Musharraf against militants in the tribal areas and that the new government will seek to reverse the policies he adopted in the “war on terror” during his eight years as a military ruler.

However, Asia Times Online investigations reveal that the ruling coalition, dominated by assassinated former opposition leader Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) of Nawaz Sharif, will attempt, through dialogue, to split the militants so that the Taliban and al-Qaeda will be exposed, much as has happened with the Sunni-dominated Awakening Councils that have turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq.

This decision comes at an important time. The Taliban have opened up a new front in Khyber Agency in Pakistan, as predicted by Asia Times Online last week (Same game, new rules in Afghanistan).

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Asia Times Online contacts maintain the government will stick to a script agreed with Washington before February’s elections that all efforts will be made to bring public support behind the “war on terror” and more military operations against militants.

“Everything will remain the same. The only difference is that politicians will do their job and the military will do its job. Nobody will try to overlap with another,” said a contact who is a close aide of the PPP’s co-chairman, Asif Zardari, and who is also close to Washington.

If Pakistan can create its own version of “The Awakening”, which created an enormous backlash against the terrorists from within the local community, and then work with the locals to hunt down and expel the terrorists, it is not infeasible to see AQ’s last refuge in Pakistan’s tribal regions go through the same transformation that hit the Sunni areas of Iraq. The result was a beaten al-Qaeda movement led or assisted by local Muslims. And that would be an amazing result for the Bush administration as it wraps up its final days.

And it would require a complete suspension of disbelief to keep buying into the SurrenderMedia’s and Surrendercrat’s delusions that the war on terror is lost and America is the villain in all of this. When Islam sides with American interests it can no longer be said we are the enemy. al-Qaeda was once the future of Islam, and now we are seeing it transition to being the enemy of Islam. Who would have predicted this change in regional views days after 9-11?