Pakistan’s PM came to the White House and pretended that the Pakistanis highly value their country’s current close military relationship with the US. President Bush reciprocated by pretending that the American air strikes that killed 18 Pakistani civilians earlier this month were not Topic A in that relationship. Even diplomacy requires more direct talk than this.

Those strikes were aimed at top fugitive leaders of Al Qaeda, but hit innocent women and children. Pakistan’s people deserve a good explanation and Bush should have provided it. Washington needs a strong and healthy partnership with Pakistan if it is to have any chance of eliminating Qaeda’s leaders, defeating a resurgent Taliban and turning back nuclear weapons proliferation. But partnerships are not built around political charades.

The most important to the US are the safe zones that fugitive Qaeda leaders established after fleeing the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan four years ago. It is inexcusable that a Pentagon already looking ahead to Iraq did not pour in enough American troops to block the escape of Osama bin Laden and his top deputies. Attacking them in wartime Afghanistan would have been far simpler, militarily and politically, than trying to catch up with them in tribal areas that even the Pakistani Army can’t control. — The New York Times