Isn’t anyone else as bemused as I am by all the Pakistan expertise flooding the blogosphere? Where did all these Pakistan experts come from?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Now listen up, for goodness’ sake.

A country is a very big and complicated thing. If you live in it for a few years, you may get a clue. Or not: I have lived in the U.S.A. an aggregate 26 years, and I still get things wrong. I’m still struggling to grasp the rules of the second of this country’s national games. (NB: The traditional sport up in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier is buzkashi. As P.J. O’Rourke says: Metaphor watch.) I’ve given up trying to use “gotten” unselfconsciously, and the appeal of the oilier sort of southern politician is utterly lost on me. The whole race-guilt thing is a bafflement, and I don’t know why my fellow American guys let their wives boss them around as they do… And so on. I shall go to my grave not ever having really got America. I don’t think I’m stupid; I just don’t think there’s space in an ordinary person’s mind to encompass more than one country. Countries are just too big, messy, rooted, and complicated.

Yet when a country thrusts itself into the news, as Pakistan has these past few days, suddenly everyone’s an expert. It isn’t even really just countries. If there’s a sensational plane crash, suddenly we’re all chattering briskly about metal fatigue as if we were lifetime subscribers to Materials Science Bulletin; if there’s a life-sciences breakthrough, everybody suddenly knows a phenotype from a genotype; when some celebrity marriage goes supernova, it miraculaously turns out that we’ve all been privy to their domestic disagreements since they tied the knot three weeks previously.

Is it just me, or do other people, reading news commentary, find themselves overwhelmed with a sudden irresistible urge to yell: “For goodness’ sake come off it—you don’t know SQUAT!”

Rather than trying to understand all these damn foreigners and their unfathomable folkways, might not the soundest foundation for U.S. foreign policy be a minimalist one—a policy based on the lowest possible expectations of our ability to understand what’s going on in these godforsaken places? (Coupled, it goes without saying, with even lower expectations, if lower be possible, of the ability of our intelligence agencies to find out for us.) Something like the recommendation offered by VDH’s nemesis, the War Nerd: “Nuke ‘em, bribe ‘em, or leave ‘em alone”?