The wires are reporting today that Uzbekistan is reconsidering its support for the US military base located on the country's southern border. We should make this decision easy for President Islam Karimov - move the base to Afghanistan where it belongs and deprive this tin-pot, backward dictator of the revenue and support he has so undeservedly benefited from in the war on terror. He and his family have done their level best to drive their country into the ground to line their own pockets and it's high time we stopped aiding him in doing it.

Further south, Pakistan has promised to send another 4,000 troops to try to secure their border with Afghanistan to augment the purported 70,000 soldiers already on duty there - another empty, symbolic effort to try to hide the fact there are doing next to nothing. This New Zealand paper asks the question we should be seeing in bold print in every US news outlet: has Pakistan delivered in the war on terror? Obviously not.

Four years down the road, enough is enough. It's time for Pakistan to either deliver up bin Laden, or prove that he is not on their soil by eradicating the al Qaeda forces they've been turning a blind eye toward all this time. If Musharraf truly is unable to control that territory, then he should grant us leave to cross the northern border and we can do him the favor of pacifying it for him.