And the problem, John, with the strategy that’s been pursued was that, for 10 years, we coddled Musharraf, we alienated the Pakistani population, because we were anti-democratic. We had a 20th-century mindset that basically said, “Well, you know, he may be a dictator, but he’s our dictator.”

And as a consequence, we lost legitimacy in Pakistan. ~Barack Obama 

I — I don’t think that Senator Obama understands that there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf came to power. Everybody who was around then, and had been there, and knew about it knew that it was a failed state. ~John McCain

The problem with throwing around the charge that your opponent doesn’t understand this or that is that it makes it that much more important for you to get things right.  What is more embarrassing than how willfully wrong McCain is here is how his partisans embrace his ignorance as proof of what Obama does not know.  Here’s Jonathan Last:

The knowledge gap is beginning to show and it gets worse when Obama mangles pre-Musharraf Pakistani history.

What pre-Musharraf Pakistani history?  The wording here got my attention, since I was fairly sure that there were no direct references to pre-Musharraf Pakistani history on either side.  Technically, Obama exaggerated Musharraf’s tenure slightly to a full ten years, when he came to power in 1999, but his basic analysis of popular attitudes in Pakistan, the largely wasted military aid and the reinforcing hostility to the U.S. and “Busharraf,” as his critics lovingly called him, is pretty accurate.  For the reasons I have outlined, McCain’s assessment of Pakistan as a “failed state” is, at best, very misleading, and his claim that “everybody” thought this is almost certainly false.  Of course, at the time Washington condemned the coup, which Musharraf had launched to prevent being fired from his post as army chief of staff.  Washington had imposed additional sanctions on Pakistan, which were then lifted in exchange for their assistance after 9/11.  As ramshackle as Pakistan under the Sharif government may have seemed and may have been, little that has plagued Pakistan in 1999 has been significantly changed under Musharraf’s rule.  To imply that Pakistan was a failed and is not now, as McCain did, is not correct.  It is either more of one now, or it has remained one throughout, but it is hard to get away from the conclusion that Musharraf has made things worse on our dime.  

Once Musharraf was in power, the “our SOB” rationale was explicit, but it was usually reframed in neo-Kemalist terms: he was an enlightened dictator opposing Islamic extremism, which seemed to make his arbitrary rule more palatable, and we bought this line for years while raising Pakistan to the status of a major non-NATO ally and accordingly selling them expensive military equipment.  Finally, popular discontent with Musharraf, both because of his perceived subservience to U.S. interests and his own domestic excesses, boiled over and finally led to his resignation this summer, whereupon he was soon replaced by the widower of Bhutto whose name McCain can’t remember.  The man whose name McCain can’t remember was apparently one of the intended targets of the Islamabad Marriott bombing (he was scheduled to attend the iftar that evening), and he was the one who was recently drooling at the sight of Sarah Palin in New York, but McCain couldn’t even get his name right…and Obama was supposed to have mangled things related to Pakistan? 

When I see people, such as Yepsen, declaring that McCain got the better of the substantive side of the debate, I want to scream, because no one who knows anything about Pakistan could have come away from the exchanges tonight under the impression that McCain knew much of anything.

Update: One other thought on this.  For the sake of argument, assume that McCain was right that Pakistan was a failed state–are military dictatorships McCain’s idea of an appropriate solution to failing states?  If so, why does he continue to support the Maliki and Karzai governments and the broader “freedom agenda”?  But we’re probably going to be treated to windy pronouncements that McCain once again showed his mastery of the subject, which I suppose is all the greater an achievement when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.