More important is the question of whether provincial elections will be held in the disputed Kirkuk Province, which the Kurds want to annex. That dispute has caused (Kurdish) President Jalal Talabani to veto the enabling legislation [link not linked] for the provincial elections, which may set them back months or indefinitely.

There is also no oil law, essential to allow foreign investment in developing new fields.  – Juan Cole

First of all, Kirkuk’s a city – the Province is At-Ta’mim, and Kirkuk was Kurdish before the Ba’ath forcibly relocated most of its inhabitants after the first superfields were found. The Kurds don’t want to annex Kirkuk, the dispute is over representation in Parliament -- the present population is one-third Kurd, one-third Turkman and another third Sunni Iraqi and the Kurds claim they’ve been undercounted in the census. They also fear that they’ll be outvoted in the Kirkuk municipal council by an ad-hoc alliance between the Turkmans and the Iraqis.

Iraq has had a new oil law since March – which replaced the *old* oil law -- and the Kurds are upset with that, too, because it nullifies the existing contracts the Kurds negotiated with foreign investors under the previous law.

“Any U.S. plan to combat Islamist extremism that relies on effective ground action from the Pakistani Army, the FC, or the Khasadars will fail.”

Between the ISI, the ethnic Pashtun Taliban sympathizers at all levels of the Pakistani Armed Forces, and the Taliban’s highly successful Psychological Operations, the Paks aren’t much of an ally. But somehow the jingle trucks from Karachi and tankers from Rawalpindi keep getting through. When they stop getting through, there won’t be much reason left to worry about pissing off the Paks.

The nuclear Westphalian nation-state of Pakistan is incapable of exercising sovereignty over the tribal areas. Can they do much about cross-border raids?