From the Australian:

Key corps commanders of Pakistan’s 600,000-strong army issued orders last night to retaliate against “invading” US forces that enter the country to attack militant targets.

[. . ]

The “retaliate and kill” order came amid reports of unprecedentedly fierce fighting in the Bajaur Agency of Pakistan’s tribal areas, an al-Qa’ida stronghold frequently mentioned as the most likely lair of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Anyone who predicted any other response to U.S. troops fighting inside Pakistan was kidding themselves. There’s a reason the tribal areas have been deemed impenetrable. Which is not to say we shouldn’t be there. To the contrary: Playing an endless game of patty-cake with Islamabad has taken a deadly toll on the coalition for far too long, and it has set back progress in Afghanistan immeasurably. In the War on Terror, it seems inevitable, unfortunately, that we’ll get things disastrously wrong before we get them right. It’s an enervating reality, but if we ever forget that the fight against jihad is a fight to the death, we’ll never get it right again.

David Petraeus is off to CentCom, and a new war is ratcheting up in earnest. It seems nearly impossible that the next president, whoever he is, will not cleave to whatever plans Petraeus puts forth. That’s a no-brainer. The challenge comes in conveying to a dispirited American public the critical importance of a new deadly war. That’s a challenge Bush failed to meet, and the chorus of disapproval has made our fight considerably harder.