The White House has decided that President Obama will not apologize to Pakistan for the deaths of two dozen soldiers in NATO airstrikes last week, which means Pakistan will have to settle for a sorry from Hillary Clinton instead. The New York Times reports that U.S. ambassador asked for an Obama apology to assuage the rising anger in the country because of the deaths. "Defense Department officials balked," write The Times' Helene Cooper and Mark Mazzetti. "While they did not deny some American culpability in the episode, they said expressions of remorse offered by senior department officials and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton were enough, at least until the completion of a United States military investigation establishing what went wrong." Clearly, the tragedy was bad enough to elicit a Secretary of State apology, but not bad enough or investigated thoroughly enough (yet) to warrant an Obama apology on America's sliding scale of how sorry we really are. As petty as it may seem, the insinuation, politics, and punditry that come with a Non-Obama apology, does fall in line with U.S.'s current  policy with the Pakistan. It was just in October when Clinton visited the region and issued what The Times described as, the "starkest warning yet to Pakistan." And back then a senior administration official said, "Soft love hasn’t worked" in regards to U.S. relationship with Pakistan and its clunky relationship to extremists. Read between the lines Pakistan, this is the U.S. solidly into a "tough love" phase.

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Alexander Abad-Santos