Caroline Glick makes some excellent points in this new column, which asks, “Are There Good Terrorists?”

Men like Musharraf and Dahlan are not secular counter-forces to Islamic jihad. They are secular fig leafs which serve to cover a larger reality of Islamic terror. What differentiates the PLO from Hamas is not its ambitions or ties to global terror groups, which both movements have in abundance, but rather the mere fact that on the one hand Hamas is better at terrorism than the PLO and on the other the PLO is better at diplomacy than Hamas.

For his part, Musharraf buys US support by rounding up just enough high-profile terrorists to make the US believe he is worth supporting while placating and strengthening the Pakistani jihadists on whose support he relies. Like Dahlan, Musharraf makes public statements about the need to fight terrorism and then assists the terrorists themselves by providing them with diplomatic cover to continue military operations and jihad indoctrination networks of schools, mosques and media outlets.

If Hamas were to take over Gaza tomorrow, Israel’s security situation would be little different than it is today. The same joint Fatah, Hamas, Hizbullah and Islamic Jihad terror cells would continue to operate. While international donor money would perhaps be curtailed, Hamas has shown that it does not lack for financial backers in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria and Lebanon as well as Europe and North America who would continue to finance its operations.

If Musharraf’s regime were to fall, no doubt the US would not follow through on Bush’s promised $3 billion military and civilian aid package. But money and assistance from Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea and Iran would no doubt continue to flow.

The US has its reasons for not taking action against the likes of Dahlan and Musharraf and the corrupt jihad backed regimes they represent. In the case of Pakistan, the US fears the Pakistani nuclear capabilities. In the case of the Palestinians, the US believes it has nothing to gain from a clash with the EU, which views the establishment of a Palestinian state as the main anchor of its foreign policy, or with the Arab world, which uses US support of Israel to justify its hatred of America.

But there is a significant difference between not acting against rogue regimes for tactical reasons and backing them based on false strategic assumptions. The false yet prevailing view in Washington is that the PA and the Pakistani military dictatorship are not rogue regimes but rather imperfect allies.

The truth of course is quite the contrary. The Palestinian terrorist organizations sheltered and abetted by the PA like the Al Qaida-linked groups sheltered and abetted by Pakistan together comprise central planks of the global jihad nexus that the US is now leading a global war to defeat.