Former Goldman Sachs chief Philip D. Murphy evidently arrived in the style to which he is accustomed last month to take up his new post as U.S. envoy to Germany, touching down in an ostentatious top-of-the-line executive jet that left German Chancellor Angela Merkel grinding her teeth over President Obama's gift of ambassadorships to wealthy donors.

Sabrina DeSousa, an alleged CIA agent charged with kidnapping in Italy, says that a Justice Department decision to pay her legal costs is much too little, much too late.

"Unbelievable!  The United States Department of Justice just 'approved' an attorney to defend me, a month after the trial ended, knowing full well that an attorney at this stage will make little or no difference to the outcome or verdict," DeSousa said via e-mail Friday.

Sibel Edmonds may never get her day in court - or at least the kind she wants.

The former FBI translator has spent seven years trying to get a court to hear her allegations that foreign agents, in particular Turkish intelligence, had penetrated her unit, the State Department, the Pentagon and Congress.

This weekend she's going to try again.

Sabrina DeSousa is as cool as you'd expect a CIA operative to be in a hot spot.

DeSousa's predicament is that she's wanted on kidnapping charges in Italy, along with two dozen other Americans connected to the CIA's "rendition" of an al Qaeda suspect from a Milan street to an Egyptian torture chamber in 2003.

Three years later, Italian authorities monitoring the missing man's home phone broke open the case, eventually filing kidnapping charges against DeSousa and the others, all but one CIA undercover operatives.

In spy-speak, it's called maintaining your cover.

Special Forces troops tend to think they carry the fate of the world in their rucksacks.

In Pakistan, they may be right.

Years from now we may look back at the "secret" deployment of some 70 U.S. military advisers to Pakistan as a turning point in the global war on terrorism, the moment when a daring idea and brilliant execution snatched victory from a looming disaster.

Or the opposite: a Pakistani version of Ia Drang, the 1965 battle when North Vietnamese regulars showed they could go toe-to-toe with American troops, signaling a long, devastating and -- in that case -- losing war.

Make no mistake about it: Pakistan hangs in the balance.

It's intermittently amazing to me that we managed to conquer Japan and Germany in four-plus years (with no small help from the Russians, of course), yet after almost twice that time we haven't been able to crush a raggedy band of 8th-century minded terrorists in an area no bigger than Montana.

We didn't even have a plan, as it turned out, as late as last spring, almost seven years after al Qaeda launched big hits on us from its mountain redoubts on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. Today it's said to be ensconced in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, loosely controlled by Islamabad in a regional autonomy arrangement.