Stardate 20011231.0003

(On Screen): You have to wonder sometimes about interviews with newsmakers. Sometimes it seems as if the questions approach the nonsensical. For example, Wolf Blitzer asks the Foreign Minister for Pakistan, "How close is Pakistan to war with India right now?"

How does one answer that? Unless you're willing to accept a vague answer like "really close!" then this seems to call out for some sort of quantitative answer, expressed in numbers. Seems as if the only way to express this would be as a probability, i.e. "45% of chance of war within 7 days" but not only is it impossible to actually calculate such a thing, no Foreign Minister would ever say such a thing even if he knew it.

So why ask the question at all?

Anyway, it turns out that Minister Sattar's answer comes down to "Closer than we'd like" which isn't exactly news.