‘My wife will divorce me if I do’ – one of a number of phrases with which General David Petraeus parries the question’ – ‘will you run for President?’ For in the spartan field that is the line-up for the leadership of America, the General is increasingly talked about for the leadership of the Republican ticket for the Presidential ticket in 2016. Petraeus vs Clinton – an intriguing line-up.

I had the opportunity to meet and talk with the General whilst he was in Britain yesterday. He talks an upbeat positive account of Afghanistan and the proposed US/allied exit by 2014. President Karzai offered the hope yesterday that the hand over of Afghan provinces would start as soon as this July.

There are many ifs and buts- not the least being the supposed overcoming of the Taliban and the reintegration of some of them into Afghan civic life. But if al-Qaeda and the Taliban have been squelched out of the Afghan threat equation, they have most certainly squirted their way into Pakistan and Yemen – two of the most unstable countries on earth.

The US has invested heavily in the beleaguered 32 years serving Yemeni President Saleh. He has truncated his reign from his previously promised 2013 departure to ‘the end of the this year’. It’s a sumptuously Mubaracist parallel in Yemen. There are sons and lackeys who had all expected to ‘inherit’. But in Yemen unlike Egypt there is a tangled and deep al-Qaeda presence.

For America the war with the oft unseen foe costs $100 billion a year, not to mention the reputational damage, and the psychological devastation that the effort metes out upon the young men and women who serve in the war zone.

If Petraeus manages to extricate Uncle Sam from all this, he’ll have a justified claim to inherit Eisenhower’s mantle (secured by victory in World War Two). But there is much agony ‘twixt here and there. And one factor I have not mentioned is that the General is supra bright – way beyond the minds of the media who monitor him and the Palinesque creatures he’s likely to have to beat for the Presidential nomination. It’s an attractive – if slightly intimidating – quality, as is his personable approachability. But as one American colleague said to me last night, ‘what’s he like in a  knife fight?’ In short is America ready for a an intellectual who knows how to read a military map?

I little thought, in penning my last two Snowblogs, that they would lead to such an elision. Last week ended with rising concerns about the leadership of Saudi Arabia. This week begins with Wikileaks revelations about…er…yes Saudi involvement in providing cash to just about any ‘terror group’ anyone cares to mention.

Exactly one year ago, according to the latest tranche of Wikileaks, Hillary Clinton wrote: “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Lashka-e-Taiba (which carried out the Mumbai attacks in 2008), and other terrorist groups”. She added: “Donors in Saudi Arabia remain the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups world-wide.”

In September 2009, Wikileaks shows an assessment from the then US Ambassador in Baghdad, Christopher Hill, that Saudi Arabia, not Iran, is “the biggest threat to democracy in Iraq”.

On the UK domestic front, last month it was revealed that Saudi cash had funded the publishing and distribution of radical Islamic text books to Muslim weekend schools.

In almost every conflict in which UK and US forces (Special or otherwise) are currently deployed – in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia (to name but four) the ‘enemy’ is funded by Saudi money.

In September of this year the US announced the biggest-ever arms to deal to Saudi Arabia – $60 billion (£38bn) of missiles, bombs, 190 helicopters, 84 F15 fighter jets and the rest.  So was this to assist Saudi’s ailing leaders to defend themselves against radical forces within their own territory? When the Israeli government asked this very question in September, Washington was candid. The deal was to assist Saudi Arabia in defending her borders against external threats and her oil infrastructure ‘which is central to our economic interest’. Congress approved the deal not least because it secured a large number of US jobs.

Hillary Clinton has called Saudi Arabia a ‘key partner and friend’. So what are we to make of these Wikileaks disclosures – they may not surprise, but do they alarm?

As Swedish prosecutors mysteriously withdraw and then restore the rape and sexual assault investigation against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, is this the moment for the UK to accede to Stockholm’s warrant for his extradition? Or is there absolutely no connection between the warrant and Wikileaks activities?

As school boys we were excited to learn that Western spies could now read number plates in Moscow’s Red Square – that was well over three decades ago. How come then, as the freed kidnap victims Paul and Rachel Chandler return home, a bunch of crude Somali pirates are able to run rings around the most sophisticated navies the world has ever known?

As drones wander about the border areas of Pakistan picking off alleged al-Qaeda leaders at will, these men are able to wander the high seas at will, snaring super tankers the size of several football pitches. How come?

Currently there are still dozens of ships held hostage, and some 400 sea-farers held hostage by Somali pirates. The EU/NATO fleet that is tasked with battling the pirates costs half a billion pounds a year to run. Sure, a good number of pirate vessels are frustrated by the force, but the Indian Ocean between Somalia and India remains the most dangerous maritime area the world has known since the North Atlantic came under fire from Germany’s U-boats.

Drones, satellites, high flying spy planes, radar, high powered computing, you name it, the world has it in abundance. Yet the pirates are not yet losing. Saudi Arabia has just seen a vast multi-million pound ransom paid to free one of her super tankers.

Will not history judge that in the early 21st Century humankind, at the pinnacle of technological achievement, in a time of war, the international community failed against some of the most primitive criminal forces deploying methods of the Middle Ages?

So what’s the problem? Is it that the world, despite spending half a billion a year, doesn’t really take Somali piracy seriously? Or is it that all that brilliant 21st Century technology proves close to useless when it comes to such a test on the high seas?

In those far off school days we used to be taught about quarantine – fixing a maritime boundary beyond which the “enemy” would not be allowed to venture. We were told how useful aircraft carriers were in policing such a zone with their fast flying harrier jump jets.

There is no full-time air craft carrier off Somalia. At the last count there were three naval reconnaissance aircraft in the region. Never mind, at least, if the pirates sport a number plate, we can still presumably read it from a very long way away.

Yesterday in Downing Street I asked Gordon Brown whether Saudi Arabia is still funding the Taliban. I was attending a news conference he was hosting with Pakistan’s President Zardari.

Mr Brown did not address my specific question. Sidestepping the Saudi aspect, he described the MI6 financial units that are now hard at work tracking Taliban transactions and bank accounts.

Just as the United States originally backed Bin Laden and al-Qaida in their war to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan, so the Saudis funded the Taliban’s holy war to achieve the same aims. The policy fitted the Saudi Wahhabi commitment which seeks to export this very conservative form of Islam well beyond Saudi borders.

A couple of years back I asked Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud, about Wahhabi extremism and the threat it posed in the funding of mosques and radical madrassas in Pakistan.

Saud did not deny the funding of schools and mosques (indeed, amid the gathering chaos in Pakistan they are still funding them). He took exception to my labelling Wahhabism as extremism.

“My great great (can’t remember exactly how many greats) grandfather was Wahhabi himself – he was no extremist,” Saud declared with some anger.

Nevertheless, the question of continuing Saudi support for the Taliban, however obscure or covert, is one that deserves an answer. It’s a question oil-dependent nations in the west don’t like asking.

The Saudi royal family is not a regime you can afford to tangle with, either on this issue or on others, such as the oppression of women or Saudi Arabia’s woeful human rights record.