Educating Obama

In a December 2007 CBS News interview, candidate Hillary Clinton was asked about which country posed the most threat to the U.S. She replied that it is Pakistan, especially in view of our counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan and dealing with Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The details of the interview and a commentary were posted on NQ in December 2007 by SusanUnPC and reprised recently in “Obama’s Blunders Tell Me He’s a Naive Neophyte.”

Hillary’s interview was on December 13, 2007 and in a classic pattern with which we have now become familiar, she went first and Obama followed suit on December 14, 2007.

In his turn at the same question in the interview Obama responded that that country is Iran, trying to make a case for his ill-conceived response to a different question earlier in a debate about talking to our adversaries without preconditions [and perhaps holding their hands while doing that]. But he later added Pakistan for good measure since Hillary had brought it up the day before. The Democratic primary campaign must have been a great learning experience for the woefully inexperienced Obama trying to keep up with Hillary.

Obama seems to think a nuclear Iran is to be feared because of its Islamic fanaticism and more, but Pakistan has already become a nuclear state with the help of China and North Korea. I hope China rues the day it helped Pakistan in the name of counter balance to India because in today’s world China has more in common with India and more to benefit from India’s growth than impeding it.

To a layperson like me, Pakistan appears to be worse than a blackmailer trying to hold hostage several countries at a time, US being the foremost among them. Instead of working toward a democratic society interested in raising living standards for its people, its Army and the feckless government have beggared themselves into victims on the one hand and blackmailers on the other with their nukes. They plead that the bad elements in their society are going to take over the nukes unless countries like the US intervene and give them aid to check these elements. At the same time, they threaten other countries by encouraging the bad elements to get out of hand from time to time so that more aid from US in the name of war on terrorism continues to fall into their lap of luxury.

The case in point for Pakistan encouraging and providing support for its bad elements is the recent Mumbai attack. As Pakistan drags its feet in accepting responsibility for the attack even in the face of mounting evidence (see here, here, here, here, here), what will the US do?

News articles report indirect links of Mumbai attackers to UK. With its large Pakistani immigrant population, UK has had its own problems with Islamic fanaticism and terror attacks. Jonathan Evans, UK’s M15 Director General warned that Mumbai attacks could become the new method of attack for terrorists in the future (see article):

“If the method used in Mumbai of using firearms in public places becomes adopted as a model, it changes our most likely scenarios,” he added.

Evans said that scores of British Muslims were still travelling to terror training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan every year. Others are travelling to lawless areas of Somalia.

The main threats to Britain come from al-Qaeda’s core in Pakistan and their “assets in this country,” he said.

“We continue to believe that the ability lies in Pakistan to attack the UK,” Evans said, adding that 75 per cent of their investigations have connections with Pakistan.

This is what the outgoing National Security Adviser, Hadley had to say in an interview with the WSJ:

“Pakistan’s increasingly turbulent border region poses threats not just to the US mission in Afghanistan, but also to neighbouring India, as evidenced by the recent Mumbai terrorist attacks, as well as to urban areas of Pakistan itself – and the world beyond,” he said.

“If extremists succeed in destabilising Pakistan, the resulting chaos will threaten the entire region,” Hadley is expected to say in his speech, according to the Journal.

“You can’t really solve Afghanistan without solving Pakistan,” Hadley told the leading financial daily in an interview in his White House office Tuesday. “That’s why I think Pakistan is at the centre” of the challenge for the incoming administration.

Pakistan is not just India’s problem — it is Afghanistan’s problem and ultimately the US and the world problem.

Meanwhile we have Obama making comments that show his ignorance of history as reported here

A Kashmir initiative by America, however “veiled”, can undermine improving Indo-US ties, Selig S Harrison, director of Asia Programme at the Center for International Policy and a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International, said an opinion piece published in The Washington Times.

“President-elect Barack Obama has made his first big foreign policy mistake – pledging US intervention in the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan,” he wrote.

In an interview to the Time magazine in October last year, Obama had said that Kashmir is a place he wanted to “devote serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there, to figure out a plausible approach”.

Harrison, who specialises in South Asia and East Asia for past 50 years, said Obama would face resistance from not only India, but also Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari.

and here:

The 19-page report titled ‘Terrorist Attacks in Mumbai, India and Implications for US Interests’, prepared mid-December for the US lawmakers — the 111th Congress in particular, was released on Wednesday and a copy was obtained by PTI.

In seeking to revamp US South Asia policy, President-elect Barack Obama and his advisors may face a key central question: Are conflictual relations between the region’s two largest states primarily an India-Pakistan problem or are they mainly a Pakistan problem alone, it said.

Any high-visibility US Government focus on the Kashmir issue ‘would risk fuelling Pakistani expectations of a future settlement favouring Pakistan, thus in turn providing a motive for Islamabad to sustain pressure by ramping up support for Kashmiri separatists,’ it said.

Obama will be playing right into the hands of Pakistan’s blackmailers if he tries to take the route of US intervention in the Kashmir issue. He will do better for the country if he holds Pakistan’s feet to the fire about Afghanistan and demand that Pakistan give up its support for Taliban, Al Qaeda, LeT, and others. What is the US getting in return for the tens of billions it has poured into Pakistan in the last seven years?

Pakistan Army has time and again played the Bush administration for fools in the last seven years. If Obama falls into the same trap that they are setting up for him with the recent Mumbai attack, it will have dire consequences. While Obama tries to make this a regional problem throwing some red meat for the Pakistan Army in the name of Kashmir, here is what he will be missing (continue reading the article ):

Let us remind Obama and his team that this phase of the Afghan problem started with ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ in October 2001 following the refusal of the Taliban regime in Kabul to surrender Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda cadres. The Taliban regime was cleared out of Afghanistan by the US Special Forces and troops of the Northern Alliance supported by US air power. As the operation was coming to a close and Osama bin Laden and remnants of Al Qaeda were cornered in the Torah Borah mountains, terrorists with links to Pakistan’s ISI attacked the Indian parliament. That compelled India to mobilise its forces on the border. Pakistan countered that move and by vacating its western borders permitted Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership to find safe havens in Pakistan. It is now quite clear that the attack on the Indian Parliament was a provocative ruse to trap India into a military move which would justify Pakistan’s convenient troop withdrawal.

The same strategem has been employed in November 2008. The Mumbai terrorist attack was to provoke an Indian military response and provide an alibi to Pakistan to withdraw its forces from the western border and enable a Taliban surge into the tribal areas and Afghan territory to preempt and wreck the proposed US surge strategy. In 2001-2, the attention from Al Qaeda and Taliban consolidating themselves in Pakistan was diverted by raising Indo-Pakistan tension. Thereafter Iraq preempted all US attention. Now when the attention of US and the NATO are refocussing on Afghanistan, the same diversionary tactics are being employed.

What did we accomplish from the 2001-2002 incursion into Afghanistan? It appears to me that the Taliban and Al Qaeda just got relocated with all expenses paid by the Pakistan Army and its Intelligence unit.

Hillary as Secretary of State will have her hands full. But she may have to first start with educating Obama just as she schooled him on various occasions during the primary campaign.