Obama and Pakistan

Sepoy has done a great analysis of Obama's speech on Pakistan, along with the tenuous situation in Pakistan.

How can Obama be just as wrong as Bush?

Yesterday Barack Obama delivered a major speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. I believe that despite its virtues, it is overall an erroneous reading of the world’s geo-political landscape; that his understanding of terrorism is deeply flawed and that his specifics on action in Pakistan should bring a smile to any fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

The speech contains Obama’s boilerplate mixture of poetic flourishes, declarative statements, and heavy-handed hypotheticals [binary positions only, please]. Here are his basic critiques of US foreign policy: Iraq was the wrong war; we did not finish the job in Afghanistan; we lacked international cooperation and diplomacy; we lost the battle for the hearts and minds. In response to these failures he provides a five-pronged policy for his presidency:

Needless to say, there is no place for facts in this narrative and the underlining assumptions remain unshakeable. For example, our enemy cannot be rational nor modern - Muhammad Atta or Shahzad Tanveer or Kafeel Ahmed notwithstanding. Why not? Because Modernity and Enlightenment, are forces which, by definition, should have no space for such actions. Consider further, that in Obama’s retelling Abu Gharib is not an actual war crime but something extremists “say” - tripping on Hashish, no doubt. Similarly our occupation of Iraq is not an imperial reality but a mirage of elaborate lies. In effect the “whispers” of the extremists, devoid of any truth, remain the hypnosis of the Old Man of the Mountain. All we have to do is to proclaim them as such - call them out as Lies - and the spell will be broken. The unmistakable conclusion of that narrative, of course escapes Obama and others who still cling to such theories. We will have to end the incubators in London, in Amsterdam, in Madrid, and in Bali - surely by invading these countries which provide a safe haven to these terrorists.

This national discourse comes from a deep Orientalism that has been a staple of our political lives prior to and since that “bright and beautiful Tuesday morning”. It is what enables us to question the sanity and the patriotism of anyone who dares raise the long history of American involvement across the globe as a contributing factor. It enables us to collapse real geographies from Leeds and Glasgow to Karachi and Islamabad into “wind-swept deserts and cave-dotted mountains”.

Pakistan, of course, is the main thrust of Obama’s speech. Here is his declaration: Al Qaeda has a sanctuary in Pakistan.. Note that the word “sanctuary” necessarily implies state protection and safety and that “Pakistan” indeed refers to the entire country. To reinforce his point, he states again, “[Al Qaeda is] training new recruits in Pakistan”. These could easily be the exact words used by Bush to describe Afghanistan right before the US invasion in 2001. And invasion is the only conclusion one can reach when Obama states that he wants to “deploy troops to the “right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan”. The only way I know of deploying troops to a sovereign nation is by invading said nation.

Obama demands his pre-emptive strike both as justification for WTC attacks and also because Pakistan has proven a good enough ally:

One should remind Barack Obama, and the US Congress which just passed such a conditional bill, that Pakistan is, in clear and evident fact, fighting a war in Waziristan - with scores of military casualties seemingly every day. One can also remind him that since the Lal Masjid stand off - July 3rd - there have been a dozen suicide bombings across Pakistan killing over 200 civilians - almost keeping pace with Baghdad. One can further remind him that Pakistan has indeed allowed US military strikes on its sovereign territory, even with questionable intelligence. On November 10, 2006, US missiles hit a madrasa in Bajaur aimed at killing the elusive No. 2 of Al Qaeda but managed mainly to kill children. They must all be casualties of Pakistan’s soft focus in the war on terrorism.

To be crystal clear, Obama suggests that a country that is a sovereign nation and ally, that has full nuclear capability, has the ability to carry out nuclear attacks, has the ability to give nuclear technologies to the card-carrying-member-of-the-Axis-of-Evil-next-door Iran, has a unpopular dictator supported and maintained by the United States, has deployed 100,000 troops across its North Western borders, has suffered thousands of casualties - army and civilians - carrying out the Global War on Terror, has seen its cities and deserts flood with the detritus from the forgotten war going on in Afghanistan, but has nonetheless maintained complete compliance by killing and capturing many key members of the Al Qaeda … should be invaded