Obama overreaching?
Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the fourteenth in his new series on the Obama era.
Last week, in a new Harris poll, Americans named President Obama as their ‘No 1 hero,’ ‘followed by Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King.’ And columns appeared in various US papers marvelling that Obama was “the only thing” Americans were optimistic about.
This startling, widespread fealty to their country’s first African-American president deserves examination in its own right. But for the moment it’s worth remarking that they’d better be right, when they put him up there ahead even of their favourite deity. Because, so far as this columnist can see, only something akin to divine intervention can give Obama the outcome in Afghanistan-Pakistan he evidently intends to fight for.
To the contrary: the stony desert-mountains of Afghanistan are where empires go to die. And Pakistan, “convulsed by a growing al Qaida-backed insurgency, hamstrung by a ruinous economy and run by an unpopular government that’s paralyzed by infighting and indecision” (McClatchy) — Pakistan is tipping, day by day, into becoming everyone’s ultimate nightmare: a failed nuclear state.
The trap for Obama is that, unlike Iraq, against whom Mr Bush launched his frivolous war, Afghanistan-Pakistan really is a vital national security matter for the US. The people who so spectacularly attacked the US on 9/11 are there; it would be complacent to assume that, given half the chance, they wouldn’t do it again; and they and their legendary leader Osama bin Laden are being given sanctuary (and training ground) by the most dauntless ‘warrior nation’ since the Spartans: the Taliban.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban are surging; they now control not only the southeast and much of the south of the country, they also control the opium poppy trade —which is to say, they control the national economy. Ten days ago, they stormed two government ministries and the prisons administration centre in Kabul, killing and wounding more than 75 Afghan security forces; a dramatic demonstration of how easily they are able to penetrate the fortress-like Afghan capital.
It’s hardly worth mentioning that all eight attackers also died (two by blowing themselves up); as with the Spartans, death to the Taliban is a mere occupational hazard.
A couple of weeks ago, Obama hesitated, insisting that Defense Secretary Bill Gates review the military’s strategy before going ahead with Obama’s promised troop surge. In particular, Obama was concerned at not getting an answer to his question, ‘What’s the endgame?’ Yet last Tuesday, with no word that the Pentagon had begun, far less completed, that review, Obama approved the dispatch of 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan in the coming months, in what would appear to be a desperate rearguard action to fortify the southern approaches to Kabul.
It’s beginning to feel a lot like Saigon.
Moreover, Obama’s troop commitment was punctuated by two bad body-blows to their already vanishing chances of success. To the east, the Pakistan Taliban blew up a bridge across the Khyber Pass, over which the lion’s share of military and other supplies reach US troops in Afghanistan; while, in Kyrgyzstan to the north, the Kyrgyz president announced the closure of an important US base, a transit point for coalition troops and home to the tanker planes that refuel US warplanes over Afghanistan. Since Moscow had just authorized a $2 billion aid package to Kyrgyzstan, the base’s closure was evidently a quid pro quo; and indeed, Mr Putin must be laughing as Obama is drawn deeper into the quagmire that brought down his own empire.
Over in Pakistan, the situation is even worse. By themselves, the old instabilities — the chronic tension with India over Kashmir, the disproportionate power of the Pakistani army and intelligence services vis-à-vis the civilian government — would be enough to keep Secretary of State Hillary Clinton burning the midnight oil; and that’s not the half of it.
Like their Afghan counterparts, the Pakistani Taliban, who long controlled the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan (they now surround Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province), have recently spread eastward and seized the Swat valley — 12,000 Pakistani army troops retreated before 3,000 Taliban — just 100 miles from Islamabad. The telltale signs of al Qaeda being busy in their midst are the high-casualty bombings of Shia gatherings that have picked up pace recently.
And even more ominous has been the government’s response.
First the Zardari government abruptly caved and, to Washington’s expected displeasure, released from house arrest the popular nuclear scientist AJ Khan, father of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, who was later convicted of selling nuclear secrets to North Korea, Libya and Iran. Then last Monday the government announced that it would accept Islamic law in the Swat valley and agreed to a truce, “effectively conceding the area as a Taliban sanctuary” (NYT).
“The concessions to the militants,” the Times reported, “were criticized by Pakistani analysts as a capitulation by a government desperate to stop Taliban abuses and a military embarrassed at losing ground after more than a year of intermittent fighting.”
The problem is that Zardari’s coalition government (formed after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was promptly assassinated on her return to Pakistan from exile) can fall at any moment, and they know it. They have no legislative agenda, haven’t passed a single law, and seem to be bracing, if not for the top Army and Intelligence officers to depose them in what would be Pakistan’s fifth coup, then for the next echelon of the security and intelligence services to do so. The ranks of the latter are rife with Taliban supporters. There’s evidence that the Mumbai attacks last year were in fact their doing.
If there’s any silver lining to the cloud of militant Islamic extremism currently threatening Pakistan from several directions, it’s that the Zardari government, while publicly deploring the US missile strikes that have been keeping the Taliban on the move in Pakistan (and enraging the population with their high ‘collateral damage’), has in fact been closely coordinating them with the Pentagon. Zardari knows of course that the Taliban are coming for him, just as they did for his late wife.
But this sets the government and the Pakistani people on a collision course. And, as the economy tanks and the Taliban gain ground, and the Zardari government lurches from one concession to the next, who with any sense of history would want to bet on the outcome?
Well, because he’s obviously concluded he has no choice: Mr Obama, for one.