Has the drone war in Pakistan’s rugged frontier finally come home? Was Faisal Shahzad, the bumbling Times Square bomb maker, a blowback from the Obama administration’s increased use of killer robots? David Sanger of The New York Times asks the question, and the New York Post says an “anonymous law enforcement” source claims Shahzad was driven to his act after witnessing drone attacks in Pakistan.
Turning Afghanistan over to the Taliban may actually be a win-win situation for the United States.
The competing assertions about Times Square-bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad’s links relationship with Pakistani Taliban reflects a broader debate both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and Pakistan over how to handle Taliban elements in Waziristan province.
The bubble is bursting.
I’m not talking about the Greek economy, the collapse of which has bankers and finance ministers trembling from Athens to Antarctica. Nor am I talking about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which reminds us once again that our current energy security rests on shaky foundations.
Many foreign-policy analysts linked to the second Bush administration believe that the elevated and energized partnership with India he and his advisors brought about may be his greatest and most enduring legacy. The significant effort they put in to revitalizing the relationship undoubtedly deserves to be acknowledged for what it is, an important redefinition – but that failed to create the political, institutional framework necessary to sustain the considerable momentum generated by the civil nuclear cooperation deal. Moreover, the redefinition came about as a result of a “de-hyphenated policy,” that is to say a, delinking of India & Pakistan in U.S. foreign policy (i.e., building relations with India and relations with Pakistan rather than an India-Pakistan approach).
Over one million people would die before the partition of India and Pakistan was over in 1947, when one country suddenly became two. The governments in Delhi and Islamabad quickly set about recasting national identities that would strengthen each individual regime. Central to these newly formed identities was a strong loathing for the other side, developed through closed borders, years of warfare, and a systematic approach by both governments to create fear. The people, once united, became enemies.
It has been a grim start to the New Year and the new decade in South Asia. Vested interests, hardened obsessions, and old habits continue to push India and Pakistan in the direction of ruinous conflict. While military planners in both countries plan and prepare for the next war, politicians and diplomats remain determined not to talk except on their own terms.
The United States has charted out its relationship with Pakistan for the next 10 years. The recently approved multi-billion-dollar U.S. economic and military aid packages for Pakistan, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent visit there, suggest that this Pakistan policy will be much like the one Washington followed for the last 50 years. For their part, Pakistanis are unlikely to change their views of the United States and may even become more hostile.
In the game of geopolitics, South Asia is the big swing region. It commands the very center of the vast Eurasian heartland, which the founders of geopolitics identified as pivotal to control of the globe.
A chaikhana is a Central Asian teahouse where poets and performers — men and (unveiled) women — sing verses and recite prose in a conversational atmosphere with fellow patrons. In New York, last month’s Muslim Voices festival recreated a chaikhana to showcase Urdu writers from Pakistan, performances of Lebanese zajal (dueling poetry with audience response and affirmation), and West African jaliya, an hereditary bardic tradition from Mali that has produced many world music stars.