In Oslo last week, President Barack Obama ironically used his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize to deliver a lengthy defense of the “just war” theory and dismiss the idea that nonviolence is capable of addressing the world’s most pressing problems.
Six months ago, President Obama dazzled audiences from Cairo to Jakarta—and everywhere in between and beyond—with his call for a “new beginning” with the Muslim world. It came after the new president made a series of confidence-building statements, speeches, and diplomatic overtures with a consistent, sobering message: It is time for relations based on “mutual respect” and “mutual interest.” Obama declared at Cairo University that there “must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground.”
When President Barack Obama laid out his plan for winning the war in Afghanistan, behind him stood an army of ghosts: Greeks, Mongols, Buddhists, British, and Russians, all whom had almost the same illusions as the current resident of the Oval Office about Central Asia. The first four armies are dust. But there are Russian survivors of the 1979-89 war that ended up killing 15,000 Soviets and hundreds of thousands of Afghans as well as virtually wrecking Moscow’s economy.
The United States has spent nearly a trillion dollars over the past seven years, fighting two wars in vastly different places. A small portion of this effort has been dedicated to what has commonly been called nation-building. In fact, our mission has been a mixture of both state-building, which further develops the institutions of government, and nation-building, which constructs roads, schools and other projects. This approach is not entirely new, but these initiatives have become an important and accepted paradigm for the conduct of war in this century.
David Swanson’s provocative new book Daybreak brings to light the many crimes and injustices perpetrated by the Bush team during its eight-year term. The Obama administration’s reluctance to confront head-on the various illegalities committed by the Bush-Cheney regime l eaves the door open, Swanson argues, for future abuses of power, “I oppose accepting the pretense that one president orders torture legal and the next orders it illegal,” he writes. “If we accept that, then what is to prevent a future president declaring it legal again?” It isn’t enough for the Obama administration to reverse the policies of George W. Bush, which ranged from torture and censorship to spying and misappropriation of funds. Criminal prosecution of Bush and Dick Cheney can diminish the likelihood of future abuses of executive authority.
A headline for a recent McClatchy news story suggests that the decision of Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah not to contest the second round of the Afghan presidential election will have a major impact on whether the Afghan government is perceived as legitimate: “Challenger’s pullout leaves Afghan government of dubious legitimacy.”
Before the Obama administration buys into General Stanley McChrystal’s escalation strategy, it might spend some time examining the August 12 battle of Dananeh, a scruffy little town of 2,000 perched at the entrance to the Naw Zad Valley in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province.
Abdul Qadeer Khan is a now infamous character in the nuclear age, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapon along with being linked to spreading his nuclear know-how to several rogue states such as North Korea, Iran, and Libya. Gordon Corera’s book opens with a history of the man behind the myth, detailing his fervent desire to make Pakistan a strong, proud country after its humiliation at the hands of India’s army. This desire and perhaps a stroke of luck landed him in the field of nuclear research despite the fact that his professional training was in metallurgy. Once he acquired his nuclear proficiency and its potential for deterrence was understood, bringing that power into the hands of Pakistan was A.Q. Khan’s way of ensuring another military defeat would never happen again.
As President Obama and his advisors debate future troop levels for Afghanistan, a new report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) muddies the water on one of the most important issues in the debate — the effects of Afghanistan’s drug production.
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.