AfPak as Obama's Wars
Aljazeera English reviews the first hundred days of Obama's policies in Afghanistan.
The The NYT explains that Obama is readying a major US military push to cut the neo-Taliban off from their funding sources in the poppy trade.
The problem is that a) the Taliban are probably being bankrolled by Gulf millionaires to some extent, and so ending the poppy trade will not put them down. Second, a lot of ordinary Afghan farmers depend on poppies and the new policy could push many of them into insurgency.
Aljazeera English also reports on Obama's recent comments on Pakistan. He says he is not concerned about a Taliban takeover in the short term, but is anxious that the civilian Pakistani government is fragile. This stance is an improvement on that of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was talking about a Pakistani collapse within six months.
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posted by Juan Cole @ 5/01/2009 12:45:00 AM
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3 Comments:
'Allah's Bomb' in radical hands is the strategic center of the Pashtunistan war. That's why Afghanistan was really scary, not the not suicide airline hijack plots. Awful as 9/11 was, it didn't engage in worse-case targeting, and was a one-off technique. But it could have depopulated a county, or worse, given access to AQ Kahn's expertise.
Why is axis-of-proliferation N. Korea still broke and without usable fission weapons, while Pakistan has enough to face down India? The answer is that PRK doesn't have the backing of big-time oil money. Arabia is a stake-holder in Dr. Kahn's enterprise. Put a knife to that tumor and we fear to discover that it's already metastasized, Arabia's missiles armed while we were all steamed up about Iraq and Iran.
Resolving the Pakistan-Afghan civil wars will probably involve Arabia-Iran, India-Pakistan and a termination of Israeli expansion. For two terms we've seen movement in the wrong direction in all four conflicts, with little room to wag a strategic finger at the Islamic Republic of Pakistan's divided army command. Their grunts and civilians have almost certainly taken more casualties than US losses in 9/11-OIF-OEF combined.
The elephant in the room is the thing that we won't talk openly about. Who has nukes today, and what are the conflicts driving proliferation and civil war?
Newsweek : “Where Pakistan is Winning” —by Haider Ali Hussein Mullick, senior fellow at the U.S. Joint Special Operations University and the author of “Pakistan’s Security Paradox: Countering and Fomenting Insurgencies.”
I am sorry, but Obama is ignorant to suggest the solution to the problems in Asia is the poppy field. Why doesn't Obama address the insatiable demand for heroin IN HIS OWN COUNTRY - THE USA !!!
But, that would be too much to ask. Obama = Bush
The problem faced in South Asia is NOT the poppy field, it is the presence of a foreign military power that is causing the insugency and anger and rage and hatred.
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