Hostility towards Pakistan Quickest Route to National Unity in India, Says Obama
By Anwar Iqbal
Washington, DC
The quickest route to national unity in India is “expressing hostility toward Pakistan,” says Barack Obama, America’s first colored president in his new book, “A Promised Land.”
The book, released worldwide on Nov 17, also includes a pen portrait of former Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, whom he first met at the 2009 G20 summit in Pittsburgh.
When Obama met Singh again during his visit to India in November 2010, Singh told him that he feared “rising anti-Muslim sentiment had strengthened the influence of Hindu nationalist BJP”, the main opposition party at the time.
Obama described Singh as “a gentle, soft-spoken economist” who engineered the modernization of his nation’s economy.
Obama quoted Singh as saying that the “call of religious and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating” for politicians, particularly in a country like India, which was still racked by poverty, wealth inequality, violence and ultra-nationalism.
Obama noted that “many Indians (took) great pride in the knowledge that their country had developed a nuclear weapons program to match Pakistan’s, untroubled by the fact that a single miscalculation by either side could risk regional annihilation.”
“Violence, both public and private, remained an all-too-pervasive part of Indian life. Expressing hostility towards Pakistan was still the quickest route to national unity,” Obama wrote.
“Most of all, India’s politics still revolved around religion, clan, and caste.”
But Obama also acknowledged that “in many respects, modern-day India counted as a success story, having survived repeated changeovers in government, bitter feuds within political parties, various armed separatist movements, and all manner of corruption scandals”.
But “despite its genuine economic progress, … India remained a chaotic and impoverished place: largely divided by religion and caste, captive to the whims of corrupt local officials and power brokers, hamstrung by a parochial bureaucracy that was resistant to change,” he added.
“A Promised Land” ends with the US raid on the Bin Laden compound in 2011 and, therefore, does not include the current Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi.
Commenting on the prevalence of violence in India, Obama wondered if “violence, greed, corruption, nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance” were “too strong for any democracy to permanently contain”.
The former US leader noted that those who believed in violence “seemed to lie in wait everywhere, ready to resurface whenever growth rates stalled or demographics changed or a charismatic leader chose to ride the wave of people’s fears and resentments”.
Obama also praised Singh’s ascent to prime minister’s office, noting that he was from an “often persecuted Sikh religious minority.”
He claimed that “more than one political observer” told him that Sonia Gandhi had “chosen Singh precisely because as an elderly Sikh with no national political base, he posed no threat to her 40-year-old son, Rahul, whom she was grooming to take over the Congress Party.”
“Somehow, I was doubtful” if Rahul Gandhi was capable of “preserving the Congress Party’s dominance over the divisive nationalism touted by the BJP,” he wrote.
Obama described Rahul Gandhi as “smart and earnest,” with good looks” but noted that “there was a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject.”
Obama wrote that India had “always held a special place in my imagination.” Analyzing this fascination, he said: “Maybe it was its sheer size, with one-sixth of the world’s population, an estimated two thousand distinct ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages spoken.”
But “more than anything, though, my fascination with India had to do with Mahatma Gandhi. Along with Lincoln, King, and Mandela, Gandhi had profoundly influenced my thinking,” he added.
Obama mentioned that his Indian and Pakistani college friends, who “taught me to cook dahl and keema and turned me on to Bollywood movies” also stirred his interest in India.
But this, he wrote, could not hide the huge issues India faced as the world’s second most populated country.
“Across the country, millions continued to live in squalor, trapped in sunbaked villages or labyrinthine slums, even as the titans of Indian industry enjoyed lifestyles that the rajas and moguls of old would have envied,” he writes in his new memoir.
“Violence, both public and private, remained an all-too-pervasive part of Indian life.”– Dawn
'Took No Joy' in Drone Strikes but 'Couldn't Afford to Look Soft on Terrorism'
Obama said that he took "no joy" in ordering drone strikes that claimed thousands of lives during his tenure, but stated that he could not afford to "look soft on terrorism".
In excerpts carried by Business Insider, Obama claimed that his first chief of staff — Rahm Emanuel — was "obsessed" with keeping track of a list of terrorist targets. Emanuel had "spent enough time in Washington to know that his new, liberal president couldn't afford to look soft on terrorism," he wrote.
"In places like Yemen and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men [...] had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings, or the schemes of older men.
"They were dangerous, these young men, often deliberately and casually cruel. Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save them — send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads.
"And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead."
"I took no joy in any of this. It didn't make me feel powerful. I'd entered politics to help kids get a better education, to help families get healthcare, to help poor countries grow more food — it was that kind of power that I measured myself against.
"But the work was necessary, and it was my responsibility to make sure our operations were as effective as possible," the former US president wrote in his book, the Business Insider report said.
Obama went on to write that the country's national security agencies had been challenged to construct "new forms of warfare" as Al Qaeda had scattered and gone underground.
"As Al Qaeda had scattered and gone underground, metastasizing into a complex web of affiliates, operatives, sleeper cells, and sympathizers connected by the internet and burner phones, our national security agencies had been challenged to construct new forms of more targeted, nontraditional warfare — including operating an arsenal of lethal drones to take out Al Qaeda operatives within the territory of Pakistan."
Commenting on the US raid to kill Bin Laden, Obama wrote that he knew ordering a military strike inside an allied state violated its sovereignty but he decided to go for it as he did not want to miss the chance to take out the Al Qaeda leader.
“Whatever we chose to do in Abbottabad, then, would involve violating the territory of a putative ally in the most egregious way possible, short of war — raising both the diplomatic stakes and the operational complexities."
The former US president revealed that his two closest aides, the then vice president Joe Biden and defence secretary Robert Gates, had opposed the raid. “US drone strikes against Al Qaeda targets in the [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] had been generating increasing opposition from the Pakistani public," an excerpt from the book carried by Vice stated.
However, Obama had ruled out involving Pakistan because he believed that certain elements inside the country maintained links to the Taliban and perhaps even Al Qaeda.
Drone strikes in Pakistan
The US began carrying out drone strikes in 2001, after 9/11, under the administration of then president George W. Bush. After assuming office, Obama had chosen to expand the programme, carrying out hundreds of strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
According to the the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 424 drone attacks were carried out in Pakistan from 2004-2016.
The first drone strike in Pakistan was carried out in 2004 to kill Taliban commander Naik Muhammad, according to data available with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism report (BIJ).
There was a 631pc jump in drone strikes under Obama, compared to the Bush administration. According to the BIJ, Bush authorized 51 strikes, while Obama gave the go-ahead for 373 strikes.
Criticism
The US had come under heavy criticism for drone strikes against extremists which critics said actually hit civilians, killing women and children at wedding parties, schools and even a hospital in Afghanistan that was run by the charity organization Doctors Without Borders.
The unmanned spy drones program also faced criticism from congressional lawmakers who questioned its scope and legality.
Obama faced pressure from both supporters and opponents to allow greater scrutiny of the secretive decision-making process guiding drone use.
In 2016, Obama acknowledged that “civilians were killed that shouldn't have been” in past US drone strikes, but said the administration was now “very cautious” about striking where women or children were present.
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