Obama's Latest Game Plan Needs Man-on-the-Street's Approval
By A. H. Cemendtaur
CA
Why is Obama's newly stated Pakistan-Afghanistan policy being analyzed so widely by the political commentators everywhere? Because it is the first time that the US administration has shared with the media a cogent plan to tackle the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
Following the events of 9/11, as soon as the Western media put the blame on Osama Bin Laden and his associates for the deadly attacks, the US focused its attention on Afghanistan and decided to overthrow the Taliban government with the aim of pulling out the rug from under Al-Qaeda's feet. But two years after overthrowing the Taliban the US, at the behest of certain hawkish elements, got involved in Iraq — the focus on fighting the perceived source of terrorism weakened.
Between 2003 and 2008 the US fought two wars, both half-heartedly. Running for the president Obama the candidate promised to make a change, to close the Iraq war front and focus solely on Afghanistan and chasing Taliban and Al Qaeda elements taking refuge in the Pakistani areas bordering Afghanistan. Obama's speech of March 27 is a blueprint of the changed strategy. The spelled-out strategy has four main elements: increased economic aid to Pakistan; increased military presence in Afghanistan; rewarding Pakistanis when they act on American intelligence and attack Taliban and Al-Qaeda targets; and buying loyalties of leaders who lie on the fringes of the Taliban sphere.
But the Obama administration's game plan is based on a super-sized assumption: that the common people of Pakistan and Afghanistan are so fed up with the Taliban that they are ready to side with the Americans to eradicate the Islamic group.
When Barack Obama ran for the president, an important part of his campaign was an articulated stand about how he, if successful in the presidential bid, would save the Americans from the external threats — the main threat to the US invariably understood to be the "Islamists." One can argue that since Obama got the majority votes in the elections, most of the Americans are on board with Obama on how to fight the War on Terror. But in the campaigns preceding the February 2008 Pakistani elections neither we saw any mention of the candidates' strategy to deal with the " Islamic extremism" nor heard their views on involving the US in sorting out the internal mess. And this is where the new Obama strategy to deal with the Taliban in Pakistan has a good chance to flounder.
Pakistan became an ally in the War on Terror when the country was ruled by a general and one man made the decision about the direction the nation of 170 million people should take in fighting a war against elements deemed dangerous for the West. Even though things have changed after the Pakistani elections of 2008, the US believes the decision made by Pervez Musharraf is approved by the present democratic government as well. And the new democratic government of Pakistan might eventually approve the way things are being handled vis-a-vis the War on Terror, but such a decision has not been transparently made yet. One would like to see an active debate in the legislative assemblies of Pakistan, at the end of which the Obama plan would either be approved or rejected by the democratic bodies. And in that debate the Pakistanis would like to hear answers to important questions like: who is our enemy, what is the end goal of the War on Terror, and what would determine victory in the war. The gravity of the situation even warrants settling the issue in a national referendum. Only when the majority of the Pakistanis share the vision of the majority of the Americans about how the War on Terror should be fought, there would be any chance of the success of this fight in Pakistan.
And it could very well be that the US does not see a need to obtain common Pakistani's approval for the support of the American plans that the US wishes to independently deal with two parallel setups of Pakistan, i.e., the army and the civilian government. But the common man on the Pakistani street must understand that such an arrangement would not bode well for the country, that in order to avoid the spread of chaos resulting from such a deal the Pakistani democratic setup must be strengthened to ultimately take the army in its control. Pakistanis must demand transparency from their government, so that the conditions of the economic aid from the US are known to all and the military aid being offered to Pakistan has a civilian oversight.
