Obama's Kashmir Focus
By Riaz Haq
CA

Even before Barack H. Obama assumed the US presidency, he had been actively working on his South Asia policy. Not only did he send his vice president-elect Joe Biden to visit Pakistan, he also reached out to his defeated presidential rival John McCain upon Mr. McCain's recent return from a trip to Pakistan. In an unprecedented move, Mr. Obama quietly consulted Mr. McCain about many of the new administration's potential nominees to top national security jobs and about other issues — in one case relaying back a contender's answers to questions Mr. McCain had suggested, according to the New York Times.
More recently, Foreign Policy journal reported of a secret dinner meeting in Washington's Ronald Reagan Building where Obama listened to several key figures including Ahmed Rashid who flew in from Lahore specially for the occasion.
It is widely known that Obama thinks the situation in Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. "The most important thing we're going to have to do with respect to Afghanistan, is actually deal with Pakistan," Obama said in an interview on October 30 with MSNBC. "And we've got work with the newly elected government there in a coherent way that says terrorism is now a threat to you. Extremism is a threat to you. We should probably try to facilitate a better understanding between Pakistan and India and try to resolve the Kashmir crisis so that they can stay focused not on India, but on the situation with those militants."
Obama reiterated his emphasis on Kashmir in a December 7 interview on NBC's Meet The Press. He said, "...as I've said before, we can't continue to look at Afghanistan in isolation. We have to see it as a part of a regional problem that includes Pakistan, includes India, includes Kashmir, includes Iran. And part of the kind of foreign policy I want to shape is one in which we have tough, direct diplomacy combined with more effective military operations, focused on what is the number one threat against US interests and US lives. And that's al-Qaeda and, and, and their various affiliates, and we are going to go after them fiercely in the years to come."
Earlier in September, Obama's adviser Bruce Riedel told a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relation, "We can't expect Pakistan to behave like a normal state, unless it has normal borders. And we can't expect Pakistan to behave the way we would like it to while it's obsessed and fixated on its neighbor and the problem in Kashmir. The problem in Kashmir has been in the doldrums for the past several years. It is now starting to boil really quickly, and when Kashmir boils, the result is Indian-Pakistani tensions that can produce war. We've seen that over and over again," he said.
The Mumbai attacks have only served to strengthen Obama's Kashsmir thesis and sharpen his national security team's focus on resolving the biggest obstacle to peace in South Asia. This fact has recently been underlined by his British ally, Foreign Secretary David Miliband. After his recent trip to India and Pakistan, Mr. Miliband wrote for the Guardian as follows: "Resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the threat on their western borders."
The Indian government and media have been protesting the statements by Obama and Miliband in the hope of averting a serious intervention by the West to force a resolution of the long-standing Kashmir dispute that can potentially trigger a nuclear holocaust. Former president of the United States and the husband of the incoming US secretary of state Hilary Clinton, Bill Clinton, on the eve of his 2000 visit to the subcontinent, called the ceasefire line that divides Kashmir "the most dangerous place in the world".
Miliband has called the war on terror "mistaken". Obama has refrained from the indiscriminate use of the label of "war on terror" as a way to avoid solving fundamental issues.
What Obama and Miliband are setting out to do will not be easy, either in South Asia or in the Middle East. There will be powerful opposition from the Indian and Israeli governments and their lobbyists and friends in the US Congress. But, to distance themselves from the misguided Bush policies and to leave a legacy of international peace of prosperity, Obama and his allies need to show tough love to their friends in India and Israel. The kind of tough love that makes two of America's best friends see what is truly in their own best interest.
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