Obama Declares War on Pakistan
by C. L. Cook
Tonight, in a national television address billed as an explanation of his previously announced decision to send 30,000 additional (and perhaps more later) American soldiers to Afghanistan, U.S. president Barack Obama revealed to his West Point military college audience the real target of the latest deployment: Pakistan.

Obama said, though America was not willing to wage an open-ended war, it was a matter of "vital national interest" that he escalate the military involvement in Afghanistan. After eight years of occupation, and admittedly losing the battle for the hearts and minds of Afghanis, the president put an 18 month deadline on the campaign in that benighted nation, saying American forces would begin to draw down from July 2011.

Obama also declared victory in Iraq, and says troops there will begin to withdraw from that country after seven years of occupation beginning in the summer. The landmine buried within the text of the speech however did not concern either Iraq or Afghanistan, but was the president's repeated allusion to the dangers a "nuclear Pakistan" posed, and his determination to send troops into the restive western "border region."

 

That border area, encompassing Waziristan, and sometimes called the tribal region is where air strikes, drone missile attacks, and an escalated surge by the Pakistani army targeting what they believe to be Taliban militants appears the destination of ten thousand marines and more. Like an echo from the American wars in Southeast Asia of the 1960's and seventies, the American strategy is now aimed directly at the neighbour of their primary operation in Afghanistan in the lands currently recognized as being part of Pakistan.

As maps go, the appearance of Central Asia today bears little resemblance to the historical understanding of territorial suzerainty and sovereignty the locals have fought over for centuries. The truth of the matter is; the borders and embarkation lines we see today were largely drawn up by the late British empire at the end of the 19th century. Where those lines are respected today it is by those that profit by them and not because they are just or representative of the people actually living within them.

 

What Obama signed onto tonight was an effort to redraw the map of Central Asia, and it looks like Pakistan is going to be the party losing not only territory, but perhaps sacrificing too their prized nuclear arsenal.

The United States has been losing friends in Pakistan for more than a year, largely due to the scores of civilians killed by the drone and air strikes. The Obama administration dramatically increased the number of those attacks over the last year, launching more of them in 2009 than George Bush did throughout his eight year tenure. And, in Pakistan as in Afghanistan, every time one of those attacks indiscriminately kills dozens of women and children resistance grows. The Taliban need do nothing.

In addition to declaring the military's unilateral intentions in Pakistan, Obama excoriated the governance of the Afghani satrapy, saying America was not going to write blank cheques to Hamid Karzai's government and ordering he bring corruption into line.

The president reminded viewers the treasury will dole out more than 30 billion dollars in Afghanistan for 2010, adding; the nation he is most concerned about rebuilding is his own.

Press released before the speech emphasized Obama's hope to bring the American people onside to support what is an increasingly unpopular entanglement in nation building in Afghanistan. How that bitter pill will be easier to swallow in light of the administration's announcement last week of more billions of dollars to be dedicated to rebuilding Pakistan's defense infrastructure is perhaps hope overstretch, but after hearing Obama tonight, America's impoverished millions can only look forward to more war, and hope their nation's "moralsuasion" is enough to bring it all to an end.