Obama Threatens Attack on Pakistan
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would possibly send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists, an attempt to show strength when his chief rival has described his foreign policy skills as naive.
To paraphrase a saying: It is better to stay silent and be thought naive, then to open your mouth and prove it.
Now, in the context of his entire speech, this was a pretty minor point, but it is still the one that everybody has seized upon. One hopes it was just rhetoric; a way to appear tough. Because right now, Musharraf is hanging on by a thread. His support amongst the people of Pakistan is nearly as low as Bush's is in the US and his legitimacy weakens with every aggressive statement or action by the US towards Pakistan that he doesn't counter.
I like Obama. Currently he's my favourite candidate of those running for the US Presidency. But January, 2009 is still a long ways off. One of the worst aspects of the US election system is that it is forcing candidates to commit to positions this far in advance of their taking power. The circumstances will have undoubtedly changed by the time the actual election rolls around. There's every chance the Bush Administration will launch the attacks on Pakistan themselves, clumsily and with excessive "collateral damage" given their record, and given how bad an idea it is, I would expect them to do just that, along with launching attacks on Iran.
Obama made no mention of widening the Iraq war to Iran, but widening the Afghan war to include Pakistan would be just as disastrous, if not more so. I do find Obama's promise to focus on the actual people who attacked the US to be laudable, and the strategy he laid out in his speech is a good one on nearly all of its points except this one. Nobody wants there to be safe havens for terrorists, but the real challenge of foreign policy is that sometimes you have to pick the least bad option; to risk the occasional sting to avoid kicking open a hornet's nest.
Naiveté is dangerous, but the posturing required of US domestic politics may yet prove to be the most dangerous aspect of US foreign policy there is.
