By Larry Jones
Three days after the alleged peace candidate Barack Obama was inaugurated as President and Commander-in-Chief, military forces under his command killed as many as 22 people in Pakistan, at least three of whom were children, by firing missiles from unmanned Predator drones into the Federally Administered Tribal Area. This comes on the heels Obama’s appointment of Richard Holbrooke, a long time hawk, as his special envoy to the region, and on the eve of tribal chieftains meeting with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, husband of assassinated Benazir Bhutto.
Antiwar Obama supporters may have been disappointed with these attacks, but this is pure Obama carrying out a position he has long put forth. That Obama is continuing and carrying through with murderous missile attacks should not be surprising. On August 1, 2007 Obama said if elected in November 2008 he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan WITH OR WITHOUT APPROVAL FROM THE PAKISTANI GOVERNMENT. Reports at the time said such a move would anger the Pakistani people, and they were right. Following his statement, Obama received the lowest approval rating in Pakistan over any Muslim nation polled before the election.
Just a couple of months later Sarah Palin criticized Obama for advocating attacks from Afghanistan without Pakistani approval, saying that the U.S. should not engage in “invading the sovereign territory of a troubled partner in the war against terrorism.” This was after her alleged boss John McCain told her to reverse her earlier position in support of such unilateral action because he wanted the Republicans to appear to be more in favor of working through alliances.
In the presidential “debate” last September Obama said clearly: "If the United States has al Qaeda, bin Laden, top-level lieutenants in our sights, and Pakistan is unable or unwilling to act, then we should take them out." And that is exactly what he is doing now.
Some observers claim there may be a tacit U.S.-Pakistani agreement that when such attacks occur, Pakistani leadership with allow them to take place, but issue protests. However, at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Pakistan‘s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani stated that no such agreement exists. "I want to put on record that we do not have any agreement between the government of the United States and the government of Pakistan," Gilani told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Pakistani leadership has continuously stated that such attacks do more harm than good.
In November Zardari told Gen David Petraeus that "Continuing drone attacks on our territory, which result in loss of precious lives and property, are counterproductive and difficult to explain [for] a democratically elected government. It is creating a credibility gap.” Yet, after only a few days in office, that is exactly what Obama did. Continuing such attacks without Pakistan’s permission not only creates a credibility gap; it violates international law by attacking a sovereign country. It did not take long for Obama to become a war criminal.
These missile attacks continually add to the number of newly recruited insurgents with al Qaida and the Taliban. When asked about the actions in a news conference on Tuesday, carry-over Defense Secretary Robert Gates replied, “Both President Bush and President Obama have made clear that we will go after al Qaida wherever al Qaida is and we continue to pursue that.”Many progressive people who supported Obama claimed that Obama’s war-like campaign statements were what he had to say in order to get elected and that he would change once in office. Tell that now to the Pakistani mother holding her dead child killed by an Obama-ordered missile.
CONDITIONS WORSEN FOR PAKISTANIS
The rapid spread of the Taliban in Afghanistan has also greatly affected Pakistan. Many of the Taliban forces have been amassed along theAfghan-Pakistan border. As the New York Review of Books reports: “In less than eight months, Asif Ali Zardari’s new government has effectively lost control of much of the North-West Frontier Province to the Taliban’s Pakistani counterparts. … Woman have now been forced to wear the burqa, music has been silenced, barbershops are forbidden to shave beards, and over 140 girls’ schools have been blown up or burned down.”
Eighty percent of the 10.8 billion US dollars that Washington has sent to Pakistan since Sep. 11, 2001 went to the military. And just three weeks before Bush left office, his Defense Department awarded a $498.2 million contract to Lockheed Martin to supply 18 F-16 aircraft to Pakistan. But has militancy decreased? Of course not; it has increased, especially with members of the Taliban crossing over into Pakistan. Plus, with all the emphasis on the military and no money going into economic development many youth fall under the sway of the Taliban.
In the January 30 Bill Moyers’ Journal show, he discussed the viability of the current U.S. approach of waging war to defeat the insurgents and then working to “fix” the government. Historian of foreign policy Marilyn Young said that: “The problem is the focus remains a military solution to what all the other information I have says is a political problem. So I don’t care how you slice the military tactic, so long as your notion is that you can actually deal with this in a military way, you’re just going to march deeper and deeper into what Pete Seeger used to call the Big Muddy…”
A former Pentagon official, Pierre Sprey helped found the military reform movement risking his career by taking issue with a defense bureaucracy spending more and more money for often ineffective weapons. He told Moyers, speaking of the Pakistani-Afghan situation that “the more we try to fix the security situation, the more we will drive these people, particularly the Pashtun, into implacable opposition. And whether the military solution is more bombing from Predators or from F-16s or more special forces on the ground, you know, attacking villages and inadvertently killing lots of civilians, it doesn’t matter. As long as security comes first, the mission will fail because these people are sick and tired of a government that’s oppressing them and a foreigner who’s killing them.
Is Obama’s military approach to the region in the interests of the Pakistanis or the Afghans or, indeed, of humanity? Obama is thinking like an American, but we must think about humanity.