Leaving Pakistan in the Lurch
- 10.14.2009 - 7:10 AMThe president, egged on by Joe Biden and his nervous domestic-policy advisers, is trying desperately to redefine the enemy and our objectives in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, events in the real world are conspiring against them. Taking note of the “full-scale war” between Pakistan and the Taliban, Washington Post editors observe:
On Tuesday, government warplanes bombed targets in the Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan in what may be the prelude to a major army offensive there. Over the previous eight days, however, the Taliban carried out four major attacks that demonstrated both its growing power and its ambitions. One, against Pakistan’s army headquarters, was staged with the help of a terrorist organization from the country’s ethnic Punjabi heartland. That alliance underlines the fact that the Taliban no longer aims merely at controlling the ethnic Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan but at gaining control over a nuclear-armed state.
Oblivious to these events (or pretending to be so), the White House is trying to narrow the focus to al-Qaeda, ignoring the threat that the Taliban will topple not just Afghanistan but Pakistan as well, nuclear arsenal and all. At the precise moment the Taliban is exerting maximum pressure on Pakistan, the administration is pondering “a strategy that would give up the U.S. attempt to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.”
If we embrace the Biden-light-footprint war strategy, we not only enter an indecisive war of attrition — or a “war of exhaustion,” as Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt (Ret.) put it. We also leave Pakistan to the Taliban wolves. We haven’t been very good allies to a number of countries lately (e.g., Honduras, Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic), but leaving both Afghanistan and Pakistan would be an eye opener, even for the most devoted Obama-philes. Abandoning our allies and reneging on our commitments would be hard to spin, even for the sycophants in Oslo.
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