A Delivery for Allah

Obama did the right thing in this case, which also happened to be the common sensical thing to do. Pakistan was exposed, for once, to the contemptuous treatment it highly merits, and bin Laden was granted a quick, sordid conclusion (capture would have been ideal). Should the President be accorded genuflections as a great Hero, as much of the Left insists? I think not. The SEALS who did the raid and provided backup, and their chopper pilots, were the heroes. Obama merely did his job--a new sensation for him.

 

I cannot say this changes my opinion on Afghanistan--the sacrifices being made without any sense of how to win are indefensible--Bush/Obama repeating just the same fundamental, disgustingly irresponsible and cowardly mistake of Johnson/Nixon. The presence of bin Laden in Pakistan, the ongoing base for our foe in the Afghan war, merely provides redundant emphasis on the futility of this fight. The endless government lies about Af/Pak: political correctness in action getting our soldiers killed overseas.

How to One-Up Bush

Obama has apparently approved drone strikes in Baluchistan, which is part of Pakistan proper and which has not been hit previously. It looks like Obama wants to demonstrate that he has bigger balls than Bush. This move will widen the war and presents the clear risk of creating more enemies in Pakistan and destabilizing that nation. But, if you really intend to win in Afghanistan, this is a necessary gamble. Bush never took it. He was content to park a division over there and claim the situation was improving (which it wasn't). I give credit to Obama for decisive action and follow-through--if you are going to fight a war, do not fight it half-assed. It remains to be seen whether still more troops will be needed--if they are, Obama will have to send them to avoid falling into the half-assed trap. I said this with Bush's Iraq war for years, and he finally authorized a decisive surge that led to military (though not political) success. The same was true in Vietnam. We did not do and were not at any time willing to do what was necessary to win--therefore we should not have gone in or, at the very least, once we determined that the requirements of victory exceeded our appetite for risk, we should have pulled out expeditiously. Now, despite all this commendation, I retain serious misgivings about our likelihood of success in Afghanistan. The great obstacle to our goals is the prevalence of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan and the near impossibility of eradicating them from the border regions. Thus far, Obama is pressing forward with the strategy he has chosen without any weakening qualifications of consequence. Unfortunately, I think he chose the wrong gamble--we should get out of there and try to finance the best political groups that remain behind and press hard on Pakistan to use its influence to prevent a Taliban reconquering. Here's a discussion: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/al-qaeda-in-the-crosshairs/?hp

Bush and Obama

Apparently Bush recently adopted a new strategy that involves attacking targets in the Tribal Areas without Pakistani permission. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11policy.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin Didn't Obama get hammered by the right a few months ago for saying that he would do just this? I believe he said that he would attack a known Al Qaeda meeting in Pakistan even if the Pakistanis declined to approve the attack. Am I missing something here? These Tribal Areas seem analogous to N. Vietnam, with Pakistani military and intel leaders acting as China did in the Vietnam war. Both would be difficult to conquer by invasion, due to guerrilla activity and a landscape that supports such activity. Of course, the fact that the Tribal Areas are a part of Pakistan makes them even more problematic than N. Vietnam was. An invasion would surely provoke further support for the guerrillas by their state backers or even a direct confrontation with that state. But, without an invasion the cross-border attacks continue indefinitely and threaten the stability of their target. Unfortunately, American operations in the Tribal Areas will probably turn the Pakistani people against us and could destabilize Pakistan.

The Nuclear Santa

It's reassuring to know that Mr. Khan sits comfortably in Pakistan under a sufficiently luxurious "house arrest" while we spend great sums and risk many lives seeking to find a much less dangerous man: Osama bin Laden. Khan is a national hero in Pakistan, which is amazingly stupid of the Pakistanis given that he helped nuclearize one of Pakistan's natural enemies, Iran. But this ring of Khan illustrates the multiplication of proliferation risks engendered when primitive nations acquire WMD knowledge. Once such knowledge begins to spread among the primitives of the world it develops an internal logic which necessarily causes it to infect ever more nations (the domino theory of proliferation). By internal logic I mean that proliferation provides more sources from which to acquire atomic knowledge and thus a greater probability of successful acquisition. Also, the anarchical nature of international relations deters states from settling for an inadequate defense capability: when their neighbors go nuclear they are constrained to follow if possible. Thus, acquisition of the knowledge becomes easier and the incentive to avail oneself of it increases at the same time. Stacking the odds against oneself is the wrong way to gamble.  

 

But, even without Khan it was only a matter of time before the more ambitious nations found a path to this capability. Maybe they would have purchased it from a corrupt scientist or, for the more advanced states, at much greater expense of time and resources, they may have developed it internally with their own scientists and engineers. Despite all this, what should make the nuke threat manageable in the long run is that an effective nuclear strike force cannot be assembled in silence--the snoops will find you out before it's ready to use. Result: deterrence. This is not true of bioweapons. They can be created in secrecy and disseminated in such fashion as to obscure the culpable party. In other words, in the worst case scenario, their development cannot be stopped and their use cannot be deterred. Knowing what is likely to follow, I am content to see the nuclear age, with all its perils and stupidities, drag itself out as long as it likes.