Pakistan Update
| Thu Sep. 4, 2008 10:30 AM PDT
PAKISTAN UPDATE....Here's the latest news from the border regions of Pakistan:
Helicopter-borne American Special Operations forces attacked Qaeda militants in a Pakistani village near the border with Afghanistan early Wednesday in the first publicly acknowledged case of United States forces conducting a ground raid on Pakistani soil, American officials said.
....The commando raid by the American forces signaled what top American officials said could be the opening salvo in a much broader campaign by Special Operations forces against the Taliban and Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, a secret plan that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has been advocating for months within President Bush's war council.
This is, apparently, all that we know. None of the news reports I read gave even a tiny clue about what this raid was about, whether any high-value targets were killed or captured, or what instigated it.
But I wonder what the political fallout is going to be? In one of those weird inversions that you occasionally get in presidential campaigns, Barack Obama is semi-committed to supporting this kind of action and John McCain is semi-committed to opposing it. Both would probably prefer to stay quiet about this particular raid, but what if the Times is right and this is just the "opening salvo in a much broader campaign"? Then they have to say something. But what? McCain strongly criticized Obama earlier in the year when Obama suggested he might follow actionable intelligence over the border ("Pakistan is a sovereign nation," McCain said), but that's not a winning formula in these latter days of base-appeasing jingoism. So I imagine he'll change his mind on this. There's an election to win, after all.
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Comments
FWIW, Moonie Times says it's about getting bin Laden before the election, erm, before GWB leaves office:
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/sep/04/us-ground-forces-hit-al-qaed...
So now we've committed an act of war upon a third sovereign nation - an erstwhile ALLY, no less - with no public debate whatsoever, never mind legal (i.e. UN) justification.
And if we've gotten the Russians so spooked they're headed towards Cold War II, the sequel, it's all their fault because they're CRAAAAAZY, see....?
There's a new military corrolary to IOKIYAR - IOKIYATUS - "it's OK if you are the US...."
what bothers me isn't so much what mccain's stance on it is (he'll say whatever he needs to), but that Obama might be forced to confront his comments about being for this sort of thing.
I can't imagine he can win if he has to come down on one side or the other of this.
The political fallout will be Pakistanis acknowledge the insurgents in the Territories are doing more to uphold the sovereignty of Pakistan than the government. This undermines the legitimacy of the government and increases political stability of a nuclear armed nation.
This makes me very nervous. At this point the best we can say about Pakistan is that it is fragile. If we keep stoking anti-US sentiment until it reaches a fever pitch, theres no telling where it will lead. But I don't think it will be a pleasant place.
At the rate we are going, we will soon have a bipolar world, everyone else against the US.
I don't know why you think this is a "weird inversion" for Obama. He's not at all a peacenik. His line back in 2002 was "I'm not against wars, I'm against dumb wars." Like many Democrats, he's something of a hawk, rhetorically at least, on terrorism, and wants to increase our anti-Taliban efforts in Afghanistan. It's just that he doesn't think the only tool in the shed is military force -- a point of view to which the Administration belatedly came round in Iraq, but still hasn't grasped in general.
McCain's position is or was less consistent with his usual jingoism, and is probably just reflexive opposition to Obama.
Submitted by Winston Smith (not verified) on Thu Sep. 4, 2008 5:06 PM PDT.
Wow! Is it October already?
If Pakistan, or regions within Pakistan are providing aid, comfort, or shelter to the admitted planner of the 9/11 attacks, the US should be at war with that country or those regions.
How can this possibly be controversial? How can this be partisan?
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