Dr. Richard Benkin
A Fawning Media Will Ignore Obama’s Pakistan Disaster
May 12, 2009

The Obama Administration continues to say all the "correct” things about Pakistan and its fight against the Taliban. Yet, knowledgeable observers in South Asia give the country no more than twelve months to stave off the terror group’s inevitable takeover of that nuclear Islamic Republic. In a New York Times piece in early April, David Kilcullen, former adviser to United States military commander General David Petraeus, predicted Pakistan’s fall to the Taliban "within six months.” Shortly afterwards, his former boss agreed that the current Taliban "insurgency” could "take down” Pakistan. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted later that month, "I think that the Pakistani government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists.”

Yet, the Administration continues to push its program of propping up the ineffective Pakistani government courtesy of US taxpayers.

The US should have two priorities for Pakistan: secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal; and lead an international effort to protect the country’s remaining minority populations on both sides of the Indo-Pak border, as they have been fleeing Taliban persecution in droves at least since February. The administration seems committed to doing neither. Thus, when Pakistan, along with its nukes and remaining minorities, falls to the Taliban; we can expect it to say that it tried everything it could, but that things were too far gone given the policies of its predecessor. And when it does, expect the media to fall behind it lock step, even though the same reporters gleefully blamed President George W. Bush for 9/11 and refused even to entertain the notion that the policies of the previous, Clinton, administration were the primary cause.

Obama’s consistent mistake is to believe that the Taliban is his enemy and that Pakistan is otherwise his ally.

First, there is no question that US policy has tilted toward Pakistan for decades; a mistake no matter who sat in the Oval Office. In part, that was due to foreign policy decisions made by India in the 1950s when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was the driving force behind the so-called "Non-Aligned Movement,” which was non-aligned in name only. Its godfathers were some of the Soviet Union’s staunchest allies at the time: Gamal Abdul Nasser, whose Egypt was the Soviets’ Middle East lynchpin and a large recipient of Soviet aid; Josip Broz Tito, while a communist gadfly, solidly in that camp; Marxist Kwame Nkrumah; and Indonesia’s Sukarno, aligned with China and North Korea. India itself became dependent on Soviet aid and welcomed legions of Soviet advisors and experts. Only in the early 1990s did it realize that it backed the wrong side in the Cold War and had to re-orient its policies. Continued rule by left-leaning governments, however, made a clear break impossible. Towing the politically correct line, the government consistently found itself on the opposite side of the US on issues like Iraq and Israel. Bush even took the lead in changing the dynamnic by offering India—and not Pakistan—a coveted nuclear deal; but the leftist Indian government almost rejected Bush’s bold attempt at rapprochement. On the other hand, Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf was much more skilled at appearing to broker some sort of bridge in fighting the Taliban and even on the Israel issue; and his country continued to benefit from that.

Regardless, it is to our everlasting shame that the United States along with the rest of the world sat by idly while Pakistan’s religious minorities were first stripped of their rights by a Nuremburg-like law. Pakistan's Enemy Property Act was and is openly anti-Hindu and has been in force since the Lyndon Johnson administration. During the same period, we remained silent while Pakistani Hindus fell from almost twenty to only one percent of the population. Most of this took place before anyone even heard of the Taliban. So, it is clear that anti-minority sentiment is not restricted to the enemies Obama has identified but is rather entrenched in the existing Pakistani institutions that we have been and still are supporting morally and with our tax dollars.

President Obama has made a great deal of noise about "restoring” America’s moral leadership in the world. Yet, he is missing a chance for genuine moral leadership here by actively ignoring this chance to unite the planet in a great humanitarian endeavor. If his administration earmarked its pledge of $1.5 billion in non-military aid annually for an effort to save Pakistan's minorities, he would find little opposition. Obama’s consistent mistake is to believe that the Taliban is his enemy and that Pakistan is otherwise his ally.

Even as Democratic Senator John Kerry, Foreign Relations Committee chair, introduced the legislation authorizing those funds for Pakistan, he warned his Senate colleagues, "An alarming percentage of the Pakistani population now sees America as a greater threat than Al Qaeda…Until we change that perception there is, frankly, very little chance of ending tolerance for terrorist groups or persuading any Pakistani government to devote the political capital necessary to deny such groups… the sanctuary that they’ve been able to receive.”

Yet, the administration ignored even its own mouthpiece by abdicating responsibility for securing the nukes to those same people Kerry was warning us about. On his 100th day in office, Obama said, "I’m confident that we can make sure that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure primarily initially because the Pakistan army recognizes the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands.” What Obama did not say is that he and many Pakistani generals would disagree on just whose hands are the wrong ones. Both the Pakistani army and the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, are known to be infiltrated by the Taliban or Taliban-sympathizers for years. For instance, in 2004, the ISI and Pakistani officials at all levels, helped fleeing Al Qaeda forces find safe havens in Nepal. Its embassy in the Nepali capital of Kathmandu brokered an agreement between Maoists insurgents and the Islamist terrorists that eventually brought the formerly outlawed communists into Nepal’s coalition government and eventually to its head. Does Obama think that Kerry’s analysis applied to everyone in Pakistan except the military?

Deep Pakistani Involvement with Radical Islamists
According to a BBC report in January, the Bush administration expressed concerns about the Pakistani nukes as early as last year and recommended that the US send in special forces to "secure the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.” Unfortunately, the Pakistanis called the proposal "outlandish” and rejected it saying there was "no chance” of them falling into "the wrong hands”! The situation now is even more desperate, and Pakistani leadership is fragile to put it kindly. Obama should reprise Bush’s proposal to secure the Pakistani nukes and use the goodwill he claims to have gotten to make it happen. He will not, however, because it would deprive him of the cover of blaming the Bush administration when the worst does happen. One would have hoped that the lives of millions and the security of the United States would mean more to the President and those around him than their political spin.

Clearly it does not. For if the President’s noble-sounding words are genuine, how do we explain the following. In his policy speech of March 27, Obama emphasized regional cooperation in the fight against Al Qaeda; and highly reliable sources inside India told me that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had informed the Indians that this meant pulling their troops back in Kashmir so that the Pakistanis would "feel comfortable” moving theirs away for the fight against the Taliban. The Pakistanis, however, are not much of a threat to the Indians in Kashmir. Their terrorist surrogates (such as the ones who carried out the November 2008 Mumbai attacks) are. Yet for ten days straight preceding Obama’s speech, Indian troops were battling those same terrorists and having a good deal of success. They even captured a major terrorist leader. Given that, Obama’s "regional solution” should have had India take on that fight, while Pakistan moved its troops against the Taliban. Of course, that only makes sense if Obama and the Pakistanis were serious about cooperating to defeat the terrorists.

Despite these warnings and the voluminous evidence of deep Pakistani involvement with radical Islamists, however, the media will scream bloody murder, blaming Bush, when Pakistan falls, even though these are Obama’s chickens that are coming home to roost. Count on it.