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Our Wobbly War on Terror
With President Bush’s would-be successors squabbling over Iraq, they are neglecting the main threat of terror that will face one of them taking office next January.
In Pakistan, Musharraf is on his way out as leaders of the two dominant parties agree to reinstate the judges he fired and try to strip him of crucial powers. (More on the nuclear dilemma here.)
“Afghanistan is slipping toward failure,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden warns. “The Taliban is back, violence is up, drug production is booming and the Afghans are losing faith in their government. All the legs of our strategy–security, counter-narcotics efforts, reconstruction and governance–have gone wobbly.”
The schedule of staying or going in Iraq is dominating the foreign policy debate in the presidential campaign, but Pakistan and Afghanistan are becoming more urgent.
“If we should have had a surge anywhere,” Sen. Biden wrote last week in the New York Times, “it is Afghanistan…In six years, we have spent on Afghanistan’s reconstruction only what we spend every three weeks on military operations in Iraq.”
The border area between the two countries, according to Biden is “a freeway of fundamentalism: the Taliban and Al Qaeda find sanctuary in Pakistan, while Pakistani suicide bombers wreak havoc in Afghanistan.”
The Bush-Cheney strategy of relying on Musharraf’s unreliable assurances about rooting them out is collapsing, but this Administration is unlikely to face that fact.
Biden sums it up: “The next president will have to rally America and the world to ‘fight them over there unless we want to fight them over here.’ The ‘over there’ is not, as President Bush has claimed, Iraq, but rather the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Voters should be pressing Sens. McCain, Clinton and Obama to tell them what they are going to do about that.
Cross-posted from my blog.
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4 Responses to “Our Wobbly War on Terror”
I won't hold my breath waiting for those questions to be asked. All I know is somehow we went from hunting Al-queda and “any nation that hides them” in 2001, to giving Pakistan a free pass for 7 years when they are doing just that. They get to shrug their shoulders saying they don't control that area, but at the same time we can't be let in there to do anything. What a racket.
Cheney is being sent (choosing to go) to the Middle East, but I wonder if it's about oil prices and a desire to constrain them so the voters are less likely to hate “Big Oil” and by implication, the GOP, and vote Democratic this November.
Would such an effort be merited?
Lol, the idea of Cheney trying to restrain oil prices almost made me piss myself with laughter. He's already making his comfy bed in the private sector after he leaves office, he doesn't care. Be interesting to see his tax returns for 2009.
“the idea of Cheney trying to restrain oil prices almost made me piss myself with laughter”
Wait until you hear Limbaugh or Hannity promote McCain after the conventions.
* * *
“Be interesting to see his tax returns for 2009.”
Halliburton in Dubai (presumably free to add Iran to its customers, by the way) may shield income or information from US tax authorities.
* * *
Meanwhile, when we hear this from someone like Biden,
“‘fight them over there unless we want to fight them over here.’”
not a single person has a right to complain about Bush offering McCain as “change.”