More Bad Advice for Obama in Washington

More Bad Advice for Obama in Washington
http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=461

William Pfaff

Paris, January 12, 2010 – President Barack Obama is said to
feel he is in trouble politically because his enemies in Congress and
among the Washington journalists who decide what the “mood” of
Washington is on any given day say he is not tough enough. This is
the kind of mind-reading about what the public thinks that got him
and the rest of us into an escalated war against the Taliban.

During the presidential campaign he was convinced by his
handlers to combine his promise of Iraq withdrawal – something the
voters wanted to hear from him, and that he intended to do – with a
promise to escalate the “right war” in Afghanistan, against al Qaeda
and the Taliban, so as to show that he could be tough.

This is what he did, but that left him with a promise to fulfill, so
he was in the hands of two young and ambitious generals, David
Petraeus and Stephen McChrystal, who have never won a war of any
kind, but have no lack of confidence in what they can do, given the
chance.

They implicitly ignore the fact that no one else has won one
against a serious Third World insurrection, among the “white” or Euro-
American powers who have tried, except the British, in their decade-
long “Emergency” in Malaya: a Communist uprising that followed the
Second World War.

A savage little affair, it was won mainly by resettling a half-
million of the some three-million-member Chinese minority in Malaya,
from among whom the Communist rebels came. This drastically reduced
the size of the “sea” in which the latter could “swim” (following the survival
advice given by Mao Tse Tung to his guerrilla followers).

Elsewhere, the Dutch were forced out of the Netherlands East Indies,
now Indonesia, in 1949, and the French and Americans from Indochina
in a struggle that began in 1946 and ended in 1975, 29 years later.

The British prudently offered self-government to India in 1946, but
nonetheless a half-million people died, and 70 million were
displaced, in the struggle that accompanied partition in 1948 and the
creation of Pakistan. Since then, Pakistan and India have fought
three wars, and the lingering struggle over Kashmir still generates
violence.

Are the generals Petraeus and McChrystal fully aware of the fact that
their war against the Taliban in Afghanistan -- from a South Asian
point of view – is merely a sideshow in the sixty-year struggle
between India and Pakistan, and by the Afghans against both of them,
as well as against the American army? Over the two and a third
millennia since Alexander the Great was sent limping off, the Afghans
have always won.

Barack Obama and his two generals are going to have trouble putting
on a tougher show than Alexander. My point in this dose of history
is to demand how many Americans have the faintest idea in what their
country has now got itself involved in Asia, without as yet winding
up the consequences of nearly a decade in Iraq?

The United States is in Afghanistan allegedly to find al Qaeda, but
al Qaeda seems to be in Yemen, or Somalia, or who knows where – a
franchise with an unmatched publicity machine. Not finding al Qaeda,
the American troops – three more Americans killed on the day I write,
out of a total of six new allied dead, and who knows how many Afghans
– are looking for, and finding, Taliban.

But the Taliban are only a portion of the Pushtuns in Afghanistan,
who are 42 percent of the total population, and only a third of the
Afghan army, while the Tajiks are 22 percent of the population, 40
percent of the army, and a very large part of the government. The
Pushtuns, in their original Taliban form, ran the government, and
expect to do so again. In 2001 they were driven out by American
bombers and the predominantly Tajik Northern Alliance offensive of
2001, meant actually to capture Osama bin Ladin – who got away.

Having got away (even though it was George W. Bush he got away from),
and one of his volunteer admirers having got aboard an airplane on
Christmas Eve 2009 with explosives in his trousers which didn’t
explode, Barack Obama now has an alleged problem with toughness.

David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official, offers
the judgement Washington makes. “If you are going to be president of
the United States...you’re going to have to look like you’re tough on
terror.” Since we are talking about looking, not doing, President
Bush satisfied Washington toughness standards by invading Afghanistan
and Iraq and walking away from both of the wars he started. Perhaps
President Obama could solve his problem by invading Yemen -- and
three, or seven, years from now, walking away from all three ongoing
wars.

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