Honeymoon Period Over for Obama?
The Speech under question. Source: C-Span
It would appear that the honeymoon period for U.S President Barack Obama is now evidently over. After enjoying mostly positive press over the first three months of his first term in office, it would appear that the escalating situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan is beginning to bring him down. American news and opinion website Salon has recently written a very condemning article of the newly elected President and the manner in which he is treating the United States population regarding the information he is giving when it comes to Afghanistan. the article itself, while somewhat hypocritical, criticises Obama for a speech he gave recently surrounding the reason for the continued deployment of U.S troops to Afghanistan. The article is critical of what sounds like simple repeated reasons such as the ‘Domino Theory’ which were used throughout the Cold War.
He acknowledged that we deserve a “straightforward answer” as to why the U.S. and NATO are still fighting there. “So let me be clear,” he said, “Al-Qaida and its allies — the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks — are in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” But his characterization of what is going on now in Afghanistan, almost eight years after 9/11, was simply not true, and was, indeed, positively misleading. “And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban,” he said, “or allows al-Qaida to go unchallenged — that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”
Obama described the same sort of domino effect that Washington elites used to ascribe to international communism. In the updated, al-Qaida version, the Taliban might take Kunar Province, and then all of Afghanistan, and might again host al-Qaida, and might then threaten the shores of the United States. He even managed to add an analog to Cambodia to the scenario, saying, “The future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan,” and warned, “Make no mistake: Al-Qaida and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within.”
This latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeovers in South Asia is just as implausible as its earlier iteration in Southeast Asia (ask Thailand or the Philippines). Most of the allegations are not true or are vastly exaggerated. There are very few al-Qaida fighters based in Afghanistan proper. What is being called the “Taliban” is mostly not Taliban at all (in the sense of seminary graduates loyal to Mullah Omar). The groups being branded “Taliban” only have substantial influence in 8 to 10 percent of Afghanistan, and only 4 percent of Afghans say they support them. Some 58 percent of Afghans say that a return of the Taliban is the biggest threat to their country, but almost no one expects it to happen. Moreover, with regard to Pakistan, there is no danger of militants based in the remote Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) taking over that country or “killing” it.
However, through trying to state that Afghanistan and surrounding nations are not under threat, and would indeed be able to survive without an American presence, the article then contradicts itself in it’s criticism of Obama. The article practically insinuates that without American troops the country would never have been able rebuild itself, and that Afghan troops themselves alone would struggle to resist the force of the Taliban within some provinces.
The Kabul government is not on the verge of falling to the Taliban. The Afghan government has 80,000 troops, who benefit from close U.S. air support, and the total number of Taliban fighters in the Pashtun provinces is estimated at 10,000 to 15,000. Kabul is in danger of losing control of some villages in the provinces to dissident Pashtun warlords styled “Taliban,” though it is not clear why the new Afghan army could not expel them if they did so. A smaller, poorly equipped Northern Alliance army defeated 60,000 Taliban with U.S. air support in 2001. And there is no prospect of “al-Qaida” reestablishing bases in Afghanistan from which it could attack the United States. If al-Qaida did come back to Afghanistan, it could simply be bombed and would be attacked by the new Afghan army.
While the article does make some extremely valid points in it’s criticism of Obama, in particularly in regards to the worrying trends of using the same excuses that were used for the Cold War such as the domino theory, it loses strong credibility due to the manner in which it contradicts itself. Nevertheless, the article is a clear representation that the honeymoon period is over for Barak Obama, and that he now needs to make solid ground in this war against terror in an effort to maintain the world’s stability.
