The reporting on the Pakistani school murder of over 130 children and adults by radical Islamist has been interesting and intense. It has been report that only a “small” percentage of the population supports them; I heard the figure 15%. Think about a society in which 15 out of every 100 people support murder of children. Personally, I think this is abhorrent. The Obama Policy of supporting people fighting to protect themselves from murdering religious tyrants seems weak but short of standing aloft from facing the facts, seems the only way to combat such a horrendous problem. Only by comparing options will we settle on that solution.
The knee jerk solutions jump from standing back and doing nothing to “kill them all and let God sort them out” that is from the peacenik isolationist to the warmonger, from the “Wolfowitz-Cheney approach”. The real world exist somewhere in between these two extremes. Americans, for the most part, are a loving, caring people and find such acts unacceptable thus are willing to attempt to do something about it. We, as a country, are not unique in that regard. However, in saying this, we have to face the fact that drone attacks and bombing are acts of war just as acts of terrorism are acts of war. For as far back as most of us can remember and from our reading world history, we think of war as huge armies and navies engaged in horrendous battles. The concept of armed conflict has changed and we have to learn to cope with these sea changes in two different aspects; “we the people” have to change our attitude concerning sovereignty and our military has to change as well in respect to techniques of war.
We no longer have weakened the concept of government boundaries and citizenship as always but at the same time, we have strengthened religious boundaries and the way we respond to them. We conduct drone attacks across national boundaries on our own citizens in radical Islamic areas, often with collateral damage, either with or without the consent of the political government: Nigeria, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, etc. In general, we do these things in the shadow of the framework of our time-honored law. Guatanimo and the torture arguments demonstrate, in addition to all of this, we have created a no-man land in the concept of combatants. We don’t capture them on the battle field, rather we arrest them and we do not put them in prisoner of war camps but “hide” them in dark sites if we don’t kill them where we find them.
Does the attack by radical Muslims on a school add Pakistan to the “battle field”? Obviously, in the framework of the new concepts it does, if we become involved it puts us in a position of being embroiled in the religious based and ongoing conflict between India and Muslim Pakistan that is the Hindi-Muslim conflict. Of course, the Muslim Shiite-Sunni conflict still rages in that country as it does in the entire region. We are involved in the el Assad power struggle in Syria because of ISIS and in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, which is an extension of the Iraqi-Kurdish conflict. The Shiite-Sunni in Iraq fold over into the Iranian conflict as well. This includes the Iranian-Israel conflict and on and on it goes, step-by-step to include the entire region. The Arab Spring, which is a series of internal conflicts in a number of Middle East countries who are trying to throw off Religious driving caliphate government, is complicating the picture because it interjects democracy into the conflict.
The Obama designed an approach to cope with all the various facets of these conflicts by establishing a comprehensive long-term strategy. Lessons learned in Korea and in Vietnam influenced the focus of the strategy; if a segment of the people in each of the various countries wants democracy, they will have to want to fight it; fight for their own freedom. If not, we will not expend blood and treasure to fight for them. We will help them but they must do the fighting—no boots on the ground. It is a tough love policy. Predictably, as long as Obama is president, we will not become involved in Pakistan any more than in any other country in the region. If he cannot be president forever, then we need someone who will follow his policies. The most important lesson learned he learned in the Iraq disaster; we will not fight a war to gain control of foreign natural resources; the era of economic empire building of America is over. In addition, and much to the chagrin of the American Jewish community and Netanyahu, the Obama policy will encompass the Israel-Palestine conflict; we will no longer support Israeli’s land grabbing desire. This was unsettling to the entire region. It takes a great man to stand up to the unrelenting pressure from the various opposition factions to accomplish all of this. Obama is that man.
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