Juan Cole has written an article worth reading over at Salon.com, about the possible negative effects of Obama’s decision to bomb inside the territory of Pakistan. The most important bit:
The Pakistani government is now ruled by the largely secular, left-of-center Pakistan People’s Party, and President Asaf Ali Zardari blames the Taliban for the assassination of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, late in 2007. Any dispute between Islamabad and the Obama administration centers on issues of national sovereignty, not on the question of whether the Taliban should be crushed. Pakistan’s own military is also fighting the Pakistan Taliban Movement and its tribal supporters. Early last week, Islamabad’s Frontier Corps pounded several villages of the Mohmand Agency, killing 60 militants. In the course of the past five months, Pakistani military operations against the Pakistani Taliban in the neighboring Bajaur Agency have left hundreds dead and hundreds of thousands homeless and displaced.
The risk Obama takes in continuing the Bush administration policy of bombing Pakistani territory is provoking further anger in the public of that country against the United States and harming the legitimacy of Zardari’s fragile elected government. A Gallup poll done last summer found that 45 percent of Pakistanis believe that the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan poses a threat to their country. Of Pakistanis who expressed an opinion on the matter, an overwhelming majority believed that the cooperation between the U.S. and the Pakistani military in the “war on terror” has mainly benefited Washington. If a more muscular American policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan sufficiently angers the Pakistani public, they could start voting for religious parties, delivering a nuclear state into the hands of Muslim fundamentalists.
The fundamentalist Jamaat-i Islami (JI), led by Qazi Husain Ahmad, held a rally of several thousand protesters in the Pakistani capital on Friday to protest the drone attacks and the ongoing military campaigns in FATA. (I saw the demonstration on satellite television, and it was clearly bigger than the wire services reported.) The coalition of religious parties of which the JI formed part was dealt a crushing rejection by the Pakistani electorate last February, but for the U.S. to continually bombard Pakistani territory could be a wedge issue whereby they return to political influence. Whereas the Jamaat-i Islami had welcomed Obama’s new path in the Muslim world before the strikes, the JI leader blasted the new president in their aftermath.
Read the whole article.
Cole reinforces my previously mentioned sense that continued Predator drone (or any other sort of U.S.) attacks on Pakistan will enhance the likelihood that the country will further radicalize, and collectively turn against us. If a change-promising liberal Democrat in effect continues the policy of the extremist far-right Bush — asserting the right to violate Pakistan’s territorial integrity at will, raining Hellfire missiles on houses, killing women and children — why would any rational Pakistani have any reasonable hope for improved relations with the U.S.? For an end to war and conflict in the region?
I would be very disturbed if control of the government of Pakistan moved from a center-left secular party strongly dedicated to stopping the Taliban to a right-wing political Islamic party with ties to (or sympathy for) the Taliban. In my view, every Hellfire missile — and every dead civilian — we deliver is a huge propaganda gift for the latter radical forces, and a blow to those forces within the country who should most naturally be our strongest allies.
And when we discuss Pakistan we must always remember the stakes: Pakistan is a nuclear power. If we regard a bunch of religious radicals with box cutters to be serious terrorist threats — as we rightly should — what then of a radicalized nuclear power?