In short, the White House is distancing itself from the current president of Afghanistan and is deprioritizing aid and reconstruction in favor of increased military engagement:

The officials portrayed the approach as a departure from that of President Bush, who held videoconferences with Mr. Karzai every two weeks and sought to emphasize the American role in rebuilding Afghanistan and its civil institutions.

They said that the Obama administration would work with provincial leaders as an alternative to the central government, and that it would leave economic development and nation-building increasingly to European allies, so that American forces could focus on the fight against insurgents.

…

Shortly before taking office as vice president last week, Mr. Biden traveled to Afghanistan in his role as the departing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He met with Mr. Karzai and warned him that the Obama administration would expect more of him than Mr. Bush did, administration officials said. He told Mr. Karzai that Mr. Obama would be discontinuing the video calls that Mr. Karzai enjoyed with Mr. Bush, said a senior official, who added that Mr. Obama expected Mr. Karzai to do more to crack down on corruption.

…

“If it looks like we’re abandoning the central government and focusing just on the local areas, we will run afoul of Afghan politics,” Mr. Khalilzad [an Afghan-American who is a former United States ambassador to the United Nations and is viewed as a possible challenger to Mr. Karzai] said. “Some will regard it as an effort to break up the Afghan state, which would be regarded as hostile policy.”

This article leaves me asking a few questions. Is it wise to abandon direct consultation with the president of Afghanistan at the same time that we intend to send up to three additional brigades to that country? What are the risks of “outsourcing” reconstruction and aid to our NATO allies at this crucial juncture in Afghanistan’s history? One should note that a clear majority of Europeans are resistant to Obama’s call to send more troops to Afghanistan, according to Reuters:

Most voters in leading European countries believe their governments should resist any request by incoming U.S. President Barack Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan, according to an opinion poll published on Tuesday.

…

The Financial Times said 60 percent of German respondents in the survey opposed Berlin sending more troops to Afghanistan.

In Britain, the second biggest contributor to NATO’s mission in Afghanistan with more than 8,000 troops, 57 percent of those polled rejected sending more forces.

In France and Italy, 53 percent were opposed. Only in Spain was there a majority willing to consider sending extra troops, the Financial Times said.

It seems to me that if we’re going to be involved at all in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) then one of our primary mission should be to build up good relations with the civil societies of both countries — to provide aid, build infrastructure, and listen carefully to the needs of the people who are there. Our primary emphasis should be on reconstruction and genuine economic development, not warfare.

As Obama quite rightly said in his interview with Al-Arabiya: “You will be judged on what you’ve built, not what you’ve destroyed.” What exactly are we building in Afghanistan and Pakistan? How will we be judged?

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?

Barack Obama has signed executive orders (i) closing Guantanamo (within a year), ending the deeply flawed military commission system, and reinstating habeas corpus to so-called enemy combatants; and (ii) ending torture by reinstating the Army Field Manual as the sole unified standard for interrogation of prisoners. This is good, though as Glenn Greenwald argues, one of the most crucial issues now facing the Obama administration regarding our legacy of torture is whether “tainted” evidence — i.e., evidence obtained by means of torture — will be allowed in trials of detainees deemed “too dangerous to release.”

As Greenwald puts it, interpreting Obama’s claim that we need to create “a process that adheres to rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo American legal system, by doing it in a way that doesn’t result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up”:

There are detainees who the U.S. may not be able to convict in a court of law. Why not? Because the evidence that we believe establishes their guilt was obtained by torture, and it is therefore likely inadmissible in our courts (torture-obtained evidence is inadmissible in all courts in the civilized world; one might say it’s a defining attribute of being civilized). But Obama wants to detain them anyway — even though we can’t convict them of anything in our courts of law. So before he can close Guantanamo, he wants a new, special court to be created — presumably by an act of Congress — where evidence obtained by torture (confessions and the like) can be used to justify someone’s detention and where, presumably, other safeguards are abolished. That’s what he means when he refers to “creating a process.”

Amazingly, when discussing the same topic, Obama vowed that “we will send a message to the world that we are serious about our values.” How? By creating a new court just for accused Islamic radicals that allows us to use confessions and other evidence that we obtained through torture? That sounds like exactly the same “message about our values” that we’ve been sending.

One should say, as Greenwald does, that it’s not entirely certain that this is necessarily what Obama means by not releasing “people who are intent on blowing us up,” but rather that Obama hasn’t yet clarified what he intends to do with those who cannot be convicted in a court of law — because their confessions were elicited by means of torture — but whom he nonetheless (without trial) presumes to know definitely absolutely want to blow us up.

II.

In other news, the AP reports on Obama’s first ordered Predator drone strike inside Pakistan:

Suspected U.S. missiles killed 18 people on the Pakistan side of the Afghan border Friday, security officials said, the first attacks on the al-Qaida stronghold since President Barack Obama took office. At least five foreign militants were among those killed in the strikes by unmanned aircraft in two parts of the frontier region, an intelligence official said without naming them. There was no information on the identities of the others.

Pakistan’s leaders had expressed hope Obama might halt the strikes, but few observers expected he would end a tactic that U.S. officials say has killed several top al-Qaida operatives and is denying the terrorist network a long-held safe haven.

The United States has staged more than 30 missile strikes inside Pakistan since August last year — a barrage seen as a sign of frustration in Washington over Islamabad’s efforts to curb militants that the U.S. blames for violence in Afghanistan and fears could be planning attacks on the West.

The Times of London adds:

Security officials said the strikes, which saw up to five missiles slam into houses in separate villages, killed seven “foreigners” — a term that usually means al-Qaeda — but locals also said that three children lost their lives.

I post this story to ask, simply: do we think this is okay, bombing inside the territory of a country with which we are not at war? If so, why? Was George W. Bush justified in initiating this practice? Obama seems to have decided that he was.