The Taliban are cutting through Pakistan like a knife through butter; the Pakistani government has responded by ceding parts of the country to the terrorists and ignoring the extensive Talibanization of its intelligence service, military, and bureaucracy.
David Kilcullen, former adviser General David Petraeus, recently said that Pakistan could collapse within six months; and a February report from a task force chaired by no less than former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry said: “We are running out of time to help Pakistan change its present course toward increasing economic and political instability, and even ultimate failure.”
So, what is the Obama administration’s response? Throw US taxpayer money down the rat’s hole. Or in the words of one mainstream Indian journalist regarding US policy: “Terrorism pays!”
Obama has promised the Islamic Republic of Pakistan $1.5 billion a year for the expressed purpose of fighting the Taliban, a move that baffles Indians of all political stripes. They are convinced, with justification as one told me that “Pakistan has been sponsoring terrorism against India for the last 60 years, and it is increasing day by day.” Indians also are convinced that Pakistan has used much of that US aid to fund their activities and especially those directed at India. (All Indian political groups believe that. The only difference is between those who think it good and those who do not.) Indians I interviewed after Obama’s March 27 South Asia policy speech made a big point of the fact that he repeatedly named the Taliban as our enemy but ignored the dozens of Islamist terror groups that are responsible for death and destruction throughout India. The growing impression in India is that Obama—and to some extent the United States—is concerned about preventing an attack on its soil (not a bad thing) and does not care who gets thrown under the bus or killed in the meantime (definitely a bad thing). One Indian general told me privately that the US is ignoring an opportunity to strengthen Indian resolve against Islamist terror, something that nation’s leaders often lack, but which seems to be growing among several segments of the population with no coherent leadership to direct it. He and others are convinced as well that America has no chance of stopping the spread of radical Islam in South Asia without harnessing that power.
Indians might be forgiven their skepticism given the fact that Pakistan is still resisting India’s calls for it to rein in the Lasker e Talibani terrorist group, responsible for the bloody attacks in Mumbai last fall that held the world’s rapt attention while killing 186 and injuring 304. Nor does it take any special intelligence contacts or inside information to predict that whatever assistance the US sends is far more likely than not to end up in the hands of a Taliban-ruled Pakistan anyway. Even those news outlets that are the most reticent to play up the Islamist threat broadcast stories of Pakistan being in “chaos” and losing badly to Taliban forces after each terror attack. In March, the apologists at the BBC featured a stunning segment about the oppression of Muslims—and especially Muslim women—by Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley and elsewhere.
Obama did give a perfunctory nod to India’s “stake” in the fortunes of South Asia’s battle against “terrorists” (although he was quite deliberate in never identifying the nexus of terror groups as “Islamist”); and the adoring media grasped it as if they were Titanic passengers holding tight to a life preserver. Just beneath the veneer of polite comments by the government and analysts lay a festering body of concern and even anger. For Obama’s high praise in fighting the Taliban was reserved for the Pakistanis, even though they have not made any effective move to stop the terrorists. On the other hand, for ten consecutive days before Obama’s speech, Indians battled Kashmiri terrorists, quite effectively at that, killing dozens and capturing an important terrorist leader. Obama’s speech was laced with platitudes about international cooperation in the fight, yet he never mentioned those Indians who laid down their lives in this fight or suggested that their efforts should allow Pakistan to redeploy troops from Kashmir to the frontier areas bordering Afghanistan and take the fight to the Taliban.
These discrepancies between Obama’s words and his actions continue to raise suspicion about him among more and more Indians. Even those previously caught up in “Obama mania” agree. I interviewed several of them in Delhi’s bustling Connaught Place in March. As one young computer technician told me, he might have found Obama “inspiring” prior to the election, but “we will have to see how they are translated into action, and that is how he will be judged.” Right now, the judgment is "not good.”
Underlying these deadly foreign policy blunders is the same philosophy that underlies Obama’s domestic blunders. Pakistan’s difficulty is the product of bad and self-seeking decisions. For years, radical Islam has been making serious inroads throughout Pakistani society, but its leaders deliberately chose to ignore it. They did so partly out of fear—fear that radicals might assassinate them; fear that they might alienate a bloc of voters; fear that the radicals would successfully use their opposition to paint them as Zionists or pro-American. And they did so out of greed—greed for the graft that would continue flowing from the minions that were taking direction from the radicals; graft from the billions in petrodollars that were funding radical activities. They did so out of wishful thinking that the radicals would either fade away or join the ranks of other civil servants, more concerned with personal enrichment than any philosophy or social goal. And they did so in some cases because they agreed with the radicals’ short term goals. Now Obama is paying them for a promise (to undo the damage their bad decisions have wrought.
The same philosophy drives Obama’s domestic policy. Just like Pakistan, America had an ideological component to its crisis. The collapse of the housing market that triggered it would not have been possible were it not for ultra-liberal measures such as the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Whereas previously, strict criteria determined a bank’s ability to grant a loan no matter who the applicant was; the CRA forced banks to loan money to people who did not qualify for them with draconian consequences for any bank that dared stay with traditional mortgage criteria even if the applicant was a minority. There was also a greed component in the cushy roles and extensive contributions by lenders to Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) to ignore warnings about the system and use their positions to rubber stamp rather than oversee. But most importantly, our problems stem from bad decisions: bad decisions by the auto makers which turned once gold standard businesses into train wrecks; bad decisions by lenders to continue making bad loans; and bad decisions by home buyers to borrow more than they could repay and pretend that their incomes supported the lifestyles they demanded. And how has Obama “taught them a lesson”? By paying them for it.
Rewarding bad behavior—whether in Pakistan or the United States—will do only one thing and that is encourage more bad behavior. Obama did not tell the Pakistanis, “You knew Islamists were taking over your society but chose not to oppose them. Now, in order to get the aid we can offer and become a true ally, you have to change.” Nor did he tell those Americans who made bad business, lending, or borrowing decisions, “The one thing we will not do is enable your bad behavior with the money of Americans who made good decisions.” Instead, he has committed the United States to a policy that seeks to make the untenable viable; that promises not to force people to take responsibility for their bad decisions; that insures bad behavior will continue with regular rewards compliments of US taxpayers.
