By Dr Farrukh Saleem
According to Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist of The New Yorker, the Pentagon is "in a war against the White House--and they feel they have Obama boxed in." Hersh, who broke the US Army's My Lai massacre in Vietnam and also the Abu Ghraib ordeal in Iraq, in a speech at Duke University said: "They (read: Pentagon) think he's (read: Obama) weak and the wrong colour. Yes, there's racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it's true and we all know it." Hersh advises Obama that the only way out for him is to "stand up to the Pentagon. He's either going to let the Pentagon run him or he has to run the Pentagon. If he doesn't, this stuff is going to be the ruin of his presidency. But Obama is going to have to take charge, and there's no evidence he's going to do that."
According to The Wall Street Journal, President Obama has finished reading Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam. Obama now needs to stand up and take charge. Can Obama avoid his Vietnam?
President Barack Hussein Obama desperately needs allies in order to avoid his Vietnam. Pakistan can help Obama where the Pentagon is clearly failing but Obama needs to know who is in charge. Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, the 67th United States secretary of state, was in Pakistan to find out for herself as to who really runs America's "major non-NATO ally" (President Bush's address at MacDill Air Force Base; June 16, 2004). Is it Islamabad or Rawalpindi?
On Oct 17, Operation Rah-e-Nijat's ground offensive was launched. Makeen, the "nerve centre" of the Pakistani Taliban, came under a three-pronged attack--from Razmak in the north, from Jandola in the southeast and from Wana in the southwest. By Oct 30, security forces had begun clearance of Kaniguram, an advance towards Sararogha and were consolidating heights overlooking Makeen. On Oct 31, security forces had cleared Nawazkot. Clinton left the same day and within two days Islamabad's highest hill came under attack by the MQM from the left-of-centre, the PML-N from the right-of-centre and FATA MNAs in the north.
On Nov 6, Syed Saleem Shahzad, the perceptive bureau chief of Asia Times Online, wrote, "the US puts its faith in Pakistan's military." Even more importantly, have Pakistanis also lost faith in their politicians? Have our politicians failed us once again? Well, one failure that stands above all others--including corruption, nepotism, cronyism, patronage and graft--is the failure to govern.
President John F Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, had stumbled into the Bay of Pigs within three months of his entering the White House. The strategists of the Bay of Pigs weren't expecting that a newly elected president would stand up to them. When the Bay of Pigs failed President Kennedy did stand up to the Pentagon. President Obama didn't start Afghanistan but merely inherited it. For Obama to stand up to the Pentagon, he needs allies.
Someone really intelligent is of the opinion that President Obama is now being tested "in a new light"--tested not in Iraq but in Arlington, tested not by the Taliban but by the Pentagon.
P.S. Businesses are shutting down and Pakistanis are being laid off across the country. To top it all, miscreants claiming to be backed by the PPP government are now bent upon hurting MCB, one of Pakistan's leading banks with a customer base of four million and an asset base of Rs300 billion.
The writer is the executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS). Email: farrukh15 @hotmail.com