Obama expands war into Pakistan

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Obama expands war into Pakistan
9 December 2009

One week ago, President Obama in a speech at West Point sought to
portray his escalation of the war in Afghanistan as the prelude to an
early withdrawal of US troops. It has since become increasingly
apparent that the speech was nothing more than a calculated exercise
in public deception.

The speech was crafted to chloroform the public, the better to defy
and disorient mass popular opposition to the war.

It is now clear that the actual policy Obama has decided to pursue is
not only the maintenance of an indefinite military occupation of
Afghanistan, but a vast expansion of the war into Pakistan.

Within hours of the speech, administration officials were “clarifying”
Obama’s talk of beginning the withdrawal of US forces by July 2011 to
make clear that there is no such deadline and that US troops will
remain in Afghanistan long after that date. Now it has emerged that a
central component of Obama’s war plan is an expansion of US drone
missile strikes in Pakistan and the deployment of US Special
Operations forces on Pakistani territory to carry out attacks on
insurgents in that country.

Obama said nothing in his speech about expanding the war into
Pakistan. As the New York Times reported Tuesday, quoting an unnamed
senior aid to the president, “We concluded early on that whatever you
do with Pakistan, you don’t want to talk about it much.”

The Times, which has for months been campaigning for an escalation of
the war and its expansion into Pakistan, reported the day after
Obama’s speech that the White House last month signed off on an
expansion of CIA operations in Pakistan.

On Tuesday, the newspaper reported that prior to Obama’s speech, his
national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, met with the heads of
Pakistan’s military and intelligence service and told them that unless
Pakistan moved quickly to expand its military offensive against
insurgents to Baluchistan and North Waziristan, “the United States was
prepared to take unilateral action to expand Predator drone strikes
beyond the tribal areas and, if needed, to resume raids by Special
Operations forces into the country against Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.”

In an editorial on Tuesday bristling with imperialist arrogance, the
Times demanded that the Pakistanis “stop temporizing and get fully
into the fight.” On the expansion of US missile strikes in Pakistan,
including their extension into Baluchistan, the newspaper wrote: “Such
strikes have killed several top extremists, but the program is hugely
unpopular in Pakistan and Mr. Obama must be judicious about expanding
it. That means three things: extremely careful targeting, no civilian
casualties, or as few as possible [i.e., as many as needed], and no
publicity.”

In other words, the American people are to be kept in the dark about
targeted assassinations, civilian casualties from missile strikes, and
other covert military operations in Pakistan. And the Times will do
its part to suppress any information about such actions.

The editorial went on to declare that Obama had to persuade the
Pakistanis that “the United States is in it for the long haul this time.”

What this points to is an unprecedented program of US military
aggression and subversion and the transformation of both Afghanistan
and Pakistan into US protectorates. This is the meaning of the recent
statement by National Security Adviser Jones that “We are not leaving
the region. We have enormous strategic interests in Afghanistan, east
of Afghanistan in Pakistan…”

Since Obama’s lying speech, a program of US colonial domination of
Central and South Asia has been unfurled, and the US media has swung
into action to bolster the effort with a new round of pro-war
propaganda, including the dispatch of TV news anchors to American
bases in Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan is only part of the global strategy of American
imperialism to assert its domination of a region rich in oil and gas
and of critical geo-strategic importance for supremacy over the
Eurasian continent. The implications of this drive are catastrophic
for the peoples of the region, who will pay the price in countless
deaths, social devastation and neo-colonial oppression. But they are
also disastrous for the people of the United States, whose sons and
daughters will be sacrificed and whose living standards will be
further slashed to pay for never-ending military adventures.

There is an element of immense recklessness in Washington’s aggressive
policy toward Pakistan. It is driving the country into civil war,
which would rapidly destabilize the entire region and heighten the
danger of war between India and Pakistan and between India and China,
all three of which are nuclear powers. Russia and Iran would
inevitably be drawn into the maelstrom as well.

Obama’s election was promoted by sections of the American ruling elite
who believed he could serve as the figurehead for a certain
recalibration of US foreign policy after the disasters of the Bush
years. It is now clear that Obama is the front man for the military
and the most ruthless representatives of the ruling class.

It is necessary for workers and youth to draw the requisite
conclusions. The fight against the war is a fight against the Obama
administration. It is a fight against the Democratic Party and the
two-party system. And it is a fight against American imperialism and
the capitalist system upon which it is based.

Barry Grey

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/pers-d09.shtml

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