It is India’s obsession with Pakistan that is forcing it to increase its strategic presence in Afghanistan.  India knows that, given the geographic propinquity to Afghanistan, Pakistan will always enjoy an unsurpassable strategic advantage over India.  Still, India has a number of additional advantages.  First, it is a rising economic power and can entice Afghanistan by offering huge amounts for economic development.  As a country whose economy is teetering at the edge of a calamitous precipice, Pakistan has little to offer Afghanistan in terms of developmental assistance.  Second, as a strategic partner of the United States, India is given pretty much a green light by the administration of President Barack Obama to escalate its strategic presence in its immediate
neighborhood.  As recently as only a few days ago, President Obama – who knows as much about the tortured history of South Asia as he does about the convoluted history of Afghanistan – gave Pakistan a public lecture that it should not view India as its “mortal enemy.”  Needless to say, India also believes along the same line.  However, what is more noteworthy is that Pakistan does not.  Thus, it makes a lot of sense for India to persuade Pakistan of that through its foreign policy behavior – its non-threatening posture – rather than a near-obsessive pursuit of enhancing its strategic presence in Afghanistan.

A complete picture of the reality of South Asia is that both Pakistan and India have been behaving obsessively when it comes to Afghanistan.  The darkest days of India’s foreign policy were when Pakistan succeeded in enabling the capture of power by the Taliban in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.  After that, India, along with Russia and Iran, did its best – albeit quite unsuccessfully –
to provide military and economic assistance to the Northern Alliance of Ahmad Shah Masood in his uphill but enormously courageous military campaign to dislodge the Taliban from power.  The United States succeeded in obtaining that goal where the collective endeavors of India, Russia and Iran failed.  The Taliban regime was dismantled in November 2001 as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

Pakistan brought the Taliban to power in Afghanistan substantially in its quest for “strategic depth,” which was supposed to provide it some advantage over India in future military conflicts.  India, for its part, had every reason to be fearful of the growing power of Islamist extremism in relation to the Taliban rule of Afghanistan, which provided an enhanced strategic advantage of Pakistan.  That advantage was expressed through numerous incidents of terrorism in the Indian-administered Kashmir.

As the Islamist groups inside Pakistan turned against their own government in the first decade of the current century, and as the U.S.-Pakistan ties remain under enormous stress, the shoe is on the other foot.  India is exploiting the situation to enhance its strategic presence in Afghanistan.  The recent strategic partnership between New Delhi and Kabul, which might turn out to be not worth the paper it is written on – is a persuasive example of that reality.  There is little doubt that it is aimed at undermining the strategic advantage of Pakistan, the strong denials of India and Afghanistan to the contrary.  In that sense, those ties remain the legitimate target of Pakistan’s own future endeavors to undermine them.

One wonders how much of this egregious reality of South Asian power politics President Obama knows, understands, and internalizes, when he stood atop his soap box and started lecturing Pakistan that India is not its mortal enemy.  If the United States were not embroiled in finding a political solution to the war of Afghanistan – a war that it seems to be losing at present –  it may have played a role in bringing the two South Asian arch-rivals together.  However, upon reflection, India is not at all perturbed that the United States is too busy with the war to be playing such a role.  In fact, India is of the view that its best interest will be served while the United States plays no such role, for it is afraid of losing its strategic advantage in its negotiations with Pakistan; negotiations that are not really aimed at resolving anything.

Pakistan, for its part, knows that it does not have much of a strategic advantage over economically powerful and politically resourceful India.  So Pakistan seems to be operating on a slightly different version of the old adage: “The strong do whatever they will, and the weak suffer what they must.”  Pakistan’s version of that adage involving India seems to be “weak will do unto the strong whenever they can.”  Afghanistan serves (and will continue to serve) as an ideal place for Pakistan, regardless of whether the United States stays or leaves that country.  Since it considers that country as a legitimate part of its sphere of  influence, Pakistan regards the “encroachment” of India in that country as a serious “offense,” which deserves an appropriate response.  Thus, and sadly so, the unending Indo-Pak rivalry in Afghanistan promises to be both brutal and bloody.

Whatever popularity the Islamists gained in the Arab and Muslim world – and there is no suggestion here that a majority of the people supported them – it had a lot to do with the gross inequality of the Arab (and Muslim) polities, inept governance, chronic corruption, and a widespread cronyism that dictatorships intentionally or unwittingly promoted.  The worse aspect of that rotten state of affairs was that people became convinced that they were doomed to live a life of misery, poverty, backwardness, and slavery.  Islamism emerged as just one response in the 1990s, especially if one looks at how communism, secularism, and pan-Arabism surfaced as templates for solving their distraught state of affairs from the 1950s through the 1980s. 

 Islamism was envisaged as a new ray of hope for change.  But it, too, was highjacked by the likes of the Islamic Brotherhood and the Islamic Jihad of Egypt, which fought bloody battles with the regimes of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat.  If the Egyptian dictators failed miserably to effectively govern Egypt, the Islamists of Egypt themselves also failed to offer alternative programs of governance, except for offering a bumper sticker slogan: “Islam is the solution.”

In a country like Algeria, it was the government’s intransigence about giving the Islamists a chance to win the popular election and govern that led to a prolonged period of bloodshed.  In the process, the moderate posture of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) became disfigured into the bloodletting posture of the GIA (Groupe Islamique Arme or Armed Islamic Groups).  Then the Algerian dictators and the GIA started a bloody campaign of “eradication” of the “enemy.”  In this instance, the enemy was the other party to the fight.

 Al-Qaida emerged in the 1980s, first as a Saudi organization, and then it acquired regional and even global reach as a “new Islamist entity.”  In that capacity, it thought that it was better equipped than its Egyptian predecessor (the Muslim Brotherhood) to solve the Arab and/or Muslim despair.  However, it quickly proved not to be different.  The chief problem with all Islamist groups is that even some of their educated leaders never understood that survival in the modern world means internalizing the rules of the globalized world and being able to offer solutions to the incessantly complicated problems of the Ummah (Islamic nation).  Instead, they insist on maintaining Islam “pure and simple,” and depicting all prospects of figuring out Islam’s role in the world of the 21^st Century as heresy.  They loathe democracy, which they keenly (and misguidedly) label as “anti-Islamic,” but fail to offer an alternative model of governance.

 On second thought, the Islamists do offer a model of governance.  They want to establish an Islamic Caliphate, which was highly inchoate.  No one really thought about the modalities of that concept.  How could an Islamic Caliphate rule billions of people who are spread over several continents, or even a few Arab states?  To be blunt about it, no one in the world of Islam gave much thought to the practicality of the Caliphate, until it was talked about by the administration of President George W. Bush as a “threat” to America’s interests.  Al-Qaida found its best propagandist in Bush for that notion.  Still, in the world of Islam, no one attaches any significance to that concept as a feasible model.

But Arab despair for good governance and for freedom from tyrannical rule continued as a powerful undercurrent, which not even the supposedly smartest American intelligence community anticipated or predicted.  The Arab masses envisioned democratic governance with high hope and interest.  They also knew how important democratic rule and good governance were for the West.  They also understood that the West was deliberately applying double standards in that regard by supporting the Arab autocrats.  The frame of reference for all Western leaders regarded democracy as a system of government suitable for the Western people and not for Arabs.  They will deny that charge vehemently; however, their actions spoke louder than their denials to the contrary.

Al-Qaida did receive a sympathetic hearing for its criticism of the Arab tyrants, but it soon lost that sympathy – or most of it anyway – when it started its Takfiri brutality to determine who is a “true” Muslim and who is not, and, consequently, who will live and who will die.  One of the major reasons for the success of the so-called “Surge” strategy in Iraq was that the Sunni Sheiks of al-Anbar and other Sunni-dominated provinces approached the American occupation forces to help them fight against the murderous tactics of al-Qaida.  Similarly, whatever little popular support the International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) are currently receiving from the Afghans is a direct consequence of similar brutalities that the Taliban is reported to be inflicting on them as punishment for being “anti-Islamic.”

 The most gruesome aspect of the inertia created by the tyrannical ways of the Arab autocrats and the murderous ways of al-Qaida and other Islamist groups was broken by the Arab awakening that started in Tunisia.  The best part of it is that it holds several magnificent promises.  First, it aims to topple the autocrats, some very soon, while others will hang on a little longer before they, too, are ousted.  Second, it promises to bring to power a new corps of Arab elites, which will be highly educated, open minded, and sophisticated about the intricate workings of the globalized world.  Once in office, the new Arab leaders will be adept at developing the modus operandi of making their countries effective members of it.  Third, the Arab awakening promises to end once and for all the seemingly innate relationship of subservience vis-à-vis the West.  It will also bring an end to U.S. hegemony in their region, which has become comfortable with the sustenance of a system that promotes the permanent occupation of Palestine and enables Israel to remain deft about finding ways of not negotiating the emergence of a free Palestine.  Finally, and most importantly, if the preceding ostensible objectives related to the Arab awakening are fulfilled, then the Islamists will also enter the dustbin of history, just like the current Arab tyrants.  While history in the Arab world is marching toward an era of great promise, we can be rest assured that al-Qaida is also busy developing its own countermeasures of becoming relevant once again.

The cause of Governor Taseer’s murder was the blasphemy laws of Pakistan that are being invoked to raise the level of tensions by accusing non-Muslims of insulting the religion or the Prophet of Islam, and then not even having an unbiased inquiry into the accusation.  He was a critic of it and was a strong voice about repealing them.  According to reports, there is a widespread support for such laws inside Pakistan.  As an example of the popularity of the blasphemy laws in Pakistan, consider this.  More than 500 scholars of the Jamaat Ihle-Sunnat, a relatively moderate Islamist group, “have advised Muslims not to offer the funeral prayers of Governor Punjab Salman Taseer nor try to lead the prayers.”  They also advised people against “expression of grief or sympathy on the death of the governor, as those who support blasphemy of the Prophet are themselves indulging in blasphemy.” The environment of fear is intensifying, and religious fanatics are having a field day in defaming a religion one of whose chief tenets is tolerance.

The murder of a high ranking official by his supposedly elite guard also points to the fact that Pakistan’s security forces are being regularly contaminated by the inflamed rhetoric of those who propagate apocryphal stories of “defamation” of Islam and stories about how Islam is under constant “threat.”  The only and mounting reality is that the chief threat to Islam is coming from those who are spreading such stories nonsensical stories, who are accusing minorities of defaming Islam, and who are murdering those who are asking them to tone down their insane rhetoric.

What most people (especially those who are at the helm of the government in Washington) fail to understand is that the civilian government of Pakistan is too weak to stand up to the rising tide of extremism.  Fanatics anywhere do not have to have large number of supporters.  Even their small gatherings are so voluble and so dedicated to their cause at a given time and at a given place that they tend to create simultaneous a movement and an environment of terror.  That movement, if not countered by the law enforcement forces, tends to gather momentum and expands.  It seems that most—if not every—official in Pakistan is getting scared in that environment of terror, getting scared of being accused of as an “agent of America” if he/she criticizes the irrational ululations of the forces of extremism.  The country is full of stories of conspiracies: about America, about India, and about the “secret” plans of taking away Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, and, above all, about conspiracies regarding Islam.

What is happening to Pakistan, whose religious enlightenment—not of the imaginary type promoted by General Pervez Musharraf, but a genuine one was a living force at one time? 

The origin of the malignancy of extremism go back to Zulfiqar Ali—father of Benazir Bhutto—who started appeasing Islamic parties in the early 1970ss to prove his own commitment to Islam.  However, Bhutto was too much of a secularist and too hard a whisky drinker to fool anyone.  Then came Zia ul-Haq, the Islamist General, who unabashedly used Islam to stay in power.  In Zia’s regime those contentious blasphemy laws were originally promulgated.

The post-9/11 environment created a profound siege mentality inside Pakistan.  George W. Bush’s warnings to Pakistan—that either you are with us or you are with the terrorists—offended the dignity of Pakistan.  The global perspective that Islam was under attack by the world’s lone superpower put everyone on the offensive in Pakistan.  Islamists and other religious extremists thrived under such a charged environment.  No Pakistani official dared to challenge them fearing the dreaded charge of being an agent of America.  While Usama Bin Laden and his ilk was envisioned as the enemy of the civilized world in the West.  Inside Pakistan, Ben Laden’s infamous phrase of about the “crusade by the Christians and Zionists against Islam” was emerged as the new enemy.  And that perception, over time, transformed itself into a siege mentality.

General Musharraf played a crucial role in that transformation, once again, to extend the term of his rule.  He made George Bush believe that he was the last and real promise against the takeover by the Islamist extremists, while at the same time coalescing, conniving with, and appeasing the Islamists inside Pakistan to stay in power. 

Considering how “superb” America’s intelligence agencies are in their “just in time” analyses and producing “agile intelligence,” Musharraf fooled Bush for a long time.  In the meantime, religious extremists continued to grow.  The world only knows about the infamous Deobandi Madrasas (religious schools) of Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier that are spreading the ideology of militancy.  However, the entire country is being contaminated by the Deobandi-Wahhabi rhetoric of religious fanaticism, obscurantism, and atavism. 

Under such an environment, the most crucial question is how untainted the security forces of Pakistan are these days?  Even General Ashfaq Kayani cannot answer that question with certainty.  Just look at the ISI and its own so-called “rogue elements” that are reported to be sympathizing with the Taliban of Afghanistan.  Who can stay with any amount of confidence how much infiltration has been made in the Pakistani Army by the Taliban of Afghanistan?  These are the questions that the Pakistani military’s high command must find answers to earnestly and most urgently.  They do not need to be on the defensive in answering these questions to the Americans.  After all, those questions are about the long-term stability of Pakistan.  The recipe of Pakistan continued existence as a nation-state rests in promoting Islamic moderation, which is the real face of Islam.

An important question that comes to mind is whether Obama would have fired General McChrystal for the same interview if the war in Afghanistan was going well for the United States. Under such circumstances, replacing a winning general would have been well nigh impossible. Then, Obama could not have said, as he did after relieving McChrystal of his command, that war is bigger than any one man. He would have still chastised the general for imprudent remarks, but would have moved on by saying that “the war in Afghanistan is too important for me to be swayed by some minor irritants like this interview.” While McChrystal was presiding over a failing war, he was a readily dispensable commodity for a highly ambitious American president, whose vision is fixed on winning a second term. And even some semblance of success in Afghanistan toward the end of 2011 becomes an important factor in Obama’s reelection.

In the meantime, President Barack Obama is developing an uncanny profound commitment to a strategy in Afghanistan that does not seem to be working. There are several problems with that strategy.

The foremost one is that it is promoting Hamid Karzai’s administration, which seriously lacks legitimacy. The doctrine on Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24, outlines a number of indicators of legitimacy for a government that U.S. troops are trying to defend in a country. At least three of those indicators are worth-mentioning: the ability to provide security for the populace, selection of leaders in a manner deemed just and fair by a majority of the populace, and a high level of regime acceptance by social institutions. Needless to say, the Karzai government is decidedly ‘flunking’ on all of these three variables.

The United States can do very little to legitimize the government of Hamid Karzai. In fact, it is stuck with him. That very fact, and the regular news items about the high degree of corruption and the constant parceling out of billions of dollars from Afghanistan to foreign banks and other safe havens are providing convincing evidence that the “rats know the ship is sinking, and they have started the process of abandoning it.”

We also hear reports that President Karzai, after becoming convinced that the United States would not stay in Afghanistan for long, has already started negotiating some sort of a deal with Pakistan that would provide stability to his country in the post-American era. As much as Pakistan is maligned by Washington and other Western countries, it might be the only source on which Karzai can count for alleviating the rising power and influence of the Taliban. The United States and other Western troops have an option of leaving Afghanistan; however, Pakistan is “doomed” to stay next door to Afghanistan forever for geographical reasons!

The second significant problem with America’s strategy in Afghanistan is that, thus far, American commanders have not found a way to win the war. The campaign in Marja turned out to be a “bleeding ulcer,” as it was candidly depicted by the departing Commanding General McChrystal. The Taliban side has been watching closely, and with much glee, the mounting confusion among American commanders about implementing new tactics. As General David Petraeus takes charge of the military campaign, the most significant thing to watch is how different his tactics are going to be about the use of force, destroying the property where the insurgents are allegedly hiding, and the use of air power. These issues – referred to in military jargon as “courageous restraint” – were reportedly causing a lot of grumbling and resentment among the foot soldiers and Marines that their hands were being tied in the name of winning the hearts and minds.

General Petraeus promised, during his confirmation hearing to replace McChrystal, that he would take a closer look at the issue of courageous restraint. At least the Republican Senators will be watching closely to see whether he really means to bring about any change. McChrystal’s critics do not care to remember that, in implementing courageous restraint, he was only following what Petraeus’ COIN doctrine had advocated. However, Petraeus is also characterized as a “political general.” But does the war in Afghanistan need a political general or a general who is willing to stay loyal to tactics purely on the basis of his military judgment? The answer to this question is obvious.

If the chief reason for the alleged success of the Surge Strategy in Iraq was its capacity to exploit the resentment of al-Qaida among the Sunnis of that country, there is no evidence that something akin to that tactic has yet been found in Afghanistan. Ethnic resentment between the Pushtoons and the Tajiks might be just one reason for the acute unpopularity of the Karzai government. Even though he is a Pushtoon, he has surrounded himself with the Tajiks.

The third problem related to the current U.S. strategy in Afghanistan involves Ambassador Carl Eikenberry and Special Envoy “Bulldozer” Richard Holbrooke. Both of these individuals publicly clashed with Karzai and McChrystal. By getting rid of McChrystal while leaving these individuals in their places, President Obama is demonstrating that he is really limited in his choice of competent personnel. The reports are that both Eikenberry and Holbrooke are on notice to get along with Petraeus. But that artificial restraint might still turn out to be problematic in the sense that it is likely to stifle honest disagreements that should still be debated in order to avoid the pathology of “group think.” These officials can still disagree without becoming disagreeable and without attempting to score points by conveniently leaking their disagreements to the press.

What President Obama ought to do is to look for another strategy right now as a fallback option. He ought to look into why Karzai and the Pakistani government are so eager to cut a deal. Perhaps the United States ought to consider becoming a party to it. Another option ought to bring Iran into the negotiating process on Afghanistan as part of the “regional influentials.” It would be a mistake to conclude that Iran would destabilize Afghanistan in the post-American era. After all, an unstable Afghanistan would be very detrimental to Iran’s interests. The same thing applies to Pakistan. A third option is to put pressure on both India and Pakistan to look for a rapprochement on Afghanistan that involves broader issues of negotiations between those two acute rivals. Fourth, for the development of his next strategy, President Obama ought to stop looking at the Brookings Institution or other think tanks in Washington to hand him over a nicely packaged – but highly flawed – strategy. He might be well advised to let the South Asian nations and Iran play a distinct role in hammering out ways to stabilize Afghanistan. The United States can still play an important role in such a process. With the passage of each week, the current strategy is looking more like a failed one. It badly needs to be replaced by a new one, if the United States wishes to find a winning way of exiting the Afghan quagmire.

Every new president’s approach to major unresolved issues is entirely different from those of his immediate predecessor, simply because the predecessor’s approach is regarded as inept or even wrong-headed. So, the successor proceeds to ‘reinvent the wheel’ on those issues by approaching it entirely differently. Since Barack Obama entered office criticizing Bush’s involvement in and his handling of the Iraq war, his own war – the one in Afghanistan – was going to have his ‘superior’ mark on it.

Bush invaded Iraq on the pretext of freeing the regime of Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction, which did not even exist. There were no plans to create a viable post-conflict government in Iraq, a reality that is largely responsible for immersing that country in a near-civil war situation.

Obama was to develop his rationale of enhancing his country’s involvement in Afghanistan by developing a strategy and even by establishing an “exit date.” He read in Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster of the Vietnamese imbroglio, in order to create a blueprint of how to avoid future disasters in Afghanistan; he put together an AfPak strategy before inserting more troops into Afghanistan; and held numerous brainstorming sessions with his own team of the “best and the brightest” to avoid potential political landmines and blinders related to conflict in that country. He insisted on holding clean elections in Afghanistan, and maintained a highly palpable ambivalence toward the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, whose reelection was allegedly based on a lot of fraudulent practices, including stuffing of ballot boxes. The frequent teleconferencing between the White House and Karzai’s presidential palace during the Bush administration instantly disappeared when Obama entered the White House. Karzai was left with no doubt that the new administration was symbolically holding its nose while dealing with him. News dispatches on the corrupt practices of the Karzai government became regular items.

The U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, dispatched two cables to the White House in November 2009, which were promptly leaked to the press, about Karzai not being an adequate strategic partner. In those cables, Eikenberry also opposed further increases in American troops in Afghanistan. There were reports that Richard Holbrook, Obama’s Special Envoy to South Asia, did not get along with Karzai. Another U.S. official, Peter Galbraith, even went to extent of stating that Karzai is unbalanced and an opium addict.

The general public’s manifestations of an overall condescending and disdainful attitude toward Hamid Karzai by prominent U.S. officials created an intense response from the Afghan president. He turned the tables on the Obama administration by accusing the “West” – which was his euphemism for the Obama administration – for conducting a fraudulent election. He insisted on being treated as an elected head of a sovereign state. Karzai did not take kindly to reports that U.S. forces were threatening to put his half-brother, Wali Karzai, on the military’s “Joint Prioritized Engagement List,” a euphemism for “kill or capture” list. Wali Karzai has been regularly mentioned as one of the chief symptoms of the problems of corruption and nepotism afflicted on his brother’s administration. The most publicized anger incident of Hamid Karzai toward the United States was when he threatened to join the Taliban, a statement that stunned the Obama administration.

Another prominent U.S. official in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has an entirely different approach toward Karzai. McChrystal, Commander of the NATO forces, not only treated the Afghan president with abundant respect, but worked with him closely, an attitude that caused ample friction between him and Eikenberry. McChrystal is totally immersed in implementing the American military’s COIN doctrine. That doctrine gives primacy to politics – hence on cooperating with the top political representative of that country, Hamid Karzai – and to winning the hearts and minds of the populace, not merely through the use of rhetorical hyperbolas, but through implementing nation-building. In this approach, gaining the support of the local civilian authorities and the Afghan populace is so intricate and pursued so single-mindedly that its practitioners (McChrystal and his staff) strongly disagreed with those who frequently insisted on inserting priorities decided in Washington (Ambassador Eikenberry, Holbrook, and their staffs).

In this constant tug-and-pull between McChrystal’s ‘nativist’ and Eikenberry’s Washington-centric approaches, President Obama – without publicly saying so – has thus far sided with Eikenberry. This type of bickering and Washington’s messy way of managing its occupation of Afghanistan – which also happened in the case of Vietnam and Iraq – was music to the ears of the Taliban and al-Qaida. That reality also perfectly suited their argument that Karzai is merely a puppet, and that Afghanistan is an occupied country, which needs to be liberated.

However, before these disagreements between Karzai and U.S. officials became irresolvable, a brazen sense of realism seems to be dawning in Washington recently. President Obama is reported to have instructed that Karzai should be treated with “more respect” by his national security team, and that he should be regarded as a “partner,” which means as a legitimate chief executive of Afghanistan.

Obama knows that his administration would sink or swim with Karzai in the driver’s seat in Afghanistan. Consequently, his treatment of Karzai during his upcoming Washington trip will be warmer and more respectful, which is a marked departure from the American president’s publicized surprise trip to Afghanistan in May 2010 during which he is reportedly lectured Karzai to clean up his government. Needless to say, no other action of the U.S. government underscored the potency of the Taliban propaganda regarding the puppet nature of the Karzai government more than the international media’s report on Obama’s trip.

The United States almost lost in Iraq by not remembering an important lesson of the Vietnam quagmire, which states that foreign wars are not won by substantially relying on military power. Rather, they are won through a healthy comprehension of the intricate role of politics, and then incorporating political variables into developing a winning comprehensive strategy.

Even though America has not yet fully secured Iraq, the concept of giving primacy to politics in that country – of which the COIN-related Surge strategy was a good example – has emerged as an approach that should be rigorously emulated in Afghanistan. When or if victory comes to the American forces in Afghanistan, McChrystal’s notion of working closely with Karzai (while privately emphasizing good governance and working unstintingly to develop policies to enhance it) is likely to play a crucial role. In the final analysis, it is only through establishing the legitimacy of his government, and by adopting a slew of policies aimed at enhancement of good governance that Hamid Karzai will win against the Taliban-al-Qaida nexus in Afghanistan.

American Muslims – a great number of them – do not seem to have gone through the kind of socialization process that other Americans have about developing a strong sense of belonging to this country. I am not questioning their patriotism; and I am certainly not stating that there is any sympathy among them toward any terror groups. What I am saying is that Muslims anywhere in the world grow up with an overarching love for, and commitment to, Islam, which overrides all other sentiment. That issue does not cause any problem with their loyalty to a nation, or steadfastness to a secular idea, as long as there is no tension – or worse yet – contradiction between their commitment to a nation or to a secular idea and their religion. That has never been the case until al-Qaida and other Islamist groups started to emphasize in the post/911 era that Islam is under attack. The United States’ invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq made that argument for some American Muslims, if not necessarily credible, at least not as contentious as it is generally thought in the West.

However, no equally powerful voices emerged in the world of Islam to counter the claims of the Islamists. The Sunni Muslim regimes – who always suffered from a lack of domestic legitimacy for their rule, and who persistently exploited Islam to seek that legitimacy by co-opting Sunni Islamic scholars to endorse their autocratic and illegitimate rule – were not going to stick their necks out by countering al-Qaida’s Islam-related argument. That is not to say that they agree with that terrorist entity.
For Sunni Muslim regimes, to defend the United States – which remains the chief occupying force of two Muslim countries, and which is waging a “global war on terrorism” – has become a highly risky proposition in the world of Islam.

Besides, the Bush administration, as part of its confused strategy of intimidation in the Middle East between 2003 and 2006, waged a public campaign of vilifying major Sunni Arab governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt for not being democratic, as if Washington had discovered that fact only after it was attacked on September 11, 2001 by the 19 young Arab hijackers of three U.S. airplanes. The lone superpower was being swept away by its then newly-found logic that terrorism in the non-democratic states of the Middle East was growing, and that the autocratic regimes were tacitly encouraging the terrorists to terrorize the outside world so that they would not focus their energy on destabilizing or overthrowing those governments.

Another major Muslim country, Pakistan, once again became a “frontline” state in another of America’s major wars within a span of a little over ten years. As a frontline state, Pakistan was gradually being pushed toward an era when its own Islamist forces would become a major threat. Thus, the major focus of Pakistan’s dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, was to make sure that his country remained a faithful player in America’s war against terrorism, which was increasingly viewed inside both Afghanistan and Pakistan as a war against Islam.

So, different Muslim regimes were involved in their own struggle to survive and were not interested in becoming chief defenders of the United States against the rhetorical barrages of al-Qaida and other Islamist groups which stated that the lone superpower was waging a war against Islam. Even if one or more Muslim regimes were to make an audacious stand to defend America’s global war, they would not have made a convincing case in the eyes of the Muslim masses. It is the nature of Sunni Islam that allows no monolithic authority—a la the Catholic Pope or even an Ayatollah of Shia Islam—to become the chief interpreter of Islamic theology. Those who criticize Muslim leaders for not authoritatively condemning terrorism and becoming a convincing “voice” of Islam are either uninformed of this reality, or choose to ignore it.

In the meantime, two aspects of the United States’ handling of terrorism are emerging as its chief sources of resentment among Muslims. First, the continued U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq is adding further fuel to the Islamist argument that the lone superpower is determined to establish its firm grip on Muslim countries and to make sure that they remain subservient to its policies and its resolve to maintain the supremacy of Israel in the Middle East. The second source of anti-Americanism is President Barack Obama’s determined approach to heavily rely on counterterrorism (CT) – which has been symbolized by the heightened use of UAVs to kill al-Qaida forces in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, or in any other Muslim country where Islamic forces are gathering momentum. On the contrary, in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal’s application of the counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine, developed by General David Petraeus, emphasizes nation-building on a mini-scale (the “clear-hold-build” approach that was proved effective in Iraq). The United States hopes to remain popular among the masses in Afghanistan by applying the COIN approach to dealing with the Taliban, yet it is so insistent upon applying the CT approach in Pakistan. The inherent contradictions between the two approaches are becoming obvious to people of those two countries, and to Muslims at large, on a daily basis.

From America’s point of view, the CT approach is most effective and least damaging. It is also popular inside the United States, because it requires no troops on the ground, no casualties, and no body bags. If in the process of using the UAVs there are civilian casualties, the United States government issues the usual statement of regrets or apologies, or worse yet, it calls it “collateral damage.” But the fact that, more often than not, the UAV attacks also result in the loss of innocent civilian lives creates ample resentment among Muslims toward the lone superpower.

America’s global war on terrorism – even though it is no longer labeled thus by the Obama administration – has created an environment where a number of Muslims, even inside the United States, are having a hard time developing a sense of shared rationale for its related military actions, violence, death, and mayhem.

However, alternatives to America’s current approach to fighting terrorism are easy to proffer; they are hard to implement. Despite that fact, I will offer a few suggestions.

The foremost suggestion is to end America’s occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. However, that is not going to happen anytime soon, because the conventional wisdom among Washington officials is that both countries would descend into chaos. It may be that the U.S. occupation of those countries might create the same result over the long run. But no serious examination of that proposition is taking place inside the United States. There are, to be sure, a number of stated deadlines regarding the redeployent of American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan; but no one really believes that they should be taken as serious commitments. The Obama administration, like the preceding one, wants no part of becoming responsible for “losing” in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The second alternative for Washington is to fully focus on nation-building both in Pakistan and in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, the United States has introduced nation-building through the Kerry-Lugar legislation. However, the use of a CT approach in that country is overshadowing the good will that should stem from the Kerry-Lugar Bill. President Obama has ruled out an ambitious commitment to nation-building in Afghanistan, regardless of the fact that it holds promise for stabilizing that country.

As the mid-term congressional election gets closer, the Obama administration, in an attempt to minimize electoral losses of Democratic candidates, is likely to be focused on making populist choices regarding its dealings with terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That means there is going to be an increased emphasis on CT tactics over implementing a comprehensive nation-building strategy. However, in order to win against terrorist forces in South Asia, the need for now is to make realistic choices, which means earnestly thinking about conducting nation-building campaigns in both of those countries. The growing popularity of the al-Qaida mentality of creating chaos and mayhem in Yemen, the Horn of Africa, Pakistan, and Afghanistan is proof that killing terrorists does not equal defeating terrorism.

The third approach is to consider developing Joseph Nye’s concept of “smart power” into complex policies aimed at nullifying al-Qaida’s potent argument that Islam is under attack. Nye has defined it as follows: “Smart power is about tapping into diverse sources of American power, including our soft power, to attract others. It is about how we can get other countries to share our goals without resorting to coercion, which is limited and inevitably costly.”

As promising as the notion of smart power is, it still requires considerable tweaking to deal with the complex strategic realities of South Asia and elsewhere. For instance, the goal of the United States in Pakistan and in Afghanistan is to enhance stability and democracy and to defeat and minimize, if not eradicate, the Islamist influence. The first two goals are laudable. Washington is not likely to have any problem persuading either of those countries to pursue it. However, on the issue of minimizing the influence of the Islamists, the Obama administration faces a major problem. It is relying heavily on the use of military power (or in the words of Nye, “hard power”).

There are additional problems inside Pakistan that are coming into conflict with America’s objectives related to that country and neighboring Afghanistan. India’s increased presence in Afghanistan has become a major problem from Pakistan’s perspective. When the United States asks India to train the Afghan police or military forces, Pakistan views that development with considerable alarm. The Indian-trained Afghan security forces are likely to be anti-Pakistan. That is just a perverse reality of South Asia that has yet to be taken into consideration. Despite its long-term involvement in South Asia, the United States either does not understand the overarching nature of regional rivalry between India and Pakistan, or is choosing to ignore it at its own peril.

Using Nye’s notion of smart power, the Obama administration must find a way of minimizing Pakistan’s strategic concerns over heightened interest and the presence of India in Afghanistan. Otherwise, Pakistan is not likely to cooperate with the United States wholeheartedly as long it remains wary about India’s enhanced presence in Afghanistan. It has shown its displeasure allegedly by conniving about, if not directly supporting, two terrorist attacks on India’s Consulate in Afghanistan.

At this time, India, after getting encouragement from the United States about its involvement in stabilizing Afghanistan, has even approached Russia to seek avenues of cooperation with that country. India is also conducting a separate dialogue with Iran on the subject. The Obama administration may be too overwhelmed with its domestic politics to fully study the implications of Indian overtures toward Iran and Russia in Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s reactions to them.

Lately, General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, Pakistan’s Army Chief, has been quite candid about his country’s strategic interests in Afghanistan and India’s heightened presence therein. He has resurrected the concept of “strategic depth” that was first mentioned by General Zia ul-Huq in his interview with the American Journalist, Selig Harrison, in the mid-1980s. The upside of Kayani’s candor is that the Obama administration is receiving an earful of what Pakistan really wants in Afghanistan as a price for its cooperation with the United States. The downside is the fact that the Pakistani Army, once again, is proving that democratically-elected leaders in that country continue to play second fiddle to the Army. In any event, it is up to Washington to decide what policy to develop by fully utilizing the concept of smart power.

America’s involvement in Afghanistan and its ties with Pakistan have to be properly advertised, once again through the use of smart power, both in the world of Islam and inside the United States. The purpose of such a strategy is to consciously develop “Muslim stakes,” both domestically and internationally, regarding America’s fight with the Islamist forces. The congruities between American strategic and Muslim interests have to be acutely and incessantly developed by the U.S. government using the blueprint of the congruity between American and Israeli interests.

The recent fatwa of a leading Pakistani Muslim scholar, Dr. Tahir ul-Qadri, condemning terrorism is the second revolutionary development in the Sunni world; a similar fatwa issued by India’s Deoband Madrassa in June 2008 being the first one. Even considering the highly independent nature of Sunni Islam, these fatwas are eminently better than any official statements issues by any U.S. or Western agencies condemning terrorism. Even though they do not instantly become a source of Muslim consensus, the legitimacy of condemnation by Dr. Qadri and the Deoband Madrassa are incontrovertible. They already have been given ample publicity by the world media. As an important aspect of the use of its smart power, the United States ought to incessantly publicize it to condemn terrorism.

America’s efforts to defeat the Islamist extremists will only succeed when they become comprehensive and dynamic in the sense of ever-changing to suit altering circumstances. For this purpose, the U.S. should use smart power ingeniously, and launch a highly visible campaign (i.e., public diplomacy) to publicize all Muslim condemnations generated in different corners of the world of Islam. In the final analysis, the best way to use smart power is to fight the Islamists’ attempt to legitimize terror in the name of Islam with the endeavors of highly credible Muslim sources to condemn it as inherently anti-Islamic.

Such an approach is direly needed, not just in South Asia, but in a number of failing and near-failing Muslim countries and also for educating American Muslims about America’s approach to the Muslim world. That is the best way to curtail the long reach of al-Qaida.

In any event, in this mental exercise, I consider the example of the United States and China. The United States became a superpower in the aftermath of the Second World War. Retrospectively, it took over the role of a great power from the U.K. and then it progressed to becoming a superpower. China is emerging as a superpower, but there has not been any war to facilitate its transformation into a superpower. Equally important, there is not likely to be a willing transfer of superpowerdom from the United States to China, as was the case in the transfer of British hegemony in the Middle East to the United States in the aftermath of World War II. One scenario that China-watchers may be ignoring is the possibility of the emergence of a bipolar global power arrangement where the two poles are likely to be the United States and the PRC.

The common variable between the United States’ emergence as the superpower and in China’s rise is a high degree of dynamism manifested by their two economies. In the case of America, its economic system did not experience the ravages of two World Wars, a reality that contributed to Great Britain’s demise as a great power. In the 21st Century, Chinese economics exhibit a high degree of resiliency, even while the world economy was experiencing a meltdown.

The record of the United States’ domination of the globe is indeed impressive and cannot be easily emulated, if at all.

The United States became a superpower unintentionally, if not reluctantly. It did not have a great design or a strategy to become one. It had tremendous resources, but President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to drag his country out of a powerful legacy of isolation and get it involved in winning the Second World War. After that victory, the United States was faced with the awesome task of rebuilding Western Europe and Japan.

The Cold War created new tensions between the U.S. and the USSR, which had become communist little over twenty-eight years prior to the end of World War II in 1945. The United States’ leadership of the non-communist world had become a profound reality by then. In that capacity, it played a crucial role in creating the non-communist global economic order by creating global institutions that were to govern world trade and other economic arrangements, in order to create a stable global peace. That order guaranteed that America’s leadership would remain unchallenged as long the global economic institutions worked well to enhance the scope and nature of economic progress and well-being. Because the U.S. economy remained highly vibrant, it could also bankroll its military strength by building a military that could project power to the remotest corners of the world. It also built military alliances in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and established a powerful legacy of treating the Latin American nations as its vassals.

The resilience of the American superpowerdom stemmed, most importantly, from the durability and dynamism of its economy, which could also bankroll its alliance systems. The American-led global economic system also showed a high degree of resilience over the Communist economic arrangements under the leadership of the Soviet Union. In fact, when one examines the entire history of the Cold War, there never was much economic competition between the two superpowers of that era. The superiority of the American-led capitalistic economic arrangement has been proven by the fact that still it exists even today.

The second most crucial reason for the durability of the American-dominated alliance systems is that its members not only remained beneficiaries as a result of their membership, but they were able to pursue their national objectives as sovereign states. There is no suggestion here that U.S. allies were at liberty to undermine the alliance systems by adopting reckless policies. They had the option of disagreeing with the U.S. without any threat of losing membership or other side benefit of the alliance. New Zealand’s decision to deny U.S. ships entry into its ports in 1985 might have been an exception to that rule. The Kiwis insisted that no nuclear-armed ship would be allowed to visit their ports. The United States, whose naval vessels were widely known to be armed with nuclear weapons, did not want to admit or deny that possibility. Consequently, it abrogated its ANZUS security treaty responsibilities toward New Zealand in 1986. However, New Zealand never formally withdrew from that alliance.

China’s emergence as a superpower is a reality, as long as its economy shows its present strength of sustained growth. It has no record of building an alliance system a la the United States, and it has no record of building regional alliance systems, save the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). But it is cashing in on the worldwide publicity given to its awesome “rise” through its deft use of building regional trade and aid systems in Africa and Latin America. It has also been playing a highly visible role, along with the United States, in finding solutions to pull the world economy out of the doldrums created by the economic meltdown of 2008-2009.

Wherever Chinese companies are busy signing up long-term oil contracts in Africa and Latin America, they also are offering highly lucrative contracts to a number of oil states for infrastructure development. As a result of these contracts, Chinese companies will build civilian infrastructures over a period of the next or more decades. Such arrangements will become the chief basis of China’s assiduous endeavors of building spheres of influence on those two continents.

Another Chinese strategy is to do business with countries that are on America’s list of so-called sponsors of terrorism or who have been given other nefarious monikers. That list includes Iran and the Sudan. What is ironic is that the Western states have made an art of doing business with autocrats and dictators of Third World countries throughout the 20th Century. However, a similar type of behavior from Chinese leaders in the 21st Century has generated ample denigration in the West. Still, considering that China’s oil and gas appetite will remain horrendous in the coming decades, it does not seem to be paying much attention to the Western exercise of double standards.

China is using its awesome economic resources in financing its major plans of military modernization. That reality is creating ample apprehension among its East Asian neighbors. China has had a record of militarily challenging the United States during the Korean War. It audaciously backed North Vietnam during its war with the United States in the 1960s, a war that the superpower lost. China, under Mao Zedong, showed a perverse brazenness about pooh-poohing a nuclear conflict in the 1950s and 1960s in his psychological warfare with the United States. That headstrong attitude toward belittling the awesome destructive nature of nuclear power might be one important reason why China’s East Asian neighbors look at its highly discernible military modernization with nervousness. Even though the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan during World War II, it does not generate the same kind of fear anywhere in the world.

The major reason for that lack of fear is that the United States has had a long history of playing a crucial role in building a variety of regimes of international influence, from the World Bank to the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). More to the point, it has not coveted the territory of any country in modern times (the purists, I am sure, will remind me of the Mexican territories that the United States incorporated into its boundaries in 1847).

However, that almost unblemished record was tainted when the United States invaded and occupied two countries in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on its territory: Afghanistan and Iraq. At least in the case of Afghanistan, the United States invaded it because it was from there that al-Qaida planned the 9/11 terrorists attacks on its territory. In the case of Iraq, the American invasion was based on an unending series of misstatements, lies, and cherry-picking of the intelligence. Still, there are indications that it will not remain in those countries for long.

East Asian nations have no idea about the real purpose underlying China’s military modernization and the blue water capabilities of its navy. They know that it will not create an alliance system emulating the Warsaw Pact. They also know that the era of implementing another Brezhnev Doctrine – whereby the Warsaw Pact countries were neither allowed to abandon that alliance during the Cold War years, nor did they have any option to leave the Socialist camp – has gone forever. Still, they want to know how benign a superpower China is likely to be in the coming years. This is a very important issue, because it will determine whether China’s superpowerdom would be welcomed by its East Asian neighbors, or would at some point be “ganged up” on in order to bring an end to its hegemony and, indeed, its superpowerdom.

In this brief conceptual exercise, the primacy and durability of economic power emerges as probably the most crucial precondition for a country’s emergence as a superpower. Needless to say, the term “economic power” is an umbrella phrase that also includes excellence in education, primacy of technological research and development, topnotch civilian infrastructural development, good governance, and transparency in trade, to mention just a few other characteristics. Of these traits, China’s record regarding transparency is shabby. If good governance were to mean responsiveness to its citizens’ needs and demands, the government in Beijing is highly sensitive. However, that sensitiveness revolves around keeping citizen dissatisfaction and dissent at manageable levels. From the perspective of Democratic theory, that type of governmental performance is far from satisfactory. But then, China is not a democracy.

Second, the exercise of creating numerous spheres of influence in different regions of the globe emerges as the next most critical precondition because, by playing a visible role in creating such arrangements, an emerging superpower enhances its international prestige and clout. Moreover, such institutions and regimes are vital for implementing the kind of trade and other important policies that a superpower wishes to establish.
The third significant precondition is the willingness of a superpower to follow the American model of hegemony, which covets no country’s territory or threatens its sovereignty. That is a very important ingredient of creating viable regional as well global alliances.

As the old saying goes, “No one can argue with success.” It seems that the United States has proven itself to be the most successful and equally resilient superpower. The next superpower – even if America were not to lose its superpowerdom – will have little choice but to by-and-large emulate the American blueprint. If that is true, then the greatest challenge that China will face as a superpower is to persuade its weaker and smaller neighbors in East Asia that its continuing rise will be nothing but peaceful. That persuasion would require the PRC to create unending streams of policies and international regimes and institutions that would palpably lower, if not totally eliminate, any apprehensions on the part of smaller nations related to its rise.

1. Leonid Brezhnev spelled out this doctrine following the crushing of the “Prague Spring” of 1968 as follows: “…each Communist party is responsible not only to its own people, but also to all the socialist countries, to the entire Communist movement. Whoever forgets this, in stressing only the independence of the Communist party, becomes one-sided. He deviates from his international duty…Discharging their internationalist duty toward the fraternal peoples of Czechoslovakia and defending their own socialist gains, the U.S.S.R. and the other socialist states had to act decisively and they did act against the antisocialist forces in Czechoslovakia.”

http://europeanhistory.about.com/od/glossary/g/glbrezhnevdoct.htm

Lord Palmerston might have been overly simplifying reality when he observed that “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.” In reality, nothing in the realm of global affairs remains permanent, not even the strategic interests of nation-states. Those interests undergo radical transformation when major regional and global realignments occur. That type of realignment is currently in the making in Asia. The rise of China is creating powerful undercurrents, and the post-World War II alliance systems are expected to experience visible changes within the next decade.
(http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/AMERICA/kanko/documents/05NAKANO.pdf)

The election of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and the end of decades of the LDP’s (Liberal Democratic Party) hold on the reins of power is the beginning of an episode that promises to be spasmodic before it becomes a trend. Japan’s emergence as the second largest economy owes a lot to the wisdom of the Yoshida doctrine, which focused on building its economic power, while leaving its security to the United States. Because of its militaristic record of the pre-World War II era, the Yoshida doctrine played a crucial role in calming the fears of East Asian nations regarding the potential reemergence of an aggressive and militarily powerful Japan. The presence of U.S. forces both in Japan and in East Asia is also envisaged as the ultimate guarantee for East Asian countries against such a development.

As a major ally of the United States, Japan was regularly consulted by Washington on issues of strategic significance affecting that region; however, U.S.-Japan ties also experienced their own episodes of tension. No one can forget how shocked Japan was when it found out about the secret Nixon-Kissinger overtures leading to the historical U.S.-China opening in 1972. The global imperatives of superpower relations were driving the American President and his Secretary of State; they were not about to allow any regional actor to have any say, much less a veto in what they were about to achieve vis-à-vis China. Japan, for its part, developed a more pro-Arab stance in response to the Arab embargo of 1973 and became “the most pro-Arab industrial country” in order to gain access to oil from the Middle East. Needless to say, that Japanese attitude created a mixture of apprehension and some tension between Tokyo and Washington, the chief supporter of Israel. But the larger security-related issues of the Cold War years kept the U.S.-Japan alliance on a steady and even keel. (http://www.idosi.org/hssj/hssj3(2)08/6.pdf).

The end of the Cold War created a friendly environment between Japan and Russia, the chief successor of the imploded USSR. However, the issue of the Kurile Islands still remained unresolved. But Japan was more concerned about China’s steady and spectacular rise and the implications for its ties with that country. Regarding China, the Japan-U.S. strategic ties continued to play a crucial role as deterrence for both Japan and China. Japan envisioned its relations with the lone superpower as guarantee against potential military maneuvers by China. The PRC, for its part, viewed the American presence as a guarantee against the emergence of a militarized Japan, despite the fact that the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush encouraged Japan’s becoming a “normal” military power.

Japan has been watching with some concern the dynamics of U.S.-China relations, especially in the aftermath of the global economic meltdown of 2008-2009. One important development with this crisis is that the significance of the G-7 (or G7+1, including Russia) has diminished, while there are increasing discussion of the enhanced role of G-20 for the resolution of global economic problems. What is also causing concern in Japan is the mounting import of G-2 summit, which involves the United States and China. Japan envisions this development as a genuine American response to keeping its global significance from experiencing major erosion.

Along similar lines, the Hatoyama doctrine is essentially aimed at finding a new niche for Japan within East Asia. It is in harmony with the age-old Asian tradition of responding to a new hierarchy of nation-states in the region, in response to the regional realignment currently in progress. Such a response, under no circumstances, would jeopardize U.S.-Japan ties, whose significance remains highly relevant to Japan, all the din about the alleged decline of the United States notwithstanding. This doctrine is also Japan’s way of cashing in on the economic dimensions of China’s rise, largely because the Japanese economy has manifested a long phase of lethargy. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/business/economy/02yen.html?_r=2)

Why, then, does the United States seems so perturbed about the alleged negative implications of the Hatoyama doctrine? One quick answer may be that, as much as East Asia is abuzz with speculations of America’s decline, Washington envisages Hatoyama’s recent East Asian Community proposal, which originally excluded the United States, as disquieting. The immediate American reaction was a feeling of befuddlement as to what was driving that type of thinking from a trusted ally. Secondly, Japan’s recent manifestations of diplomatic warmth toward China and a palpable cool attitude toward the United States during President Obama’s recent trip to that country have raised a lot of eyebrows in the Asian capitals as well as in Washington. Finally, even if the Hatoyama doctrine reverts its perceived frostiness toward the United States, or if a new Japanese government in the future changes its attitude on the issue, Washington may still feel uneasy about the precedent-setting aspects of the Hatoyama doctrine for its future prime ministers in the years ahead.

Hatoyama may not have thought about the long-term implications of his thinking on the U.S.-Japan alliance, but China is. The game among nations in the East is changing. The United States is not necessarily losing its significance to East Asia; however, the fact that China is gaining its import for even a long-standing American ally underscores that the realignment of nation-states is becoming an inexorable reality as much as China’s rise. What the lone superpower is not certain about is whether its decline is also becoming equally inescapable.

President Barack Obama decided to show his “outrage,” since some so-called pundits were upset that he was not showing the kind of passion that George W. Bush had shown after the 9/11 attacks. But, Bush’s record in his so-called “war on terrorism” has been a miserable failure. During his regime, the United States became an occupier of two Muslim countries. That might be one reason why the lone superpower under Obama is facing such an uphill battle in dealing with “violent extremism.” If Obama were to follow Bush’s example, then the United States is likely to face future quagmires and inertias.

Another dim-witted statement that was uttered by one of the “pundits” is when he wondered out loud why Muslims are not condemning what the young Nigerian tried to do. Statements of that nature imply that all Muslims, until every one of them yells at the top of his/her lungs condemning such action over and over again, are condoning terrorism. At no time in the history of human kind was such a reckless notion deemed worthy of air time.

What happened to America’s dealing with terrorism is that, under a new president, another country (Afghanistan) became the focus of it, as if by “winning” in that country the current administration would defeat terrorism once and for all. What the United States is not considering is that there cannot be any victory against the terrorist forces unless it develops comprehensive anti-terrorism policies. Firing cruise missiles or using UAVs to shoot a group of terrorists here and there, or sending Special Forces to take out a few terrorists is not the solution. Actions of that nature only intensify feelings of hatred and revenge against U.S. personnel all over the world. If the United States’ invasion of Iraq taught anything to America, it is that the use of military power (“hard” power) alone is no guarantee of victory.

As President Obama is busy developing some sort of blueprint (I will not call it a strategy, because there is no such thing up to this time), Pakistan and Afghanistan look increasingly precarious places. In both those countries, Islamist forces are on the offensive. Iran, totally unrelated to the latest episode of terrorism, is getting increasingly unstable. The Iranophobes in America are eagerly waiting for the Islamic regime to fall, hoping that the next government will be pro-Western. No one is considering that the alternative to the Islamic Republic might be chaos, which might have its own deleterious spillover effects in Iraq.

Across the Persian Gulf, Yemen is boiling over as another failed state. Northern Yemen and areas of Saudi Arabia contiguous to it have become the new battleground between forces of those two countries and al-Qaida, with the United States increasing its pressure on both of those countries to let loose their hard power on them. America’s answer to problems of al-Qaida is: kill, kill, kill, never mind what happens to Yemen or Saudi Arabia in the process. Farther East to the Arabian Peninsula is the Horn of Africa, which contains Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eretria. Somalia is already the poster child candidate for a failed state, while Ethiopia and Eretria are right behind it.

The question of the hour—indeed, of the decade—is what should be done about all these countries that are steadily becoming havens for al-Qaida. Does the United States have enough cruise missiles to shoot at all of them, ensuring the eradication of all supporters of al-Qaida? Does it have enough drones to fly them on a 7/24 basis on all the aforementioned countries?

In the last presidential election, there was no debate about how to win against the terrorists worldwide. Terrorism as an issue had already fallen way down on the list of American voters’ concerns during that presidential campaign. Candidate Obama made his electoral fortune by banging the drum of the failed policies of Bush, and then insisting that he would go after al-Qaida and would do everything to eradicate it in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. Who could have argued against that without having his/her patriotism questioned? What bears repeating here is that the 2008 presidential election campaign was totally devoid of any debate regarding how to be victorious over global terrorist forces because, by then, the 9/11 attacks were fading in American memories.

That fading process would have continued if not for the fact that Obama remained true to his promise and started the use of hard power in Afghanistan and Pakistan, assuming that he would win where his predecessor had failed.

The widening popularity of al-Qaida on the Arabian Peninsula and on the Horn of Africa, and its sustaining capacity in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, should intensify the feeling in the U.S. that the need of the hour is to develop comprehensive anti-terrorism policies, and not to solely rely on killing (counterterrorism emphasis) and hope that such a measure would also eradicate terrorism. But right now, examining the public debate, one gets the feeling that the American government is in the process of reinventing the wheel. There is the usual blame game that various agencies are still not cooperating; or the process of terrorist monitoring has become so cumbersome that it does not work even when a young man’s father reports to the American embassy that his son might have joined the ranks of the terrorists, yet that young man is allowed to travel to the United States.

Watching the process of recrimination, looking for fall guys, the blame game that is currently in progress in Washington, one wonders whether the lone superpower would ever become invulnerable to the actions of those who attach no value to life, neither of their own nor of others.
If there is a fall guy inside the United States in this whole process of countering terrorism, it is the cumbersomeness related to securing America that has become the chief culprit of making America unsafe. The strength of the terrorists stems from the fact that they operate on the basis of simplicity: one person or a few persons specialize in or invent new ways of creating death and mayhem. All they have to do is to find just one or more loopholes in the cumbersome security processes. At least in incidents of this nature, the culprit is the incompetence of the intricate bureaucracies, which promise to become even more intricate and, in all likelihood, more incompetent in the coming months.

The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission of creating an intelligence czar was a wise one. Instead, Congress diluted most of the recommendations of that Commission by playing politics. Today, we have eight or more intelligence agencies. All of them are busy fighting budget and turf battles and performing the redundant tasks of collecting intelligence. Those types of redundancies are also contributing further to the aforementioned cumbersomeness. As the co-Chairs of the 9/11 Commission observed in their OpEd of January 11, 2010, “The DNI [Director of National Intelligence] has been hobbled by disputes over its size, mission and authority, but forcing information-sharing and enabling the NCTC’s [National Counterterrorism Center] best analysts to do their work should not be subject to dispute.”

What America needs is an anti-terrorism strategy that is geared toward homeland security, but a strategy that also deals with causes of global terrorism that is focused on Africa, the Middle East, and South, Central, and Southeast Asia. Of these regions, Africa—the Horn and the trans-Sahel region, North and West Africa—is where terrorism is likely to run rampant during the next decade. South Asia and the Middle East will remain hotbeds of terrorism from now until at least the middle of the next decade. Central Asia appears calm; however, we know so little about that region because countries of that area are governed by autocrats who want absolutely no outside scrutiny of their tyrannical rule. So, it is a safe bet that one or more countries of Central Asia is likely to experience internal turbulence or even violent regime change. In all likelihood, such change would not result because of terrorist groups, but such groups are most likely to take every advantage of the resultant political turbulence.

If the prognostications of increased transnational turbulence are correct, then it behooves the United States to have trans-regional strategies to counter such events. Merely appointing “czars” and “special envoys” is not enough. However, considering how unprepared the United States has shown itself to be about dealing with terrorism last December, one has little reason to remain optimistic.

The real test of President Barack Obama’s dealing with China and Russia will be whether he can persuade them to support U.S. pressure on Iran to give up its nuclear weapons aspirations. Obama is reported to have lobbied China on that issue during his recent visit. He also broached the topic with Russia in the recent past for the same purpose, but with little success. Iran denies wanting to join the nuclear club, but Washington has no faith in those denials.