In the midst of the political turmoil engulfing Egypt and much of the Arab
world, last month’s revelation that Pakistan has doubled the size of its nuclear
arsenal over the past four years has been largely ignored.
Nuclear
proliferation analysts from the Federation of American Scientists and the
Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) assess that since 2006,
Pakistan has increased the size of its nuclear arsenal from 30-60 atomic bombs
to approximately 110. That makes Pakistan the world’s fifth largest nuclear
power ahead of Britain and France.
As for delivery systems, according to
The Washington Post, Pakistan has developed nuclear-capable land- and
air-launched cruise missiles. Its Shaheen II missile, with a range of 2,400
kilometers, is about to go into operational deployment.
On Wednesday,
Pakistan test-fired its new Hatf- VII nuclear-capable cruise missile with a
600-kilometer range.
The Obama administration has been silent on
Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation activities. As ISIS President David Albright
said to the
Washington Post, “The administration is always trying to keep people
from talking about this knowledgeably.
They’re always trying to downplay
the numbers [of Pakistan’s nuclear warheads] and insisting that ‘it’s smaller
than you think.’” Pakistan’s nuclear growth goes on as its economy is in
shambles, its government is falling apart and a large portion of the country’s
territory is controlled by the Taliban.
Pakistan is the largest recipient
of US foreign aid. In 2009 Congress approved a five-year $7.5 billion civilian
aid package. Last October, the Obama administration proposed supplementing the
aid with $2b. for Pakistan’s military.
The administration requested the
supplemental aid despite criticism that economic assistance to Pakistan
indirectly funds its nuclear project, since Pakistan is in an effective state of
bankruptcy.
Moreover, a US Inspector-General’s Report published this week
concluded that the $7.5b. in assistance has achieved little.
For their
part, the Pakistani government and military adhere to a radically anti-American
line, and Pakistan’s powerful ISI intelligence service and large sections of its
military continue to maintain intimate ties with al-Qaida and the
Taliban.
Last month, Pakistani police arrested US diplomat Raymond Davis
in Lahore after he killed two gunmen who were reportedly about to rob him at
gunpoint. Pakistani law enforcement officials have charged Davis with murder and
refuse to release him to US custody, despite the fact that he should enjoy the
protection of diplomatic immunity. Rather than attempt to quiet passions, the
Pakistani government is fanning anti-American sentiments by among other things,
releasing a videotape of Davis’s police interrogation.
To date, while
members of Congress are beginning to threaten to curtail aid to Pakistan pending
Davis’s release, the administration has limited its response to this de facto
act of hostage-taking by Pakistan to refusing to hold high-level exchanges with
Pakistani leaders. And even this limited response has been inconsistently
implemented.
For instance, while US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
refused to meet with her Pakistani counterpart, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, at the
Munich security conference last weekend, she did agree to meet with Gen. Ashfaq
Kayani, the commander of the Pakistani military. So, too, the US ambassador in
Pakistan met on Monday with Pakistani President Asif Ali
Zardari.
Pakistan is a textbook example of a disaster of biblical
proportions in the making. Its hyperactive nuclear expansion, weak central
government, impoverished, radicalized population, and pro- Islamist military and
intelligence arms are sources for major concern. That concern becomes all-out
alarm in light of the Taliban/al-Qaida’s control over anywhere from a quarter to
a third of Pakistani territory and the widespread public support for them
throughout the country.
Since taking office, the Obama administration has
failed to conceive of a strategy for contending with the situation. One of the
main obstacles to the formation of a coherent US strategy is the Obama
administration’s move to outlaw any discussion of the basic threats to US
interests. Shortly after entering office, President Barack Obama banned the use
of the term “War against terror,” substituting it with the opaque term “overseas
contingency operation.”
Last April, Obama banned use of the terms
“jihad,” “Islamic terrorism” and “radical Islam” in US government
documents.
Given that US officials are barred from using all the terms
that are relevant for describing reality in places like Pakistan, it is obvious
why the US cannot put together a strategy for contending with the challenges it
faces there. Imagine an intelligence officer in Peshawar trying to report on
what he sees. Imagine a defense attaché in Lahore trying to explain the problems
with the jihad-infested Pakistani military to his superiors in
Washington.
Imagine a USAID officer trying to explain why the
jihadist-mosque attending public refuses to work at US-funded highway
programs.
The Obama administration’s decision to ban relevant language
from the official US policy discourse was ideologically motivated. And in
choosing ideology over reality, the Obama administration has induced a situation
where rather than construct policies to deal with reality, at all levels, US
officials have been charged with constructing policies to deny and ignore
reality.
AGAINST THIS backdrop it becomes fairly clear why the Obama
administration’s handling of the political turmoil in Egypt has been so
incompetent.
Upon entering office, Obama made a determined effort to
ignore the political instability percolating under the surface throughout the
authoritarian Arab world. US government officials were instructed to curtail
programs aimed at developing liberal alternatives to authoritarianism and the
Muslim Brotherhood. The justification for this behavior was again
ideological.
As the world’s biggest bully, the US had no moral right to
judge the behavior of tyrants like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Once
the dutifully ignored long-repressed popular discontent boiled over into the
popular revolts we have seen over the past month in Tunisia and Egypt as well as
Yemen, Jordan, Algeria and beyond, the Obama administration rushed to get on the
“right side” of the issue. To avoid criticism for refusing to contend with the
problems bred by Arab authoritarianism, Obama went to the other extreme. He
became the most outspoken champion of unfettered popular democracy in
Egypt.
Of course, to occupy this other side of the spectrum, Obama has
had to ignore the danger constituted by the most powerful opposition movement in
Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood’s hostility towards the US’s most fundamental
strategic interests in the Middle East has been swept under the rug by the Obama
administration and its supporters in the US media.
But then, in light of
the prohibition of all discussion of the reasons the Muslim Brotherhood
constitutes a threat to the US – its jihadist ideology of Islamic conquest, its
genocidal Islamic-based Jewhatred and hatred of America, its support for Islamic
terrorism against non-jihadist regimes throughout the Muslim world and against
the West – it is not surprising that the Obama administration is embracing the
inclusion of the movement in a post-Mubarak Egyptian regime.
How could
the administration object to something it has chosen to ignore? The Obama
administration’s ideologically driven strategic ineptitude is evident
everywhere.
From its slavish devotion to appeasing Iran, its
single-minded insistence on withdrawing from Iraq, its announced commitment to
withdrawing from Afghanistan, to its tolerance of Hugo Chavez, and its infantile
reset button diplomacy towards Russia, the Obama administration’s foreign policy
is on a collision course with reality.
But nowhere is its premeditated
incompetence more evident than in its obsession with the establishment of a
Palestinian state west of the Jordan River.
So it was that during his
visit in Israel this week, Obama’s recently retired national security adviser
Gen. James Jones claimed that it is God’s will that Israel withdraw to
indefensible borders, and effectively blamed the political turmoil in Egypt on
the absence of a Palestinian state.
As Jones put it, “I’m of the belief
that had God appeared in front of President Obama in 2009 and said if he could
do one thing on the face of the planet, and one thing only, to make the world a
better place and give people more hope and opportunity for the future, I would
venture that it would have something to do with finding the two-state solution
to the Middle East.”
Jones then argued, “Time is not on our side, and a
failure to act [in establishing a Palestinian state] may trigger other
Egypt-like demonstrations in other countries in the region.”
The Obama
administration is not alone in this completely irrational view. As the Arab
world undergoes massive convulsions born of the legacy of authoritarianism and
nourished by the pull of jihadism, all of Europe’s major statesmen are lining up
behind Washington in pushing Israel to agree to surrender still more land to the
PLO in order to establish yet another authoritarian, jihadinfested Arab
state.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, British Foreign
Minister William Hague, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and other
senior officials all parroted Jones’s view this week.
CONFRONTING THE
Obama administration’s assault on reason in the interest of ideological
faithfulness, Israel is faced with very few good options. The threats Israel
faces stem largely from the rising forces of jihad, Islamic terrorism and
religiously justified nuclear adventurism embraced by Islamist politicians and
religious leaders. That is, the threats facing Israel stem largely from the
forces the Obama administration has elected to ignore and deny.
Moreover,
the Obama administration’s singular obsession with coercing Israel to surrender
still more land to the Palestinian Authority means that America’s central Middle
East policy involves demanding that Israel further strengthen the unmentionable
forces of jihad at its own expense. This fact was underlined this week with
The
Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh’s revelation that most senior PA leaders have
recently applied for Jordanian citizenship. Clearly the likes of Mahmoud Abbas
believe they will not be the winners if their repressive regime in Judea and
Samaria is seriously challenged by their popular jihadist rivals in
Hamas.
Our leaders are doubtlessly tempted to simply take the path of
least resistance and join Obama and his merry band of blind men as they move
from lie to lie to defend their ideology from reality.
But doing so will
not protect us when the dangers sown by the US’s strategic dementia provoke the
next conflagration.
Israel’s best option is to simply tell the truth as
loudly and forcefully as it can and base our policies on it. While doing so will
win Israel no friends in the Obama administration or in Europe, it will prepare
us for the day when the wall of lies they are building from Islamabad to Cairo
to Ramallah come crashing down.
caroline@carolineglick.com