Amid considerable media discussion of President-elect Barack Obama's plans for the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq -- The New York Times, for example, published an article on December 4 with the headline "Campaign Promises on Ending the War in Iraq Now Muted by Reality" -- Washington Times chief political correspondent Donald Lambro falsely suggested that Obama has reversed himself on the need for residual forces in Iraq. In his December 4 column, Lambro wrote that Obama's "wiggle-room talk is making his party's hard-line, antiwar base very unhappy and there is growing anger in the leftist blogosphere." As evidence to support his characterization of "wiggle-room talk," Lambro wrote that Obama "now says the U.S. will have 'to maintain a residual force to provide potential training for the Iraqi military, logistical support to protect our civilians in Iraq' " [emphasis added]. In fact, contrary to Lambro's suggestion that Obama only "now" supports a residual force, Obama talked throughout the presidential campaign about the likely need for such a force to remain in Iraq.

In a September 12, 2007, campaign speech in Clinton, Iowa, Obama said that after a withdrawal from Iraq, the United States "will need to retain some forces in Iraq and the region. We'll continue to strike at al Qaeda in Iraq. We'll protect our forces as they leave, and we will continue to protect U.S. diplomats and facilities. If -- but only if -- Iraq makes political progress and their security forces are not sectarian, we should continue to train and equip those forces." Additionally, Obama's campaign website states: "Under the Obama-Biden plan, a residual force will remain in Iraq and in the region to conduct targeted counter-terrorism missions against al Qaeda in Iraq and to protect American diplomatic and civilian personnel." According to the Internet Archive, a similar statement was on Obama's website in October 2007. Also, as Media Matters for America has previously noted, in January 2007, Obama introduced legislation that provided for U.S. forces to remain in Iraq after combat troop withdrawal was completed "[t]o protect United States personnel and facilities in Iraq" and "[t]o provide training for Iraqi security forces."

From Lambro's December 4 Washington Times column:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates' decision to remain in his job presented different challenges. He had been the chief proponent of President Bush's surge that rescued the Iraq war from certain defeat and gave the Iraqis time to train their military. He opposed Mr. Obama's troop withdrawal timetable and said so publicly and still believes the Iraqis need more time before they can go it alone.

Mr. Obama gave him assurances that as the lone Republican on the team he would be in on all national security decision-making and the future of the Iraq war. At the same time, Mr. Obama assured Mr. Gates that his own 16-month pullout timeline was not set in concrete, that the United States would not leave the Iraqis high and dry and that he was willing to seek a compromise on any future withdrawal.

He acknowledged Monday that the policy terrain regarding the length of time that combat troops would remain in Iraq had already changed as a result of the Bush administration's security agreement with Iraq that called for U.S. troop withdrawal in three years.

There is a lot of room for compromise between 36 months and 16 months, and Mr. Obama was sending signals this week that he was prepared to leave U.S. troops in Iraq longer than he envisions if his military commanders say they need more time to secure the country.

Thus, the man who made pulling out of the Iraq war his No. 1 foreign policy campaign issue now says the U.S. will have "to maintain a residual force to provide potential training for the Iraqi military, logistical support to protect our civilians in Iraq." That was the behind-the-scenes advice his Iraq war advisers gave him early this year and apparently he is taking it.

Notably, Mr. Obama now says his "No. 1 priority is making sure that our troops remain safe in this transition phase and that the Iraqi people are well- served by a government that is taking on increased responsibility for its own security."

"I will listen to the recommendation of my commanders," he reaffirmed Monday.

Not surprisingly, all of his wiggle-room talk is making his party's hard-line, antiwar base very unhappy and there is growing anger in the leftist blogosphere. It is suddenly dawning on them that we are going to be in Iraq a little longer than they had been led to believe.

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/41220?ns=guardianpageName=Comment+is+free%3A+America%2C+cowering+to+an+imaginary+enemy%2C+is+not+the+country+I+once+knewch=Comment+is+freec3=The+Guardianc4=US+news%2CAl-Qaida+%28News%29%2CTerrorism+-+international%2CObama+White+House+%28News%29%2CUS+foreign+policy%2CWorld+newsc5=Not+commercially+useful%2CUS+Electionsc6=Simon+Jenkinsc7=2008_12_05c8=1129131c9=articlec10=GUc11=Comment+is+freec12=blogc13=c14=Comment+is+freeh2=GU%2FComment+is+free%2Fblog%2FComment+is+free" width="1" height="1" //divpAmerica seems much in need of Roosevelt's maxim to stop fearing fear itself. Virtually all comment on the Mumbai massacre has mentioned 9/11 and al-Qaida, and thus invited citizens to continue feeling afraid. No matter that Mumbai appears to have been primarily about Kashmir and the status of India's Muslims. No matter that Osama bin Laden has no dog in that fight. Any stick will do to elevate al-Qaida as America's enemy number one./ppLast week, the CIA warned of a terrorist threat that "might be unleashed" during the presidential transition, a threat that George Bush described as "dangerously real". On Wednesday Barack Obama was formally told by a congressional inquiry that "it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction, either nuclear or biological, will be used in a terrorist attack" in his first year of office. The inquiry demanded that an official must be appointed "to oversee efforts to prevent such an attack", as if millions of Americans in and out of uniform were not doing that already. /ppThen London added its pennyworth, with a Home Office minister, Lord West, telling of "another great plot building up again" and a "huge threat" from al-Qaida. The purpose of all this scaremongering remains a mystery./ppReactions to Mumbai have seemed to suggest Americans are still seeking fellowship in their 9/11 pain, as after the London and Madrid bombings. Gone are the days when Americans would tell Britons to shrug off IRA terrorist attacks (many instigated from America) and grow up. Any explosion anywhere now abets the extraordinary 9/11 iconography, underpinning the politics of fear that has been the leitmotif of the Bush presidency./ppDebating this presidency in New York on Tuesday night, I found myself pitted against Bush's impresario of fear, Karl Rove. Nothing in his master's glorious reign quite matched his "victory" over terror. The sense of unreality was equalled by Rove's supporters, to whom all who did not fear the "Islamofascists" were "liberal upper-east side elitists", an apparently crushing epithet. One assured me that Afghanistan would soon be won by merely "moving the surge" to Kabul. The whole evening was like the scene in Gone with the Wind where Southern gallants out-boast each other in predicting victory over the Yankees. /ppRove was undeniably a master manipulator of fear politics, like Tony Blair's Alastair Campbell, who called him a "kindred spirit". Both Bush and Blair were led to portray al-Qaida in its Tora Bora cave as they had Saddam Hussein, as a threat to their respective realms. It was what the sociologist Ulrich Beck described as an exaggerated risk "exploited as an elixir to an ailing leader". On this the two leaders built a culture of self-validating counter-terrorism, where both the absence of any threat and the presence of one can be made equally supportive. /ppThe media's fondness for describing any explosion as "al-Qaeda-linked" has turned what was a tiny, if efficient, cabal of fanatics into a global menace, ridiculously on a par with Hitler and postwar communism. Whoever said the political brain has advanced over time was mad./ppOn every visit to America I am stunned by the pervasiveness of fear. Terrified officials pounce on the slightest deviation from security rules. Americans must strip almost to their underwear to board even the shortest domestic flights. IDs are scanned in the meanest office blocks. Computers must be dismantled. National guardsmen troop out at dawn to protect New York installations "against the terrorist threat". /ppThe repressive Patriot Act - mocking a patriotism that was once built on courage and the rule of law - remains in operation. Getting through American immigration with a brown face is an indignity that many Indians and Arabs of my acquaintance now simply refuse to endure. I had trouble even with a Baghdad visa in my passport./ppBarack Obama, who is pledged to close Guantaacute;namo Bay, is being challenged to say what he will do with what the conservative Weekly Standard asserts are "250 participants in the most devastating terrorist attacks in history" from "an enemy unlike any other this nation has ever faced". Britons should not smile at this hyperbole. The same madness afflicts Jacqui Smith's Home Office./ppIn the 1960s Richard Hofstadter, the American political scientist, puzzled over the anti-intellectualism of much of American public life, echoing the remark of the Puritan, John Cotton, in 1642 that "the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan". Listening to the debate on Tuesday I realised how deep is that strand, how strong the line of descent to the war on terror from previous generations who likewise puffed up the mafia and home-grown communism. /ppThe 1950s Kefauver commission on organised crime sought a foe to demonise as foreign, sinister and ubiquitous. The inquiry found that there was no national "mafia" worthy of the name, or of their attention, just disparate bunches of local hoodlums. Kefauver and the FBI, whose burgeoning empire depended on him, were furious. They had come to need the mafia and its menace to justify their budget, effort and status. /ppThe same synthetic sense of fear enveloped the McCarthy hearings on communism. A grain of truth was exaggerated to boost McCarthy's standing as a defender of the people against a real and present danger, that of reds under every bed. Communism had to be erected as an internal weapon of mass destruction, and much cruelty resulted./ppAt least organised crime and communism posed genuine threats to American liberties. Al-Qaida does not, yet it has become the ruling obsession of Bush's courtiers. They see al-Qaida fiends on every side, bearded mullahs, caches of bombs, ricin and anthrax. The precautionary principle has become fanaticised. By treating the unknown as an enemy, we ensure that the unknown becomes one. /ppMost of the outrages committed by graduates of the Pakistan terrorism camps are locally motivated, and will continue as long as such motivation survives. A network of criminal suicide squads with no coherent programme has no conceivable hope of undermining western democracy. It can just set off bombs, and will always do so if front-line policing is weak and constantly overruled by a grand "counterterrorism" bureaucracy. /ppJust when America had won a real victory in the century-old combat with communism, it allowed itself to be terrified by a band of fanatics who, in part through America's negligence, "got lucky once" and pulled off a coup on 9/11. For seven years its behaviour at home and image abroad have been dogged by the reaction to it. The challenge to Obama, here as elsewhere, is immense. /ppThe attractive feature of the America in which I once lived was its bold self-confidence. To find the survivors of the Bush presidency still cowering in a mental bunker afraid of a bunch of Arabs - and with British ministers for company - strips western democracy of a leadership that should be both heroic and sensible. It is surely an un-American activity./ppa href="mailto:simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk"simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk/a/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usa"United States/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/alqaida"Al-Qaida/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/terrorism"Global terrorism/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/obama-white-house"Obama White House/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usforeignpolicy"US foreign policy/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/jAwPo33e1p2W35OTVycr8aQ0Iko/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/jAwPo33e1p2W35OTVycr8aQ0Iko/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

The Mumbai attacks remind the world that the intertwined problems of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan will be the most extreme foreign policy challenge that President Obama will face as he assumes office.div class="feedflare" a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=2ZbEcEVW"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=hluyv4vC"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=83AwYxsw"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?i=83AwYxsw" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=Vh4GNHcL"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=9mpEGAPg"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?i=9mpEGAPg" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/cnn_topstories/~4/avBWxb4Jsjk" height="1" width="1"/

The Mumbai attacks remind the world that the intertwined problems of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan will be the most extreme foreign policy challenge that President Obama will face as he assumes office.div class="feedflare" a href="http://rss.cnn.com:80/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=2ZbEcEVW"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com:80/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=hluyv4vC"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com:80/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=83AwYxsw"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?i=83AwYxsw" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com:80/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=Vh4GNHcL"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com:80/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=9mpEGAPg"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?i=9mpEGAPg" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/cnn_topstories/~4/avBWxb4Jsjk" height="1" width="1"/

Image via Wikipedia

Esta noche estuve ayudando a mi segunda hija, Isabella, de 16 años a estudiar historia de la India a principios 1900. Tiene un examen mañana. Al final me quedé enganchadísimo con un tema y es el de la zona de la actual frontera Afganistán/Pakistán que pertenecía a la provincia del noroeste de la India y lo trataba de gestionar inutilmente el Virrey Curzon.

Estudiar el conflicto entre los rusos y los ingleses por dominar lo que es hoy Afganistán (Great Game) y ver como tanto los rusos como los ingleses fracasaron rotundamente en la zona Pakistán/Afganistán de los Pashtunes, es darse cuenta que los norteamericanos y europeos ahora en Afganistán no hemos aprendido mucho. De lo que leí me impresionó este artículo sacado de la Wikipedia. Especialmente esta frase de cuando los ingleses pelearon contra los Pashtuns.

The British, who had captured most of rest of South Asia without significant problems, faced a number of difficulties here. The first war with the Pashtuns resulted in a devastating defeat, with just one soldier coming back alive (out of a total of 14,800 people).

Enviaron 14,800 soldados a pelear contra los Pashtuns de Afganistán y volvió uno solo.

Por todo lo que leí pasaron 100 años pero poco parece haber cambiado. Tratar de controlar Afganistán/Pakistán sigue siendo misión imposible. También se entiende como los antentados terribles de Bombay pueden venir de Pakistán pero que Pakistán en si no sea culpable de esos antentados porque la zona de las tribus Pashtun es hace siglo tierra de guerreros fanáticos (los Talibanes entre otros) que no solo causan muchos problemas a su alrededor pero meterse con ellos parece ser entrar a un agujero negro de la muerte. Esta zona combina partes de Afganistán y Pakistán. Cito un artículo de la experta María Amparo Tortosa Garrigós publicado en el periódico online de mi fundación.

Los datos arrojados por el período de extensión de las operaciones de combate de la Coalición anglo-americana indican un aumento terrorista desde que se impulsaran. Mientras de 2001 a 2003 no hubo ataques suicidas, en el 2004 hubo tres, en 2005 diecisiete, y en 2006 la cifra se disparó a 124 con un resultado de 4.400 víctimas. “Se está perdiendo también la batalla de la opinión afgana hacia la presencia internacional en el país” ¿Con qué coincide este pico? Con la expansión de dichas operaciones al surete (verano de 2006 Operación Medusa a Kandahar, y en marzo de 2007 a Helmand con la operación Aquiles). A ello hay que sumar que en 2007 hubo 137 ataques suicidas con un resultado de 6000 muertes (de las cuales 210 eran soldados de la Coalición y 700 afganos). Tan sólo en junio de ese año morían 90 civiles en diez días debido a los daños colaterales. En lo que va de 2008 hay contabilizadas 4.300 víctimas civiles.

Supongo que hay dos razones para estar ahora ocupando Afganistán, una ocupación de la que España es parte. Una es que en el mismo Afganistán no se cometan atrocidades en contra de la mujer, las niñas, y todos los habitantes en general. Todos sabemos los horrores y abusos que cometieron los Talibanes (en su mayoría Pashtuns). Pero francamente aunque entiendo que nos preocupen los derechos humanos en Afganistán no me parece fácil explicarle a un padre o una madre española que su hijo/a murió defendiendo los derechos de las niñas afganas a ir al colegio. La otra razón para invadir es porque si nosotros nos vamos vuelve Al Qaeda y desde ahí exporta terrorismo como ya lo hizo controlando el gobierno. Esta justficación es más razonable y probada históricamente porque así hizo Osama Bin Laden, se adueñó del gobierno y atacó occidente. Pero el coste de quedarse ahí, según lo que aprendí ayudando a Isabella, será muy alto. Las posibilidades de realmente reformar Afganistán y transformarlo en algo parecido a una democracia, diría que muy bajas. En mucho de estos casos me pregunto si no será más sencillo tener más seguridad en la frontera e interna que tratar de mantener invasiones como las de Irak y Afganistán.

Termino recomendando el artículo del profesor Zidane Zeraoui publicado hoy por el periódico online de mi fundación sobre el tema de qué puede hacer el gobierno de la India luego de que se sabe que el ataque a Bombay viene de Pakistán.

Compártelo

A federal judge re-imposed a 22-year prison sentence for terrorist Ahmed Ressam, an Al Qaeda-trained terrorist convicted of plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport at the turn of the millennium.