A single paragraph in General Stanley McChrystal's leaked assessment of the war in Afghanistan has generated much interest, particularly in Pakistan.

"Indian political and economic influence is increasing in Afghanistan, including significant development efforts and financial investment," it says. "In addition the current Afghan government is perceived by Islamabad to be pro-Indian. While Indian activities largely benefit the Afghan people, increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani counter-measures in Afghanistan or India."

He did not say anything that anybody did not already know. Pakistan has long been wary of India's growing influence in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and is seen as reluctant to turn against the Afghan Taliban and other insurgent groups as long as it believes it might need them to counter India. The fact that he said it all suggested a renewed focus on the relationship between India and Pakistan, whose confrontation to the east spilled long ago into rivalry over Afghanistan to the west.

Pakistan's Daily Times said in an editorial the rivalry between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan highlighted the need for peace talks between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, which have fought three full-scale wars since independence in 1947, two of them over Kashmir.

"One must be clear in one’s mind that in many ways the mess in Afghanistan is actually a spillover of the Indo-Pak conflict in the region of South Asia," it said. "Pakistan’s policy of “strategic depth”, which reached a climax with the hijacking of an Indian airliner to Kandahar in 1999, was in reaction to the unresolved dispute over Kashmir which created the “threat of India” that Pakistan felt “from the east”. Even today, as Pakistan struggles against the Taliban, 80 percent of its army is stationed on the Indian border.

Dawn newspaper said McChrystal's words on India were "perhaps as significant as any other in the report".  The Americans appeared to have finally understood, it said, that the war in Afghanistan could not be won without help from Pakistan. "But that means gaining Pakistan’s full cooperation, which in turn means alleviating the national security establishment’s concerns vis-à-vis India."

However, as discussed in this analysis, India is in little mood to move rapidly towards peace talks with Pakistan until it takes greater action against militants it blames for last year's attack on Mumbai, although the two countries have been taking incremental steps towards repairing relations. Many argue that the powerful Pakistan Army would be unlikely to turn against militant groups it once cultivated to fight India in Kashmir, without a comprehensive peace settlement with India. (For an understanding of how complicated all this is, read this book reviewby Pakistani strategic analyst Ayesha Siddiqa.)

So, to win the war in Afghanistan, the United States needs help from Pakistan, which Pakistan in turn is reluctant to provide so long as it believes it is threatened by India to both the west and east.  From Washington's point of view, it needs to nudge Islamabad and New Delhi towards the negotiating table, by leaning on Pakistan to act against militant groups and putting pressure on India to resume peace talks. 

Here is another catch. Although the relationship between the United States and India blossomed under former President George W. Bush, there is far less warmth in New Delhi towards the Obama administration. The relationship started on the wrong foot with India concerned about increasing U.S. economic dependence on its rival China.

Now India and the United States are at loggerheads over President Barack Obama's nuclear non-proliferation drive.  India has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That row, in turn, complicates efforts by Washington to persuade India to talk to Pakistan.

(Reuters file photos: Obama with Karzai and Biden; a British soldier in Afghanistan; hijacked Indian Airlines plane in Kandahar)

Back in 2008, even before Barack Obama was elected, Washington pundits were urging him to adopt a new regional approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan involving Russia, India, China, Saudi Arabia and even Iran. The basic argument was that more troops alone would not solve the problems, and that the new U.S administration needed to subsume other foreign policy goals to the interests of winning a regional consensus on stabilising Afghanistan.

It would be simplistic to suggest that the Obama administration's decision to cancel plans to build a missile-shield in eastern Europe was motivated purely -- or even primarily -- by a need to seek Russian help in Afghanistan. But it certainly serves as a powerful reminder about how far that need to seek a "grand bargain" on Afghanistan may be reshaping and influencing policy decisions around the world.

"Securing Afghanistan and its region will require an international presence for many years, but only a regional diplomatic initiative that creates a consensus to place stabilizing Afghanistan ahead of other objectives could make a long-term international deployment possible," Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid argued in their much-cited 2008 policy paper titled "From Great Game to Grand Bargain". (pdf document).

Many of those arguments reappeared in a more recent report by the Asia Society (pdf document) -- formerly chaired by U.S special envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke -- so they are worth studying closely.

The ideas were ambitious and far-reaching, from remapping relations between Russia and the United States, prodding India and Pakistan towards a peace deal on Kashmir, seeking help from Iran and drawing in China and Saudi Arabia.  Some of those ideas were blown off course by the financial crisis, by the row in Iran over its disputed election, and by last November's attack on Mumbai which undermined U.S. attempts to steer India and Pakistan towards a peace deal.

And recently, they had been almost completely drowned by the media focus on military tactics and the merits of sending more troops to Afghanistan. With the U.S. decision to cancel the missile shield, one of those ideas -- about seeking Russian help in Afghanistan -- may have finally managed to break above the surface again.

In the case of Russia, the question was always about what price the United States was willing to pay to win Moscow's help in Afghanistan, possibly through less ardent support for NATO aspirants Ukraine and Georgia and a review of the missile shield due to be set up in the Czech Republic and Poland.

Obama already moved to try to assuage fears in Moscow and elsewhere that the United States might be seeking a permanent military presence in Afghanistan, a long-standing concern in Russia wary of having U.S. troops in what it sees as its backyard. “Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no military bases there," Obama said in his speech in Cairo in June. 

But it has been unclear how much further he might be willing to compromise to win Russia's support for what has become widely known as "Obama's war" in Afghanistan.

As discussed in this post, the Moscow Times spelled out what it saw as the price of Russian cooperation in Afghanistan in an op-ed published before Obama's inauguration:

“Afghanistan may well define your foreign policy legacy the way Iraq defined Bush’s," it said. "You will need all the support you can muster, including from Iran. You will also need Russia’s support. Moscow understands that the stability of its southern flank will hugely depend on what happens on the Hindu Kush mountain range in eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. But Moscow is torn between giving support to the West and preparing for the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. The latter would mean cutting deals with the Taliban locally and relying on China strategically. You can help Russia make the right choice.”

Of course, there are many other reasons for, and consequences of, the U.S. decision on the missile shield, as discussed here and here.

But if anyone wants a steer on the likely direction of U.S. foreign policy, and its implications globally, it's probably worth rereading Barnett Rubin's "grand bargain" proposal from last year. Diplomacy is the art of the possible, and nobody expects the recommendations to be followed to the letter. But with Obama a considerably more cerebral president than his predecessor, the old "Read my Lips" slogan probably needs to be replaced with a new one: "Read the pdf."

(You can also find regular updates on the progress in relations between India and Pakistan -- one of the key themes of that report -- on "Pakistan:Now or Never", most recently in this post)

(Reuters photos: Girl in Afghanistan; Holbrooke, Obama)

Try hard as you can, there doesn't seem to be any escaping from comparing America's eight-year war in Afghanistan to the one it fought in Vietnam.

Every now and then, either when there is a fresh setback or a key moment in Afghanistan's turbulent history, like last week when it went to the polls to choose a president, the debate flares anew.

Foreign Policy magazine has a provocative piece headlined "Saigon 2009: Afghanistan is today's Vietnam. No question mark needed." No matter who wins last week's election, America is certainly not winning the war in Afghanistan because it is committing the same mistakes it did in Vietnam, authors Thomas H.Johnson and M Chris Mason argue.

The parallels are just too strong, too structural to be ignored. Both Afghanistan and Vietrnam (prior to U.S. engagement there) had surprisingly defeated a European power in a guerrilla war that lasted a decade, followed by a civil war which last another decade. Insurgents in both enjoyed the advantage of a long, trackless and unclosable border and sanctuary beyond it, the authors say.

Both were land wars in Asia with logistics lines more than 9,000 miles long and extremely harsh terrain with few roads, which nullified U.S. advantages in ground mobility and artillery. Almost exactly 80 percent of the population of both countries was rural, and literacy hovered around 10 percent. In both countries, the United States sought to create an indigenous army modeled in its own image, based on U.S. army organization charts.

But above all, the United States has consistently and profoundly misunderstood the nature of the enemy in each circumstance, the authors say. "In Vietnam, the United States insisted on fighting a war against communism, while the enemy was fighting a war of national reunification. In Afghanistan, the United States still insists on fighting a secular counterinsurgency, while the enemy is fighting a jihad.".  In short, it is hard, almost impossible, to defeat an enemy you don't understand.

Already, like the Vietnam war, support is starting to dwindle at home with a Washington Post-ABC poll showing the number of Americans who believed the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting slipping to below 50 percent.

Is Afghanistan already starting to weigh on President Barack Obama, then ? The New York Times this weekend questioned whether he was fated to be another Lyndon B. Johnson,  and not another Abraham Lincoln or the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt as his supporters portrayed him to be even before he took office.

Each presidency is different, but it is "the L.B.J. model — a president who aspired to reshape America at home while fighting a losing war abroad — is one that haunts Mr. Obama’s White House as it seeks to salvage Afghanistan while enacting an expansive domestic program," the newspaper said.  Obama himself  has expressed concern that Afghanistan may yet hijack his presidency, it reported based on accounts of a group of historians who had dinner with him at the White House this summer.

Like Johnson, Obama has framed Afghanistan as a war of necessity and not choice. Just as Johnson had no choice but to fight in Vietnam to contain communism,  America has to be engaged in Afghanistan as the bulwark against international terrorism.  "Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban  insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans," he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their convention in Phoenix last week.

But is it really a war of necessity ? Richard Haas, the president of the Council of Foreign Relations, argues it was necessary to go into Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, but no longer to remain there. Wars of necessity must meet two tests, he says in an op-ed in the New York Times. They must involve vital national interests, and second, a lack of viable alternatives to the use of military power to defend those interests.

While it was necessary to invade Afghanistan to oust the Taliban,  now that there is a friendly government in Kabul is it necessary to maintain a military presence ? While it is true that the government is weak, and unable to enforce its writ in large parts of the country, it is equally true that terrorism cannot be eliminated even if you had a strong government, Haas argues.

 Militants could still operate from Afghanistan and would put down roots elsewhere. And Pakistan’s future would remain uncertain at best.

Moreover, he says  there are alternatives available.  The United States can begin to curtail  ground combat operations and emphasise drone attacks on militants, the training of Afghan police officers and soldiers, development and diplomacy to fracture the Taliban.

A more radical approach would be withdraw completely and focus on regional and global counter-terrorism efforts and homeland security initiatives to protect the United States from threats that may emanate from Afghanistan, Haas suggests, In that sense, Afghanistan would resemble the approach toward Somalia and other countries where governments are unable or unwilling to take on militants, and the United States eschews military confrontation.

But is the world ready for that ?

[Photographs of Afghan women voting, U.S. troops in Bagram and Obama in Phoenix last week]

TEGUCIGALPA - When ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya made a symbolic (and brief) return to his homeland on Friday, what could have been a potentially dangerous situation turned out to be a show for live television — a far cry from the bloody coups of the past in Latin America.

Even as he walked toward the border in sight of Honduran security forces waiting to arrest him, Zelaya, in his trademark cowboy hat, took a call from CNN’s Spanish language channel and conducted a long interview with the broadcaster.

The de facto leader of Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, dismissed the scene as a media circus, “irresponsible, ill conceived and not very serious.”

Micheletti’s interim government has been using the media, too.

State television has been repeatedly playing rousing music over pictures of pro-Micheletti marches and slogans urging Hondurans to “Hold Firm” for peace and democracy. One of the most frequently played pieces is the stirring theme music from the 1980s movie about U.S. Navy fighter pilots, “Top Gun.”

Periodically, authorities cut transmission on all cable channels and broadcast announcements about curfews on local TV stations. Uniformed police officers are hosting news programs. 

At the time when Zelaya was staging his symbolic come-back on the border, state TV stations were showing a meeting of an electoral committee and a demonstration by Hondurans waving blue and white flags and holding placards (some in English) praising Micheletti and denouncing Zelaya.

Television spots accusing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a socialist and ally of Zelaya, of orchestrating the coup are also frequent. 

Venezuelan TV channel Telesur has been blocked in Honduras, leaving many with cable to rely on CNN en Espanol as their main source of television news from outside Honduras. (Spanish speakers should read this article by my colleague Juana Casas)

Most Honduran newspapers support the new government and a pro-Zelaya radio station, Radio Globo, is the one of the few Honduran news outlets giving airtime to Zelaya himself.

This may be the age of the Internet, but Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and Zelaya’s supporters, as he tells it, are “the people.”

Some supporters of Micheletti have been using the Internet to try to persuade the outside world that Zelaya’s ouster was not a coup. To read a lively debate on this matter see this blog I wrote earlier in the month.

As the crisis drags on with no immediate sign of a solution, tell us who you think is winning the media war.  

Check out some of the web sites of the Honduran newspapers here:

La Tribuna, La Prensa, El Heraldo, Tiempo

PHOTOS BY REUTERS show Zelaya on the border on July 24 and pro-Micheletti supporters a few days after the June 28 coup.

Barack Obama’s American admirers are not the only ones who compare former U.S. President John F. Kennedy to the current U.S. leader. Leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a vociferous critic of the United States, also invokes the charismatic late president when he talks about Obama, who, like Kennedy 48 years earlier, was a young senator when he was elected to the White House.

Chavez brought up Kennedy again this week, as he railed against Washington over the coup in Honduras, which many observers have called an unwelcome reminder of the ousters of Latin American leftists during the Cold War — waged partly under Kennedy.

Obama must “stop dithering” and prove that he is not supporting the coup, Chavez thundered during “Alo Presidente,” his weekly television show.  ”I want to remember President Kennedy,” Chavez said, during the seven-hour broadcast.

“U.S. imperialism killed him, and I hope it does not kill   Obama, because Obama is in the same shirt of 11 rods, a shirt of 11 rods,” Chavez said, using a Spanish idiom referring to a situation too large for someone to handle.

 Chavez has been no fan of recent U.S. leaders. He repeatedly called George W. Bush “the devil.” And he has said he fears Obama has the “stench” of his predecessor, whom he accused of backing a brief coup against him in 2002.

But Kennedy is Chavez’s favorite U.S. president and the fiery ex-paratrooper has reminisced about his childhood admiration for the slain leader, despite his anti-Communism and backing of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which sought to oust Chavez’s mentor, Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Kennedy was a force for reform in the United States, Chavez says, and praises his Alliance for Progress economic program for Latin America for trying to improve conditions for the poor, even though it was intended as a counter to Communist Cuba’s influence in the region.
Of course, Chavez is hardly the only Latin American leftist who admires the United States’ first Roman Catholic president.

Kennedy is also a favorite of Fidel Castro.

Picture Credit: Chavez riding a tractor during “Alo Presidente” on July 12, 2009 : REUTERS/Maria Cecilia Toro/Miraflores Palace/Handout

Picture Credit: Chavez gives Obama a book on April 18, 2009: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

As expected, U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech to Africa in Accra had plenty to say on the importance of good governance – but there was also a very strong message that his “new moment of promise” is one that Africans have to seize for themselves.

"You have the power to hold your leaders accountable, and to build institutions that serve the people. You can serve in your communities, and harness your energy and education to create new wealth and build new connections to the world. You can conquer disease, end conflicts, and make change from the bottom up. You can do that. Yes you can. Because in this moment, history is on the move,” Obama said.

"Freedom is your inheritance. Now, it is your responsibility to build upon freedom's foundation. And if you do, we will look back years from now to places like Accra and say that this was the time when the promise was realized -- this was the moment when prosperity was forged; pain was overcome; and a new era of progress began. This can be the time when we witness the triumph of justice once more."

To listen to the whole speech, you can find a link on the White House website.

As Obama put it: "Make no mistake: history is on the side of these brave Africans, and not with those who use coups or change constitutions to stay in power. Africa doesn't need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.”

There was no doubt they were strong words from the son of a Kenyan immigrant, who through elections has become the leader of the world’s most powerful country. Obama’s background may also give his message a better chance of being heard than those of past American leaders lecturing Africa on what it needs to do.

But when all is said and done and Obama flies off to deal with more urgent U.S. priorities, will the message be heeded? Will Africa live up to that promise?

By Sara Webb

It takes India weeks to complete an election and it never passes without flashes of violence.

But the much younger democracy of Indonesia voted calmly for their president on Wednesday and got the voting over in five hours with a good indication of the result — a second term for the reformist ex-general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono — out just a couple of hours later.

“Faster, Better,” was the racy campaign slogan of Jusuf Kalla, one of Yudhoyono’s challengers. He trailed in a distant

third, but his rally cry somehow seems fitting for the country’s remarkable journey since the chaotic coda of President Suharto’s authoritarian rule a decade ago.

And yet if you talk to many Indonesians, they’ll tell you that the whole campaign, which kicked off in January and encompassed parliamentary elections before Wednesday’s vote, has been one long bore.

The series of televised debates by the presidential and vice presidential candidates were so polite and deferential, so Javanese really, that it was hard at times to believe that here were three teams actually competing against each other. Perhaps it’s unfair to mention it on his victory day, but Yudhoyono himself has been known to send listener’s off to sleep with his speeches.

Maybe “boring” is good, a sign that democracy isn’t a novelty anymore — just a fact of Indonesian life.

Still, there were moments during the election campaign when things got a little bit edgier in this predominantly Muslim country, where religion is increasingly a sensitive subject.

There were snide remarks about whether the wife of Yudhoyono’s running mate, Boediono, was a Catholic (she is Muslim), and whether the wives of Yudhoyono and Boediono ought to wear a headscarf, like the wives of their opponents.

And while Wednesday’s vote was an illustration of how much Indonesia has changed in the 11 years since Suharto’s ignominious exit, there were many reminders of that less glorious past.

Yudhoyono’s rivals, Megawati Sukarnoputri and Kalla, picked Suharto-era generals with terrible human rights records — Prabowo Subianto and Wiranto — as their running mates.

Prabowo, who was married to one of Suharto’s daughters, was responsible for the kidnapping and torture of some of Megawati’s supporters in 1998. Now, the two are the best of friends and Prabowo, a rousing speaker, most likely has his eye on the 2014 election.

“I think Indonesia needs a decisive military man. SBY? He is so Obama. When he speaks, he sounds exactly like Obama!,” said Lilik S. Wardi, a housewife in Surabaya after she had cast her vote. “So I chose Prabowo. I didn’t want a president who copies Obama’s style.”

It’s not quite as bad as it was back in 2003 when Gerhard Schroeder publicly chastised George W. Bush for invading Iraq and Condi Rice introduced a new policy in the White House called ”ignore Germany” (France was to be punished and Russia forgiven for their opposition to the war).

But relations between Berlin and Washington are probably as poor as they’ve been since Angela Merkel replaced Schroeder in 2005 and set Germany on a course of reconciliation with the United States.

After becoming accustomed to dinners in the White House, barbecues and back-rubs with Bush in his Europe-friendly second term, Merkel and her advisers in Berlin are agonising over a series of slights (perceived or real) from Obama since he came to office in January. 

First came the message from Washington that Obama might not continue the regular videoconferences Merkel held with Bush. In the end the White House came around, but it took two months to set one up.

Berlin also got the cold shoulder when Merkel tried to arrange a trip to Washington ahead of a G20 meeting in London at the start of April. Messages from Berlin with proposed dates went unanswered for days until Merkel’s team abandoned the idea completely, an official close to her told me.

This week came the latest signal, at least from Berlin’s perspective, that the Obama team is not taking German concerns seriously. 

The rescue of Opel, the German unit of U.S. carmaker General Motors, has become the central theme of a slow-to-get-started German election campaign that pits Merkel against her Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. A misstep on Opel and Merkel’s bid for a second term could be doomed.

But when she called an “Opel summit” for Wednesday to try to save the carmaker, her ministers were shocked to see only low-level representation from the U.S. Treasury — a crucial player in the discussions.

Merkel’s team in the Chancellery ended up excluding the envoy from the nitty gritty talks and a teleconference was set up with Ron Bloom, the former investment banker and  United Steel Workers veteran that was brought into the Treasury earlier this year to advise on auto bailouts.

The outrage at the U.S. stance, its nonchalant attitude and lack of preparation for the meeting was palpable in the voices Merkel’s ministers when they emerged from the 12-hour marathon to announce to weary reporters that no deal had been sealed.  

Some in Berlin have suggested that Obama is still punishing Merkel for not allowing him to speak at the Brandenburg Gate when he passed through Berlin last summer in the midst of his rousing campaign for the presidency.

According to this view, her government’s refusal to take on inmates from Guantanamo Bay, the prison for terrorist suspects Merkel lobbied hard to close, has reinforced the resentment in the Obama camp.

This might explain Obama’s decision to avoid Berlin when he visits Germany next week (he will go to Dresden and tour the Buchenwald concentration camp in the eastern state of Thuringia). Because Merkel failed to help him out during his election campaign, Obama is refusing to give her the honour of hosting him during hers.

But the truth may be less complicated. Obama has a daunting list of problems to tackle – from a sinking economy  to a worryingly complex set of foreign policy challenges in North Korea, Pakistan and Iran. Against that backdrop, he may not need Germany or Merkel as much as Berlin would like.

With President Hamid Karzai now looking all but unassailable in Afghanistan's August election, two articles out this week - one from Washington and the other from India - offer mirror-image analyses of President Barack Obama's handling of the Afghan leader. They should really be read as companion pieces since both offer insights into the workings of the Obama administration and the complexities of Afghan politics.  Reading both together also highlights how different the world looks depending on your perspective, whether writing from America or Asia.

According to this article in the Washington Post by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (highlighted by Joshua Foust at Registan.net) the Obama administration had decided to keep Karzai at arm's length. It says Obama's advisers faulted former President George W. Bush for forging too personal a relationship with Karzai through bi-weekly video conferences and as a result creating such cosiness that it became hard for his administration to put pressure on the Afghan government.

"It was a conversation. It was a dialogue. It was a lot of 'How are you doing? How is your son?'" it quotes a senior U.S. government official who attended some of the sessions as saying. "Karzai sometimes placed his infant son on his lap during the conversations."

"Obama's advisers have crafted a two-pronged strategy that amounts to a fundamental break from the avuncular way President George W. Bush dealt with the Afghan leader," the report said.  "Obama intends to maintain an arm's-length relationship with Karzai in the hope that it will lead him to address issues of concern to the United States, according to senior U.S. government officials. The administration will also seek to bypass Karzai by working more closely with other members of his cabinet and by funnelling more money to local governors."

Retired Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, has a rather different reading on the wisdom of the Obama administration's approach. In this article in the Asia Times Online, headlined What Obama could learn from Karzai, (highlighted by Marie-France Calle on her French-language blog), he says the Americans allowed themselves to be outmanoeuvred by the Afghan President by keeping him at arms-length.

"In retrospect, United States President Barack Obama did a great favour to Afghan President Hamid Karzai by excluding him from his charmed circle of movers and shakers who would wield clout with the new administration in Washington," he writes. "Obama was uncharacteristically rude to Karzai by not even conversing with him by telephone for weeks after he was sworn in, even though Afghanistan was the number one policy priority of his presidency."

But Karzai, he says, had the last laugh, as the opprobrium heaped upon him by the west raised his standing in Afghan eyes. Karzai had been able to manoeuvre himself into a strong position through weeks of Afghan-style backroom negotiations, capped by a decision by a popular candidate to pull out of the election race.

"The Afghan experience with democracy offers a good lesson for Obama: it is best to keep a discreet distance and leave the Afghans to broker power-sharing on their own terms, according to their own ethos and tradition," he writes. "However, Obama has a long way to go in imbibing the lessons of democracy in the Hindu Kush ..."

(Reuters photos: President Karzai, and Karzai with President Obama and Vice President Biden. Photos by Yuri Gripas and Jonathan Ernst)

Barely had President Barack Obama outlined a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan meant to narrow the focus to eliminating the threat from al Qaeda and its Islamist allies, before the U.S.-led campaign ran into what was always going to be one of its biggest problems in limiting its goals. What does it do about the rights of women in the region?

The treatment of women has dominated the headlines this week after Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed a new law for the minority Shi'ite population which both the United States and the United Nations said could undermine women's rights. Karzai has promised a review of the law, while also complaining it was misinterpreted by Western journalists. 

In Pakistan, video footage has been circulated of Taliban militants flogging a teenage girl in the Swat valley, where the government concluded a peace deal with the Taliban in February. The graphic and disturbing video, which has been posted on YouTube, has outraged many Pakistanis and the flogging was condemned by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani as shameful. There have been contradictory reports of exactly when and why the girl was punished, although Dawn newspaper quoted a witness as saying she was flogged two weeks ago for refusing a marriage proposal.

But where do women's rights fit into the new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan?

The New York Times quoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as saying in response to a question on the Afghan law that "women’s rights are a central part of the foreign policy of the Obama administration".

Mark Malloch Brown, Britain's foreign office minister for Africa, Asia and the U.N., was quoted by the Guardian as expressing dismay over the Afghan law's impact on women's rights. "We are caught in the Catch-22 that the Afghans obviously have the right to write their own laws," he said. "But there is dismay. The rights of women was one of the reasons the UK and many in the west threw ourselves into the struggle in Afghanistan. It matters greatly to us and our public opinion."

And NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the Afghan law could make it harder to raise troops to be sent to Afghanistan. "We are there to defend universal values and when I see, at the moment, a law threatening to come into effect which fundamentally violates women's rights and human rights, that worries me," he told the BBC.

Now, setting aside for the moment the question of how far the West should be prepared to fight for women's rights, compare these statements to what Obama said when he defined his strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan:

"Many people in the United States -- and many in partner countries that have sacrificed so much -- have a simple question: What is our purpose in Afghanistan?  After so many years, they ask, why do our men and women still fight and die there?  And they deserve a straightforward answer.

"So let me be clear: Al Qaeda and its allies -- the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks -- are in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al Qaeda is actively planning attacks on the United States homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan.  And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban -- or allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged -- that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can."

His comments were seen as a break from the aims of the former Bush administration to impose Western-style democracy in Afghanistan.  Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been clear about the need to keep the goals limited, telling Congress: “If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose.”

Narrowing the focus to defeating the threat from al Qaeda and its Islamist allies will force Washington to make some unpalatable choices about how far it is willing to turn a blind eye to the repressive treatment of women both in Afghan society and among the Pashtun tribals in Pakistan.  Is the renewed attention on women's rights the first evidence of mission creep?

You might argue, as does Rafia Zakaria in this editorial in the Daily Times, that there is a moral obligation to help Afghan women.  You might also argue that raising the status of women often has powerful impact on improving economic conditions -- helping to eliminate the poverty in which Islamist militancy thrives.

But that's far closer to nation-building than to setting limited goals. And it's not what Obama said when he defined the purpose of sending  men and women to fight and die in Afghanistan. 

(Reuters file photos: President Barack Obama, and women in Taloqan in Afghanistan)