President Barack Obama has just pledged to make a new start for United States relations with the Muslim world: "To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect," he said in his inaugural address. "To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West - know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."

(Photo: President Obama delivers his inaugural address, 20 Jan 2009/Jason Reed)

It's not clear what he plans to do. One idea he's mentioned is to deliver a major speech in a Muslim country in his first year in office. There's already a lively discussion on the web about where he should go. During his speech, CNN showed a shot of the crowd with some people holding up signs urging him to deliver the speech in Morocco.

Before this train starts rolling, it might be useful to recall that some Islam experts don't think it's a good idea for him to deal with "the Muslim world" as a bloc opposed to the West. Two French experts on Islam, Olivier Roy and Justin Vaisse, argued this in a New York Times op-ed piece last month. Here is the full text and below are excerpts.

Do you think it's helpful for Obama to talk about the Muslim world as a distinct bloc?  Would he actually play into Osama bin Laden's hands by talking about the Muslim world and the West as distinct entities? If so, what should he do?

As Roy and Vaisse wrote:

"Such an initiative would reinforce the all-too-accepted but false notion that “Islam” and “the West” are distinct entities with utterly different values. Those who want to promote dialogue and peace between “civilizations” or “cultures” concede at least one crucial point to those who, like Osama bin Laden, promote a clash of civilizations: that separate civilizations do exist. They seek to reverse the polarity, replacing hostility with sympathy, but they are still following Osama bin Laden’s narrative.

"Instead, Mr. Obama, the first “post-racial” president, can do better. He can use his power to transform perceptions to the long-term advantage of the United States and become a “post-civilizational” president. The page he should try to turn is not that of a supposed war between America and Islam, but the misconception of a monolithic Islam being the source of the main problems on the planet: terrorism, wars, nuclear proliferation, insurgencies and the like...

"The truth is, Islam explains very little. There are as many bloody conflicts outside of regions where Islam has a role as inside them. There are more Muslims living under democracies than autocracies. There is no less or no more economic development in Muslim countries than in their equivalent non-Muslim neighbors. And, more important, there exist as many varieties of Muslims as there are adherents of other religions. This is why Mr. Obama should not give credence to the existence of an Islam that could supposedly be represented by its “leaders”.

Osama bin Laden is no longer involved in the day-to-day planning of attacks, Germany’s spy chief says, arguing that al Qaeda has turned from a centralised force into a regionalised “franchise company” with power centres in Pakistan, North Africa and the Arab peninsula. Does this weaken or strengthen the Islamist militant group? And how does it influence its operations, planning of attacks and its efforts to recruit new followers?

Ernst Uhrlau, who heads the BND foreign intelligence agency, Germany’s equivalent of the CIA, says al Qaeda’s “concept” has changed significantly over the past few years. “After the centralisation phase and the break-up of its bases in Afghanistan, when it had the backing of the Taliban government, we have seen a regionalisation over the past four years — something like a franchise company.”    “Today, there is al Qadea in the Maghreb, al Qaeda on the Arab Peninsula, in Iraq, in Yemen,” Uhrlau told Reuters in an interview this week. (more…)

Is U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama going to heed calls from Pakistani-Americans to tone down his statements on hunting militants inside Pakistan ?

Democrat Obama and Republican candidate John McCain face off in a final debate in New York state on Wednesday night.

While the global financial crisis will likely overshadow everything else, the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan, now seen as the central front against al Qaeda, is sure to figure high in the foreign policy segment of the debate, as happened in the previous two meetings. The war in Iraq has actually faded from view in the election, as this Reuters analysis says, and the focus instead is on Pakistan, Iran and the pursuit of Osama bin Laden.

Soon after last week’s debate, where Obama reiterated his long-held position of going after targets inside Pakistan if Islamabad was unable or unwilling to do so, a group of Pakistani-Americans and anti-war activists wrote to him urging restraint, according to the Chicago Tribune.

“We are particularly concerned with your public pronouncements earlier this week in support of  violating the borders of our ally, the country of Pakistan. . . . You must understand the sweeping dismay that your avowed support for U.S. military incursions into Pakistan . . . has elicited among untold numbers of Pakistani-Americans and peace activists across the country,” the group said in the letter sent to Obama’s Chicago office.

The newspaper also quoted the host of a Pakistani radio talk show in Chicago as saying the U.S. was making a “mistake” by “attacking Pakistan and making Pakistan your enemy.”

Obama has said he wasn’t advocating the invasion of Pakistan, but that taking out militants, including bin Laden, had to be the “biggest national security priority”. McCain chided his rival, saying he would rather work with the Pakistani government instead of threatening attacks.

(You can read what the two candidates said on foreign policy during the last debate here.)

Pakistanis are also trying to read the tea leaves, especially in the event of an Obama presidency, as his lead over McCain widens. South Asia Investor Review, a blog on issues on the subcontinent, has been going over comments by former CIA officer Bruce Riedel who the New York Times identified as a key member of the Obama foreign policy team, specializing on India, Pakistan and South Asia.

“Obama is determined to put a lot more resources into the war in Afghanistan - and it’s overlapped into Pakistan - than either a McCain presidency would or the Bush administration did,” Riedel is quoted as saying by South Asia Investor Review.  For Obama  Afghanistan and Pakistan are “the central front of the war against al Qaeda and the war against extremism” according to Riedel.

“Translation: The war in Afghanistan will escalate and expand into Pakistan,” says the South Asia Investor Review.

But another Pakistani blog has pitched for Obama, saying while there wasn’t much of a difference between the two candidates over the approach to Pakistan, the Democrat appeared to propose a quick clean up of the mess there. McCain, by contrast, was proposing “a slow but extensively drawn out plan of action, which I feel actually means a long term American presence in Pakistan,” said Teeth Maestro, a blog that has been closely covering nuances of the debate on Pakistan in the U.S. election.

“If they are both generally coming with the same mindset then I feel I would carefully put my eggs into Obama’s basket,” the blog’s author said.
 

There have been many contradictory reports this week about whether Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, had died. Pakistan’s Geo television channel said that the leader of the Pakistani Taliban had died of kidney failure after a long illness, while a Taliban spokesman dismissed the report.

I’m not going to add to that speculation here. What does strike me, though, is that the attention paid to talk of Mehsud’s death was greater than that given to reports that frequently do the rounds about the fate of Osama bin Laden.

In a detailed profile in the Long War Journal, the author writes that Mehsud is now considered to be  “a threat as big as, or bigger than, even Osama bin Laden”. A guerrilla leader credited with uniting many of Pakistan’s often disparate militants under the banner of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan late last year, Mehsud gained worldwide notoriety when he was accused of involvement in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto – an accusation he has denied.

So does Osama bin Laden matter any more?

As the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, it is Mehsud, rather than bin Laden, who is seen as the leader of a movement that has fuelled a series of bomb attacks inside Pakistan, and challenged any attempt by the Pakistan Army to tame the tribal areas along Pakistan’s border which are home to both Pakistani and Afghan insurgents.

Then when people talk about the insurgents attacking U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, again rarely does bin Laden’s name crop up.  The Los Angeles Times writes of a “trio of warlords” with bases in Pakistan, blamed for a surge in violence in Afghanistan. The three, also mentioned in this piece in the U.S. Army Times,  are Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, both veterans of the campaign against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, and Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar, believed to be hiding somewhere around the Pakistani city of Quetta in Balochistan.

All are said to have links with al Qaeda, while retaining their own separate motivations, identities and loyalties. Where does that leave bin Laden? Has he become just a name? An idea?

And did he ever have the reach and power that was ascribed to him? Or has he always been what one commenter on an earlier blog described as just “a guy living in a cave”?

Both the United States and Osama bin Laden are losing support in Pakistan, according to the latest Pew Global Attitudes report released this week (download the full PDF report to see details on Pakistan).

The poll, conducted before the resignation of former President Pervez Musharraf, showed faith in U.S. intentions towards democracy  was weaker than ever - only 20 percent believed the United States favoured democracy in Pakistan, down from 39 percent in 2005.

Confidence in Osama bin Laden to do the right thing regarding world affairs had also dropped, from 51 percent in 2005 to 34 percent. “On balance, more Pakistanis express a negative than a positive view of the Taliban and al Qaeda,” the report said. ”One third of Pakistanis hold an unfavourable view of the Taliban (33 percent) and al Qaeda (34 percent). Roughly one quarter hold a favourable view of both groups while many Pakistanis do not express an opinion about either.”

Unsurprisingly for a country that has been hit by a series of bomb attacks, the report showed a steady decline in the numbers saying that suicide bombings can often or sometimes be justified — 81 percent of Pakistani respondents said that suicide violence can never be justified. Seventy-two percent said they were concerned about Islamic extremism in Pakistan.

These results were probably to be expected, but I thought they were worth highlighting given the intensity of the debate over U.S. strikes on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.  

Among the other nuggets in the report was evidence of an enormous level of support for Saudi Arabia.  Among Pakistani respondents, 97 percent held positive views about Saudi Arabia, up from 87 percent a year ago — quite interesting given that Pakistan has traditionally looked at China as its most loyal ally. The finding may reflect hopes that Saudi oil money will help bail out the country’s struggling economy; or there may also be a siege mentality creeping in that has driven Pakistanis to turn more and more to the homeland of Islam — the report says that 56 percent of Indians, and 55 percent of the Chinese, said they had a negative impression of Muslims.

Among Muslim countries surveyed, Pakistan scored high in those who said Shiite-Sunni tensions were a growing problem for the Muslim world — 69 percent saw it as a problem that reached well beyond Iraq.

It would probably be unwise to draw any major conclusions from the report, beyond the obvious picture of a complex and volatile country. But it will be interesting to see how support for the United States, al Qaeda and the Taliban changes over time, after the tensions over the Pakistan-Afghanistan border have been played out.

Speculation the United States is preparing to send commandos into Pakistan’s tribal areas to hunt down al Qaeda and Taliban militants is gathering momentum.  Pakistani fears of a U.S. attack were reinforced by a surprise visit to Pakistan this weekend by the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, in which he was reported to have expressed U.S. frustration that Islamabad was not doing enough to tackle militants on its border with Afghanistan.

The Daily Times says in an article from Washington that Mullen had been expected to ”read the riot act” to the government. It quoted an unnamed ”well-informed source” as saying that U.S. patience was close to running out.  When it did, the paper said, there would be  unilateral US military action, both covert and overt, in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Dawn quotes a senior Pakistani official  as saying that while the ”possibility” of direct American military action in the tribal areas was always there, now the “probability” has suddenly increased. It says President George W. Bush might want to be able to tell the American public before he leaves office that Osama bin Laden or one of his top lieutenants had been captured or killed.

And the Houston Chronicle last week quoted three Texas congressmen briefed during a trip to the region as saying that American commandos are poised to stage “hot pursuit” raids into Pakistan’s tribal areas to stem mounting Taliban attacks against U.S. troops in Afghanistan and to disrupt efforts by al Qaeda to plan strikes against the United States.

The United States has already stepped up patrols by unmanned Predator aircraft in the tribal areas, angering Pakistan which sees it as an invasion of sovereignty and terrifying the local population who do not know when the drones are likely to unleash missiles on suspected militant hideouts.

But sending in ground troops would be a major new departure with highly unpredictable consequences. In a comment in an earlier blog I posted on this subject,  Pakistan military expert Brian Cloughley says any decision to send in U.S. special forces would lead to disaster.

“Anyone who knows the Federally Administered Tribal Areas,” he writes, “realises that the presence of even Pakistani troops excites resentment — to put it mildly. If a score or so of US Green Berets (or whatever) were heli-landed or parachuted in, there would be tribal reaction of the utmost ferocity. If they tried to walk in from Afghanistan it would be the duty of the Frontier Corps or the Pakistan army to repel them. And US ground forces, these days, are incapable of fighting without massive air support. So if they called in airstrikes within Pakistan the PAF would have no alternative but to support their own kin, and use their American-supplied F-16s to counter violations of Pakistan’s airspace by US aircraft.” 

And this is what a former CIA officer had to say about a plan, called off at the last minute, to send in commandos in 2005. According to the New York Times, he had ”told the military guys that this thing was going to be the biggest folly since the Bay of Pigs.”