A group of Pakistani kids have voted with their wallets (including Eid savings) for U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama, hoping he would resolve the conflict raging in their troubled northwest corner of the country through peaceful means.

The children in Peshawar, capital of the North-West Frontier Province which along with the Federally Administered Tribal Areas has become the central front in the battle against al Qaeda and the Taliban, had collected $261 for “Uncle Obama’s election campaign,”  The News reports.

The children, aged 10 and 13, gathered outside the Press Club in Peshawar, accompanied by their parents and teachers, holding placards highlighting the cycle of violence they were trapped in, the newspaper said.

“We hear Obama speaking in television debates and addressing public meetings about a safe and prosperous future for the American children and people. And this is what we desire for ourselves,” one of the boys said.

The idea behind the small donation to the Obama campaign, made out of pocket money and Eid gifts, was to draw the world’s attention to the dangers the children faced in the NWFP and tribal areas, they said. (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.
 

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone.  Joshua Foust is a defence analyst who also writes an Afghanistan blog for Global Voices  and is a contributing editor to Registan.net, a blog devoted to Central Asia and the Caucasus.

                                           The view from the heartland

                                                    By Joshua Foust

In much of the hoopla over the American presidential election - including what to do about Pakistan and Afghanistan - the voices of regular Americans are often lost in the noise.

As someone who has studied Central Asia and American foreign policy for several years since graduating from University, I am perhaps not a typical voter. But I do live in Kansas City, Missouri - literally the centre of America.

So when I was invited to write for this blog about the popular conceptions here of Pakistan and Afghanistan, I initially froze: how does one make sense of what people think of a distant part of the world? I’ve spent so much time trying to figure out what I think, getting at what others do as well seemed an enormous task. Regardless, I could discern a few common themes by talking to those around me.

Belinda is a statistical programmer. Though she says she doesn’t read international news as much as she should, she considers herself reasonably well informed. “I think the US conducting raids into Pakistan could lead us down a bad path,” she said, referring to both drone-fired missiles and troop incursions into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. She continued, “I think we need to tread really carefully.”

Christine, an entomologist, took a somewhat more flippant attitude. “The United States decided to tar and feather some insurgents and so he sent our military to go blow up homes in Pakistan.”

These two seemed perfectly representative of what I can only call “The Daily Show Set”-that is, those who watch John Stewart’s nightly mockery of the news. They see the need for caution, yet seem to feel they can have no influence over the choices of policy makers.

There is, as one might expect, a difference between white-collar professionals and blue-collar professionals. Jared, a plumber working for a commercial real estate management company, simply didn’t know what to think of it. “They seem like really tough people,” he said. “But I don’t know what else to think, ya know?”

I did know. Without pouring over the news and spending hours talking to those with a personal stake in matters there, it is difficult to form a solid opinion.

The challenge in being informed about Pakistan is most news sources simply do not discuss Pakistan (or the region as a whole) in any detail whatsoever, to say nothing of offering enough information to form opinions.

And the Presidential candidates have not helped matters much, either. No one I spoke to could say what the candidates have actually said about the region, though they all thought John McCain would probably take a military-first approach and Barrack Obama would take a more diplomatic route. But aside from generalities, people don’t seem to know what to think of the region.

There is universal agreement it is important, and that the United States needs to have an active presence in the area, but beyond this information is simply too scarce to draw deeper opinions.
 

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain stressed important differences in approach to Pakistan in their first debate.

On the surface, Obama advocated a tougher line, as he has done since the start of his campaign. “If the United States has al Qaeda, (Osama) bin Laden, top-level lieutenants in our sights, and Pakistan is unable or unwilling to act, then we should take them out,” he said. He talked about the $10 billion Washington had given to Pakistan in aid over the last seven years, saying it had failed to rid the border region of al Qaeda and the Taliban

“You have got to deal with Pakistan,” the Illinois senator said, and I coudn’t help thinking how those words will play out in a nation already under immense pressure from both the militants  and the United States.

McCain was more considered, saying he would work with the Pakistan government and that new President Asif Ali Zardari’s  (whose name he seemed to have mis-pronounced) had his plate  full. And he accused his rival of threatening Pakistan with military strikes. “You don’t say that aloud. If you have to do things, you have  to do things, and you work with the Pakistani government,” he  said.

As the New York Times said, Obama’s position is closer to President George W. Bush who this summer is reported to have authorised American special forces to cross the Afghan-Pakistan border into Pakistan’s tribal areas that al Qaeda and the Taliban have used as a sanctuary.

At its core, the candidates’ argument was about the “central front” in the war on terror. Obama said it was, and always has been, Pakistan’s tribal areas and the neighboring areas of Afghanistan. Iraq, he argued, was a dangerous distraction. McCain made the case that Iraq was the central front, noting that bin Laden himself had declared it the battle ground with America.

But Obama isn’t about to be attacking Pakistan and it would be a mischaracterisation to say he was advocating that position, says Changing up Pakistan blog. During the debate the Democrat made no mention of an attack on Pakistan’s sovereignty, on its people, or on the government, it said.

So how much is the difference between Obama and McCain’s positions on Pakistan one of presentation rather than substance? And equally importantly, would Obama’s strong words on Pakistan come back to haunt him if he were elected president and then compelled to carry through on his threat?
 
 
 

Given how little many people in the west seem to know about Pakistan — at most that it has nuclear weapons and, possibly, Osama bin Laden; rarely that it has 165 million people (not too far off three times the population of Britain) with individual day-to-day challenges of earning a living and bringing up children like anywhere else – it’s encouraging to see the range of debate in the U.S. blogosphere after President Pervez Musharraf announced his resignation.

Here are just a few that caught my eye, in no particular order, and with apologies in advance to anyone I’ve mislabelled as U.S.-based:

Larisa Alexandrovna writes that Musharraf’s departure could lead to a “catch-22 of epic proportions” for the United States because of the threat of terrorism and the nuclear black market: “Forget the Russian-Georgian conflict for a moment. Forget Iraq for a moment. Forget everything for one moment and understand, that if Pakistan explodes into a power struggle, that struggle/conflict will be the match that lights a world war of epic proportions. A war that we are not equipped to deal with anymore,” she says.

The Punditburo agrees that Pakistan is “far more important than Iraq as far as the issue of terrorism and Al Qaeda go”  but draws a different conclusion: “Democracy managed to arise in Pakistan, even though the Bushies fought it tooth and nail, and failed to even embrace democracy even when it was clear that Musharraf had no future. This should be tonic for our arrogance.”

Sepia Mutiny highlights an article in counterpunch by Fatima Bhutto, the niece of the late Benazir Bhutto, from whom she was estranged. In it she attacks both Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif – who forced Musharraf to quit after their parties won elections in February.  ”We have options,” she says. “Zardari is not an option. Sharif is not an option. The army is not our one and only option. The mullahs have not become an option yet. There are close to 200 million of us: I’m sure we can think of something better.”

But it would be wrong to suggest that Musharraf’s departure for once overshadowed the U.S. presidential election. The Huffington Post used it to attack presidential candidate John McCain, arguing that he had been an “outspoken” supporter of the former army general.

With both U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain calling for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan, there have been a slew of articles arguing this will at best not work and, at worst, fuel the insurgency.

The Financial Times quotes Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national security adviser and prominent supporter of Barack Obama, as saying the United States risks repeating the defeat suffered by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. “It is important for U.S. policy in general and for Obama more specifically to recognise that simply putting more troops into Afghanistan is not the entire solution,” he is quoted as saying.

“We are running the risk of repeating the mistake the Soviet Union made . . . Our strategy is getting in deeper and deeper.”

That theme is echoed in Canada’s Globe and Mail, whose correspondent in Moscow talked to veterans of the disastrous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1889, which helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union.  ”We knew by 1985 that we could not win,” it quotes veteran Ruslan Aushev as saying.  It then took Moscow four more years to extricate hundreds of thousands of troops.

In the Gulf News, Patrick Seale says that trying to force through a military solution on Afghanistan would be a grave mistake which would only radicalise the Muslim world further, while Juan Cole writes in salon.com that Obama could be jumping from the frying pan into the fire by shifting the focus away from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Are these the voices of reason that might temper the new U.S. zeal for taming Afghanistan — hoping to succeed where both the British and the Russians before them failed? Or will they be dismissed as pessimists?

For those with the patience for long-term solutions, here is a detailed piece from the Belfer Center which argues that the solution lies in restoring the autonomy and authority of the Pashtun tribes in both southern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. “Rather than seeking to extend the reach of the central government, which simply foments insurgency,” it says, ”the United States and the international community should be doing everything in their means to empower the tribal elders and restore balance to a tribal/cultural system that has been disintegrating since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.”

At the other end of the scale is a suggestion by U.S. counterinsurgency expert John Nagl that Afghanistan institute a draft to call up Afghans to fight the insurgency. ”It was good enough for the United States up until 1973,” said Nagl, an author and former U.S. Army battalion commander now at the Center for a New American Security think tank, according to this Reuters story. “How can it not be good enough for the fifth poorest country in the world which is afflicted by a difficult insurgency?”

No shortage of ideas out there then. But how many can be accommodated with the timespan of a U.S. presidential term, or indeed rushed through by the current U.S. administration, anxious to show a foreign policy success before President George W. Bush leaves office in January?

By pure coincidence, Pakistan and India are both embroiled at the same time in domestic rows over their nuclear bombs.

In Pakistan, disgraced nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan kicked up a storm by saying that the Pakistan Army under President Pervez Musharraf knew about the illegal shipment of uranium centrifuges to North Korea in 2000 — contradicting his earlier confession that he acted alone in spreading Pakistan’s nuclear arms technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Although Khan has subsequently suggested his remarks may have been overplayed, they are nonetheless likely to raise anxieties overseas about Pakistan’s nuclear programme.  His statement, and partial retraction, have also spawned a range of conspiracy theories about which of Pakistan’s squabbling politicians stood to gain from it, as seen in the comments to this blog on All Things Pakistan.

India has an entirely different problem, but nonetheless one which stems from domestic politics. A nuclear deal with the United States which would have given its nuclear programme legitimacy and, it hoped, set it on the road to superpower status, has foundered on opposition from the Congress-led government’s communist allies. The government is hoping to salvage the deal with support from the regional Samajwadi Party before time runs out on the Republican administration of President George W. Bush.

What is interesting is how these two very different issues will play out in the minds of U.S. voters and on perceptions within South Asia of the U.S. presidential elections.

Pakistanis are already worried that Barack Obama, if elected president, would take a harder line on Pakistan than the outgoing Bush administration which stands accused of failing to tackle al Qaeda hideouts there. The row about Pakistan’s nuclear programme can only make the country more vulnerable to U.S. pressure,  says Pakistan’s The Post.  And all this comes at a time when some are beginning to say that Pakistan would be better off if John McCain were to be elected. “Most Pakistanis may prefer Obama,” writes Ikram Sehgal in The News, but ” pragmatism and national interest dictate that McCain suits us far better as the next U.S. president.”

India has always been wary of the U.S. Democrats, who have been tougher on nuclear proliferation than the Republicans. So while Obama might have charmed Non-Resident Indians in the United States (who admittedly are the ones who will vote),  at home McCain looks like a better bet for upholding the nuclear deal. “Obama good for the world, McCain good for India,” wrote a blogger on merinews.

Is this the first sign of a convergence of views between India and Pakistan on who they want to become the next U.S. president? Or is it too early in the campaign to see clearly which candidate the two countries would prefer? And in any case, would U.S. voters care?

Some people have begun to voice what has been for some time an unspoken fear in Pakistan - that of a U.S. attack.

What would happen if there were to be another big attack  on the United States that is traced back to militants holed up in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas on the Afghan border?

“Such an attack would immediately trigger massive bombing and an invasion of Pakistan by the U.S. and NATO,” says Riaz Haq in his blog Haq’s musings. “It could also result in the removal of the democratically elected government and installation of a new military regime in Pakistan,” he writes. “In addition to unparalleled death and destruction, such a scenario could turn Pakistan into a failed state with widespread unrest, homelessness, poverty, hunger and disease.”

Within the United States, he says, it would mean the election of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

A top adviser to McCain appeared to corroborate that bit at least when he was quoted as telling Fortune magazine that a Sept.11-type attack before the November election would benefit McCain. Charlie Black has since apologised for his remarks following widespread criticism.

Haq is the not the only one worrying about the months ahead. Pakistani blogger Farrukh Khan Pitafi  goes as far as to say : “Accept it or not, Pakistan is the next target of the U.S. invasion.” Over-reaction ?  Paranoia ?

You could argue both, but four months after Pakistan voted a civilian government into office there is a leadership void in  Islamabad, argues the New York Times, and perhaps that is feeding some of the insecurities. There doesn’t seem to be anyone in charge, and there is even less coherence on dealing with al Qaeda and the Taliban. The confusion is allowing the militants to consolidate their sanctuaries while spreading their tentacles all along the border area.

U.S. air strikes earlier this month in Pakistan’s Mohmand agency that killed 11 soldiers of the Frontier Corps,  followed up by a threat by Afghanistan’s Washington-backed President Hamid Karzai to chase down militants inside Pakistan, have heightened the anxiety.

But it isn’t just Pakistan. Descent into Chaos  is the title of reputed Pakistani journalist and author Ahmad Rashid’s latest book and it, according to the reviews, chronicles how the war against Islamist extremism is being lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.
 

“War does not determine who is right — only who is left.” (Or so said the British philosopher and anti-war activist Bertrand Russell.) So who is going to be left standing once U.S. and NATO forces have finished battling it out with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan?

Republican presidential candidate John McCain came out with some interesting comments in a speech in Ohio last week on where he sees Afghanistan at the end of his first term in office in 2013, if he were to be elected president:

“The threat from a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced but not eliminated. U.S. and NATO forces remain there to help finish the job, and continue operations against the remnants of al Qaeda. The Government of Pakistan has cooperated with the U.S. in successfully adapting the counterinsurgency tactics that worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan to its lawless tribal areas where al Qaeda fighters are based. The increase in actionable intelligence that the counterinsurgency produced led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, and his chief lieutenants. There is no longer any place in the world al Qaeda can consider a safe haven.”

Optimistic or realistic?

Digging around on the internet, you can find a different view. Back in April Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistan Bureau Chief of Asia Times Online, wrote that the Taliban were taking their inspiration from the Vietminh who chased the French out of what was known as Indochina in the 1950s.  He wrote that they were inspired by the Vietnamese commander General Vo Nguyen Giap, who successfully employed guerrilla tactics against the French before crushing them in the battle of Dien Bien Phu  in 1954.

Taking up the theme, the website openDemocracy  followed up by saying that the west tends to assume that it alone is watching the lessons of Vietnam. ”It is as if “only” the United States (and by extension western forces or combatants in general) have the capacity or the interest to draw lessons from the past,” it said. It called the reference to the Taliban looking for  inspiration in Vietnam ”startling and ominous”.

“In the early 1950s, the Vietminh - faced with an imbalance between their own forces and conventional French military power - concentrated on attacking isolated garrisons in the northern part of Vietnam well away from the main colonial centres of control…  This strategy, combined with attacks on French supply-lines, gradually wore down the French military and political leadership’s resolve. Now, it seems, the Taliban aim to do the same against an equivalently “asymmetrical” enemy: Nato, and the International Security Assistance Force forces in Afghanistan.”

So do we go with McCain, who has his own experience of Vietnam? Or the historical parallels with France, which like the United States today in Afghanistan and Iraq, was struggling to cope with guerrilla warfare, did not know how to win over the hearts and minds of the local population, and faced economic crisis at home and a general public which was tired of war in faraway places?

I thought it would be interesting to ask one of the retired Reuters correspondents who had covered Vietnam whether it was legitimate to compare it to Afghanistan and got the following reply from Bernard Edinger, a French reporter who was sent in from Paris before the fall of Saigon in 1975 and also covered Kabul when the Russians first went in with ground troops in 1979:

“Yes, America’s opponents all dream of seeing the US helicopter its people out of Kabul the same humiliating way they flew out of Saigon. I stood on a rooftop opposite the embassy and watched the last choppers go as thousands of local Vietnamese clamouring to be evacuated were abandoned. As you know, the Communists did not win the war, the Americans lost it - at home. The press and much of the public had turned against the war to the point that the politicians just no longer thought it was worth fighting,” he wrote.

“Obviously domestic opposition to US involvement in Afghanistan is far less than that over Vietnam because the horror of the Taliban regime is already known and the Western public has seen the execution by rifle fire of kneeling women in midfield at half-time at Kabul soccer matches , the condemned men hanging from the goalposts etc … Also, opposition to Vietnam was led by students who had the threat of army service before them if the war lasted whereas the US only commits pro soldiers to the war today.”

“An outright Taliban victory over the US is out of the question … But in asymmetric warfare, ‘the strong lose if they don’t win and the weak win if they survive.’ I’m quoting others. The Pathans outlasted Kipling’s British Indian army (and even slit the throat of the British ambassador in his residence) and the Soviet Army. All they have to do is hang in there.”
  

 Any other views out there?