Editors Note: The title of this post has been changed.
Via the Tank, Henry Kissinger talks with the German magazine Der Spiegel about, among other things, Barack Obama's idea that Pakistan should be the real focus of America's counter-terrorism efforts. He begins with this gem: "You can always say there is some other war I would rather want to fight than the one I am in."
Why, some geniuses (cough, cough) even said the Vietnam War was a distraction from the Cold War with the Soviets! But I digress. The former Secretary of State went on:
"What does it mean to fight the war in Pakistan? Should we use military power to control the tribal regions in Pakistan and to conduct military operations in a region which Britain failed to pacify in over 100 years of colonization? Should we use military force to prevent a radical take-over of the Pakistani government? Should we prevent the Pakistani state from splitting up into three or four ethnically based groups? I don't think we have the capacity to do that."
All good questions, those. Alas, those were also questions that might have been posed vis-a-vis Iraq, but Kissinger apparently didn't think of them then.
But fine. That's in the past. Currently, the Bush administration is already conducting in Pakistan exactly the kinds of military operations that Obama proposed, and which Kissinger thinks will lead us to disaster: low-key, quick, targeted strikes that avoid long, costly occupations that inflame nationalism and that require hundreds of thousands of troops. These strikes don't get us bogged down in the day-to-day political machinations of a country we know little about. They're the best military-oriented course of action to fight anti-American terrorism.
They're a bad idea, though, according to Kissinger. Of course, that's when only when Obama proposed them. Now that Bush is carrying them out, I'm sure the famously sycophantic Kissinger would say they're brilliant.
---Jordan Michael Smith
