Last night an audience member tried to nail down Obama's policy about whether he would cross into Pakistan in pursuit of terrorist targets. Obama basically stuck to his line on the issue.
What I've said is we're going to encourage democracy in Pakistan, expand our nonmilitary aid to Pakistan so that they have more of a stake in working with us, but insisting that they go after these militants.
And if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden; we will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.
Thus far, violating Pakistan's border whenever we feel like it hasn't proven to be a responsible policy. While I don't see a real alternative to Obama's position regarding bin Laden, he clearly hasn't explicitly ruled out crossing into Pakistan under other circumstances.
At any rate, the lack of troops in Afghanistan remains a serious problem. Yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was at a NATO summit asking European countries to devote more troops to the mission in Afghanistan. As Ezra pointed out, an increase in troops has the potential to reduce the use of airstrikes, not to mention seriously problematic situations like this one. It will simply be impossible to make progress in Afghanistan if Afghans are more afraid of the Western military than they are of the Taliban.
That said, it's not clear to me that a simple increase in troop levels will do the job either.
--A. Serwer
