Obama Seems Serious About Fighting Radical Islamic Terrorism
As I have said before many times, the United States under President Reagan did not realize just how dangerous the Radical Islamic terrorist ideology is when they unlocked the monster from the bottle by funding Osama bin Laden and other mujahideens to fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the period 1979-1989.
Subsequently President Clinton and the senior President Bush winked at Pakistani terrorism against India in Jammu and Kashmir, refusing repeatedly to add Pakistan to the US list of terrorist countries (to which countries such as Libya, Sudan, Iran, etc had been added, but not Pakistan, which had killed hundreds of thousands of people in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir using terrorism as an instrument of state policy against India). The reason for this is: US foreign policy under Clinton and the senior Bush was about making money and getting deals; not about upholding moral principles -- such as the prevention of Genocide of the Kashmiri Pandit Hindu minority community -- that got wiped out of Kashmir by Pakistani terrorists under the watch of President Clinton, while he was busy having fun with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office.
The junior President Bush was the first American President who realized that Radical Islamic terrorism is not a matter of joke. It is deadly serious. This is something we Indians had been trying to explain to Americans under Clinton and senior Bush for 11 years -- from 1989 to 2000.
1989 is when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan. Pakistan immediately sent the Radical Islamic terrorists from Afghanistan to Kashmir. Terrorist attacks in Kashmir went through the roof. Every day hundreds of Kashmiri Pandits would be killed, women raped, children killed brutally, with Arabic threats and Koranic verses (about how to treat infidels) inscribed in blood on their skin while they were still alive.
The senior President Bush ignored this for 3 years -- from 1989 to 1992. He was busy fighting the Iraq War for part of this time. Still, that is not an excuse for ignoring Genocide. President Clinton ignored this for 8 years -- smilingly winking at Pakistan and pretending to India that he just can't see the evidence that Pakistan is behind all these terrorist attacks.
Even the junior President Bush was a hypocrite par excellence when it came to seeing the pain inflicted on innocent Indians in hundreds of terrorist attacks by his ISI sidekicks of his pal Musharraf.
The junior Bush also conned his country into going to war against Sadam Hussein in Iraq, even though there was no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda at that time. He neglected the war in Afghanistan for 8 years and allowed Osama bin Laden to make a career out of making home videos and putting them up on the internet from his safe house in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, protected by the ISI and the Pakistani Army.
The junior Bush was perhaps mentally challenged, but it has hard to believe that he could really be dumb enough to not see through Musharraf's trick of repeatedly arresting and releasing the same people (never convicting anyone) and making a huge show of it in a pitifully transparent attempt to show that he was "fighting against Terror." In reality Musharraf was allowing Radical Islamic terrorist leaders like Sheikh Omar, Dawood Ibrahim, Maulana Masood Azhar, etc to live in their own houses in Islamabad or Rawalpindi, and make hate speeches, raise money for Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Al Qaeda, Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, etc and other terrorist organizations, run training camps for their terrorist foot-soldiers, and plan and carry out numerous attacks in India, UK, Spain, and several other countries. The junior Bush reacted strongly whenever some plot against the US or UK was uncovered. But in a clear show or racism and double standards, he turned a blind eye to the terror attacks when the victims were Indian. India even provided him with the names, addresses, and phone numbers of Pakistani terrorist leaders sitting safely in Islamabad and Rawalpindi and plotting attacks against India. The junior Bush did nothing. None of those terrorist leaders -- people like Maulana Masood Azhar, Dawood Ibrahim, Sheikh Omar, etc -- were extradited to India to stand trial, and not even to American prisons, because their targets had been Indian, not Americans or Britishers. This kind of blatant racism and double standards was certain to defeat the efforts of Civilized sections of Humanity to defeat the scourge of Radical Islamic terrorism.
Note that India was unable to finish the Pakistan-sponsored terrorists because America constantly requested India to avoid "raising tensions". This was the height of racist hypocrisy and double standards: when America is attacked she can go to war, but when India is attacked, hundreds of Indian men women and children brutally killed and thousands maimed in new attacks twice a month -- repeatedly -- again and again and again -- she must stay put and avoid "raising tensions".
President Obama, however, seems to be made of different stuff. He seems to be an honest and upright human being; not a slimy politician.
From the very beginning of his Presidential campaign, Obama had focused his attention on Pakistan. He boldly said "if we know that Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders are in Pakistan and the Pakistani authorities are not taking action against them, then we will go into Pakistan and finish the job ourselves."
Obama is not "all talk and no action" like so many others have been before him. He increased the number of soldiers in Afghanistan from 50,000 to 70,000 soon after he became President. And just recently, he decided to send an additional 30,000 US soldiers there, taking the total number of US soldiers in Afghanistan to over 100,000 -- double the number it had been before he became President.
Last week, a report appeared in the Times of India that Obama has sent his National Security Adviser General James L. Jones to Islamabad with a hand-delivered letter from Obama saying that if Pakistan does not act against Radical Islamic terrorists operating from Pakistani territory, then the US itself will take action against them.
The text of the TOI article, saved for future reference, is as follows:
Stop using insurgents as strategic tool: Obama to Pak
PTI 30 November 2009, 04:36pm IST
WASHINGTON: In a stern message to Pakistan, the United States has asked it to shed its policy of "using insurgents" like LeT as a strategic tool and warned that if it cannot deliver against terrorists, the US may be impelled to use "any means" at its disposal.
The message, which has been conveyed in a letter from US President Barack Obama to his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari, also includes an offer by him to try to "reduce tensions" between India and Pakistan, media reported here.
The two-page letter, hand-delivered by National Security Adviser General (retd) James Jones when he visited Islamabad early this month, offers Pakistan enhancement of strategic partnership if they act as wished by the US, besides additional military and economic aid.
In his letter, Obama has also warned Pakistan that its use of insurgent groups for policy goals "cannot continue" and called for closer collaboration against all extremist groups.
He named five such groups - al-Qaida, the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Tehrik-e-Taliban.
"Using vague diplomatic language, he said that ambiguity in Pakistan's relationship with any of them could no longer be ignored," the Washington Post reported.
Jones did some straight-talking with the top Pakistani leadership, the daily said. "If Pakistan cannot deliver, he warned, the US may be impelled to use any means at its disposal to rout insurgents based along Pakistan's western and southern borders with Afghanistan."
When I saw this article, I was very dismissive. I suspected the US was again playing its old game of adopting double standards, and pretending to do something, and instead doing nothing. I had cause to be suspicious: a hand-delivered letter? Nobody except Obama, Jones the courier, and the recipient Zardari of Pakistan would know what the letter says. How does Times of India know what the letter says? America can easily write a letter saying "Happy Birthday" to Zardari, and tell India that the letter said something else: that USA would take action against Radical Islamic terrorists in Pakistan. None of the US newspapers or TV channels, or BBC etc said anything about this letter. Only Times of India is jumping up and down about this so-called letter.
But today the New York Times has published this article confirming the story. This article leads me to believe that Obama is serious about fighting Radical Islamic terrorism. Obama also seems to be a believer in the concept of Humanity, and of the Global Family and Fraternity/Sorority of civilized men and women, and not narrow-minded about race, in the way President Bush junior clearly was (he didn't care about Indians dying in terror attacks).
I have quoted a relevant excerpt from the article as follows for future reference:
Administration Presses Pakistan to Fight Taliban
By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: December 7, 2009
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is turning up the pressure on Pakistan to fight the Taliban inside its borders, warning that if it does not act more aggressively the United States will use considerably more force on the Pakistani side of the border to shut down Taliban attacks on American forces in Afghanistan, American and Pakistani officials said.
The blunt message was delivered in a tense encounter in Pakistan last month, before President Obama announced his new war strategy, when Gen. James L. Jones, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, and John O. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief, met with the heads of Pakistan’s military and its intelligence service.
United States officials said the message did not amount to an ultimatum, but rather it was intended to prod a reluctant Pakistani military to go after Taliban insurgents in Pakistan who are directing attacks in Afghanistan.
For their part the Pakistanis interpreted the message as a fairly bald warning that unless Pakistan moved quickly to act against two Taliban groups they have so far refused to attack, the United States was prepared to take unilateral action to expand Predator drone attacks beyond the tribal areas and, if needed, to resume raids by Special Operations forces into the country against Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.
One senior administration official, when asked about the encounter, declined to go into details. But he added quickly, “I think they read our intentions accurately.”
A Pakistani official who has been briefed on the meetings said, “Jones’s message was if that Pakistani help wasn’t forthcoming, the United States would have to do it themselves.”
American commanders said earlier this year that they were considering expanding drone strikes in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, but General Jones’s comments marked the first time that the United States bluntly told Pakistan it would have to choose between leading attacks against the insurgents inside the country’s borders or stepping aside to let the Americans do it.
The recent security demands followed an offer of a broader strategic relationship and expanded intelligence sharing and nonmilitary economic aid from the United States. Pakistan’s politically weakened president, Asif Ali Zardari, replied in writing to a two-page letter that General Jones delivered from Mr. Obama. But Mr. Zardari gave no indication of how Pakistan would respond to the incentives, which were linked to the demands for greatly stepped-up counterterrorism actions.
“We’ve offered them a strategic choice,” one administration official said, describing the private communications. “And we’ve heard back almost nothing.”
Another administration official said, “Our patience is wearing thin.”
...
During his intensive review of Pakistan and Afghanistan strategy, officials say, Mr. Obama concluded that no amount of additional troops in Afghanistan would succeed in their new mission if the Taliban could retreat over the Pakistani border to regroup and resupply. But the administration has said little about the Pakistani part of the strategy.
“We concluded early on that whatever you do with Pakistan, you don’t want to talk about it much,” one of the president’s senior aides said last week. “All it does is get backs up in Islamabad.”
...
Publicly, senior American officials and commanders take note of that concern. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Pakistan in late October with offers of a strategic partnership. But General Jones followed Mrs. Clinton two weeks later carrying more sticks than carrots, American officials said.
posted by Harsh Vardhan @ 7:04 pm
permalink
Do you feel strongly on a topic related to India ? Send me an article writing
what you want to say and I'll publish it on here (let me know if you want
anonymity) ! This blog is for you to express your opinions too !
1 Comments:
Subj: Sarvadharamsambhvay
1. Attriji
Sarvadharamsambhvay, I think you are referring too.
Those, who recite this precious Mantra have indeed taken a leave of their senses. I couldn't disagree with
you. This pious Mantra has no room for ADHARMA in it, but penny does not drop in some of us.
BK Chaudhari
2. My Take:
Chaudhari Sahib: Thanks for your comments.
3. Reg: Sarvadharamsambhvay: Yes, that is the term that they use.
Frankly, I don't think much of this term, because it is phoney.
Sarvadharamsambhvay or Equal Respect ( or Equal Consideration ) for all religions, can exist ONLY among those religions who, have goodwill towards each other, and wish each other well. It CANNOT exist amongst followers of Hostile religions. Do Moslems or Christians wish us Hindus well, or are they working for total destruction of our Hindu faith ?
4. Quote: Those, who recite this precious Mantra have indeed taken a leave of their senses
COMMENT: Very much so, Chaudhari Sahib. Their logic has gone to pieces.
That is why, no matter what label you put on this bull-sh**, it stinks. It is an Out-House Expression ( Please pardon my French or my Portuguese ! ).
5. This term also does a double or triple mischief. Phoney-Liberal politicians of Congress, CPI, Janata Dal et al, who tout this BS day in & day out, are keeping the Hindus completely in the dark, about the condition of their Hindu society. It conceals the heinous conspiracy that, Moslems & Christians are hatching for the total liquidation of Hinduism from India. By putting Hindus to sleep, they keep them from taking steps, to confront the hostile ideologies of Islam & Christianity.
6. To put it simply & succinctly, this expression is a GIANT fraud on the Hindu. It destroys his cultural ( Hindu ) identity, and makes him turn his back on his Hinduism ( and its Vedic roots ).
A rational & alert Hindu, should see through this deceit & deception, and recognize that:
" The Phoney-Liberals are up to No Good. "
Surinder Paul Attri
Post a Comment
<< Home