Obama’s inexperience deadly in South Asia

Kolkata, India. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is still congratulating the Pakistani government for “resolving its crisis,” by which she means an internal political spat; the real crisis is only getting worse. The Taliban continues its march through Pakistan, imposing Sharia law and persecuting non-Muslims as it does, while President Barack Obama continues to happily search for the “moderate Taliban” among them. And that’s not all.

Yesterday, police here foiled an attempted terrorist bombing by a former member of the Pakistani Rangers paramilitary force. According to Kolkata police and the Indian Border Security Force (BSF), Shahbaz Ismail, flew from Karachi, Pakistan northwest of India to the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka, which borders the Indian state of West Bengal that has Kolkata as its capital. He slipped across the border near Murshidabad not far from this sprawling metropolitan area, the world’s 14th largest. The BSF got a tip about Ismail and alerted the Kolkata police. “We found out that [Ismail] would go to Fairlie Place to buy a rail ticket,” a police spokesman said. Read more

Finding “Moderate Radicals”, Barack Obama style

The words we use are important, and each has its own specific meaning. So when the Obama Administration says that it is open to dealing with “moderate Taliban,” people should ask what in the world it means. The Taliban is by definition a radical organization that is not about to give on its maximalist demand of imposing Sharia law wherever it attains power. It is in its very essence contrary to everything we believe in as Americans. When the US President, who considers himself a master of words, speaks about moderate radicals, he needs to be asked, “Are you crazy?”

President Obama is copying the policy of the Pakistani government whereby it has identified elements of the Taliban that it believes are moderate; that is, amenable to negotiation. This, of course, is criminally naïve. Our history with Islamist radicals is that the only time they negotiate is when they believe themselves too weak for a military win and consider themselves bound to any “negotiated peace” only until they are strong enough for total victory. Read more

Obama administration to lift sanctions against Syria

NICOSIA — President Barack Obama has decided on a new U.S. ambassador to Syria and is expected to lift sanctions against a nation charged with aiding Al Qaida in Iraq and secretly building a nuclear reactor with North Korean assistance

Diplomatic sources said Obama, in consultation with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has asked Frederic Hof to become the first U.S. ambassador to Damascus since 2005. The sources said Hof, a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Middle East Policy Council, agreed to take the post.
“There will be an announcement very soon,” a diplomat said.

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Obama: US choosing words carefully in terror war

WASHINGTON – When talking about terrorism — words matter, President Barack Obama said Tuesday.

Asked in a television interview why he hasn’t used the oft-repeated “war on terror” phrase coined by the Bush administration, Obama said he believes the U.S. can win over moderate Muslims if he chooses his words carefully.

“Words matter in this situation because one of the ways we’re going to win this struggle is through the battle of hearts and minds,” Obama said in an interview with CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.”

The Associated Press reported Saturday that Obama has used the catch phrase just once, in contrast to its repeated use by the Bush administration in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Instead, Obama has spoken broadly of the “enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism” and pledged to “go after” extremists and “win this fight.”

“I think it is very important for us to recognize that we have a battle or a war against some terrorist organizations,” Obama said Tuesday. “But that those organizations aren’t representative of a broader Arab community, Muslim community.”

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Cheney: Obama making U.S. less safe

(CNN) – The Obama administration’s new policies on Guantanamo Bay prison and the treatment of detainees makes it more likely a terrorist attack against the United States will succeed, former Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday.

In an interview with Politico, the former vice president issued a stringent defense of the Bush administration’s record on the war on terror, and said he worries the President Obama has already made the country more vulnerable.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said in the interview published Wednesday.

Cheney also predicted the Obama administration is likely to backtrack on its pledge to end coercive interrogation techniques, since the protection of the United States from terrorists is a “tough, mean, dirty, nasty business.”
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