Obama sending John Kerry to Islamabad
Web posted at: 12/14/2008 5:55:11
Source ::: Internews WASHINGTON: A former American presidential candidate and a close associate of President-elect Barack Obama will soon visit Pakistan to discuss anti-terrorism strategies. Senator John Kerry, a Democrat, will also visit India and Afghanistan.
Kerry will become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee next month. The Obama team, in a bid to show respect to the outgoing Bush administration, said Kerry was not going as an emissary because “there’s only one president at a time”.
But Brooke Anderson, a spokeswoman for Obama, said the president-elect “will be very interested to hear about the trip from Senator Kerry, whose insight he values greatly”.
Diplomatic observers in Washington noted that the trip coincided with the Obama team’s efforts to formulate a comprehensive strategy for South Asia before he took oath on January 20. In his speeches during and after the election, Obama referred to South Asia as the first front in the “war against terror” and promised to formulate a new strategy to win this front.
Kerry noted that the Mumbai terrorist attack was “latest reminder of the region’s fragile security situation” and underlined the need for a successful US strategy for South Asia.
While Obama’s team is busy sounding out experts on its policy for the region, the Pentagon is preparing its own report. Gen David Petraeus, the new head of the US Central Command, is expected to submit the report to the Pentagon and to Obama before his inauguration.
And as Petraeus and other US generals have already indicated, the Pentagon may propose, and Obama may accept, to send at least 20,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.
In a recent policy paper, Obama’s top South Asia adviser, Bruce Riedel, advocates normalising relations between India and Pakistan as a prerequisite for bringing peace to Afghanistan.
He also emphasises the need to resolve the Kashmir dispute, arguing that this will free the Pakistani military to focus on the fight against Al Qaeda and Taliban. This line of argument is based on the theory that bringing more pressure on Pakistan to fight terrorism without easing tensions with India may cause the new democratic set-up in Islamabad to collapse. And yet another military rule will strengthen extremist forces.
There’s also a fear that too much pressure, particularly from both eastern and western borders, could cause the collapse of the Pakistani state and if this happens, it could have two possible outcomes: either the Pashtun areas of Pakistan would become totally lawless or merge with Afghanistan, giving the Pakhtuns an absolute majority there.
Both scenarios are unacceptable to the US as it does not want to deal with a radicalised Pashtun population either in Afghanistan or in a lawless region with no central authority. Hence there’s a realisation in Washington that it needs to play a pro-active role in reducing tensions between India and Pakistan and encourage them to resolve the core dispute of Kashmir.
Media reports that the incoming Obama administration regards South Asia as a ‘priority zone’ has encouraged South Asian experts in the United States to release dozens of policy papers on the subject.