As the Democratic presidential roadshow rolls into Chicago for a liberal blogfest this weekend, there’s speculation that Sen. Barack Obama might get a chilly reception from some in the “netroots.”

Anti-war activists seemed taken aback this week when Obama, in what his campaign billed as a major foreign policy speech, called for U.S. military intervention in Pakistan - if its government fails to root out al Qaeda leaders who have taken refuge there. And little wonder: If you think invading Iraq was a gamble, striking the much larger and nuclear-armed Pakistan could be the strategic equivalent of going all in.

Here’s what Sen. Obama said:

“As President, I would make the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional, and I would make our conditions clear: Paksitan must make substantial progress in closing down the training camps, evicting foreign fighters, and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan.

“I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

This startling bit of saber rattling came amid a long speech in which Obama laid out a solid, five-part strategy to “win the war that has to be won” against global terrorism.

Nonetheless, pundits across the political spectrum drew the same conclusion: Obama is trying to “out-tough” his Democratic rivals and thereby establish his credentials as America’s next Commander-in-Chief. Striking a bellicose pose toward Pakistan helps to compensate for his lack of experience - and what Sen. Hillary Clinton has stingingly called naievete - on national security matters.

So maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if Obama draws brickbats from some liberal bloggers in Chicago. It would be a chance for Obama to show Americans that, while he is staunchly anti-war on Iraq, he’s anything but “anti” when it comes to the larger struggle against Islamist terrorism. On the contrary, he wants to get America out of the bad war in Iraq so we can concentrate all of our energies and resources on the good war against al Qaeda. And, as Tom Edsall has noted, Obama’s hard line on Pakistan continues a pattern of deviations from the party line that have made it hard to pigeonhole him ideologically.

Maybe so, but does Obama’s stance make strategic sense? If not, it’s unlikely to burnish his foreign policy credentials. While Pakistan is an often frustrating ally in the struggle against al Qaeda, it’s hard to see how public threats will make it a more effective one. And the repercussions of a U.S. military strike on volatile Pakistan could dwarf the bitter harvest America has reaped in Iraq.

Pakistan, which has many more people (169 million versus Iraq’s 24 million), and nurses a brittle sense of national pride, is the only Islamic country with nuclear weapons. Pakistani society is balanced on a knife’s edge, with its traditional secular governing elites on one side and a rising tide of Islamist fundamentalism on the other. As Stephen Solarz has pointed out, Pakistan is both a partner and a problem. Having previously supported the Taliban, Islamabad quickly switched sides after 9/11. The Bush administration designated Pakistan a “major, non-NATO ally” and dramatically increased aid. The government has helped capture and kill many al Qaeda fugitives and has tried to convince tribal leaders in the Northwest Frontier Province to stop Taliban remnants from launching attacks in neighboring Afghanistan.

On the other hand, Pakistan is run by an increasingly unpopular dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who finds one excuse after another to postpone the country’s return to democracy. Its military is compromised by ties to Islamist extremists, including terror groups operating in Kashmir. And as the recent carnage at the Red Mosque in Islamabad shows, Islamists radicalized in Saudi-funded madrassas are mounting an increasingly bold challenge to Pakistan’s secular political order.

Obama is right on one point: It is outrageous that al Qaeda masterminds Osama bin Laden and Ayman al- Zawahiri have found a safe haven in northwest Pakistan. But killing or evicting them is no simple matter. The government’s writ barely extends to the wild western regions bordering on Afghanistan. And if Pakistan’s Muslim army can’t subdue the largely Pushtun tribes in that region, it’s unlikely that U.S. or western forces could do the job. U.S. airstrikes could further inflame Islamist sentiment throughout Pakistan, especially if “actionable intelligence” proves inaccurate, as it often does, and civilians are killed. That’s why our best bet is to help Pakistani security and intelligence services conduct a classic counter-insurgency campaign in the northwest and recruit local tribal leaders in the fight against the Taliban’s growing influence in the region. At the same time, as Obama rightly argues, the United States should seek to fortify the Pakistani center by pressing Musharraf to relinquish power to a democratically elected government.

So while Sen. Obama’s eagerness to go after al Qaeda is welcome, issuing ultimatums to Pakistan is likely to be counterproductive. A better and bolder way for Obama to display his tough-mindedness on national security would be to spell out the next phase of America’s engagement in Iraq. In the eyes of many antiwar activists, he is without “original sin” in the sense that he is the only first-tier candidate to have opposed the Iraq war from the start. To his credit, Obama has rebuffed Democrats who demand a swift and total withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. But he - along with the other leading candidates - has been reluctant to offer a vision of an orderly, gradual and responsible U.S. exit from Iraq.

Let’s hope we hear more about that in September, when Congress will again grapple with the question of how to leave Iraq.

This entry was posted on 8.03.2007 at 12:26 pm and is filed under National Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.