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All anti-taliban combatants should unite

KAZI ANWARUL MASUD
Terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, coupled with the arrest of Islamist militants in Bangladesh, furthered by the American assessment that al-Qaeda has tentacles in about sixty countries, makes it imperative that they be destroyed to safeguard our sovereignty and economic development.***
PRESIDENT Obama's strategy to fight the Taliban is yet to get unanimous support in all the quarters in the US. The war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, albeit sanctioned by the UNSC and sought by the international community, if pursued as prescribed by General Stanley McChrystal, that the US shift its strategy to population security and dedicate more resources, as distinct from the advice by Vice President Joe Biden of the US cutting its losses and prosecuting the campaign using Predator and cruise missile strikes to produce better results, could bring into focus Gabriella Blum’s thesis of (The laws of war and the lesser evil — Yale Law Journal) whether the absolutist stance of non-recognition of lesser evil is justification for breaking the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.
The Afghan war also strengthens Professor Michael Paulsen's argument that international law is never more than an opinion and that US constitution should keep international law at bay. Such debate apart, Hillary Clinton's tough talks during her October visit to Pakistan, virtually accusing the country of complicity with al-Qaeda,
and her difficulty in believing that no one among Pakistani authorities knew whereabouts of the al-Qaeda leadership though al-Qaeda has had safe havens in Pakistan since 2002, shook not only Pakistanis but also Washington. She also implicitiy criticised the Pakistani military security establishment.
It is believed that the Pak-Afghan border region had been the base of 9/11 hijackers and many other terrorists, and that most terrorist attacks after World Trade Center in 1993 have been traced to Pakistan and not to Afghanistan. Iran or Iraq.
US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry opined in May that Pakistan, with its nuclear arsenal, terrorist safe havens, Taliban sanctuaries and growing insurgency, has become the most difficult challenge faced by the US. He added that Pakistan at present had the potential to be crippled by the Taliban or to act as bulwark against everything the Taliban represented.
Senator Kerry underscored both the Pakistani feeling of being used by the US and then left in the lurch and the American policy of cooperation with the military while paying scant attention to the wishes of the people. Concurrentiy, President Obama's
AfPak representative Richard Hallbrooke testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that a stable, secure, democratic Pakistan was vital to US national interest He said that President Obama's policy towards Pakistan was to ensure Pakistan's stability for the security of the US and the rest of the world through increased security, governance and development assistance.
Halbrooke spoke of the trilateral engagement among the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan in which the three parties shared commitment to combat terrorism and extremism. South Asian expert Rory Stewart testified that the final goal of the Obama administration to disrupt, dismantle and defeat the al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and to prevent their return to either country in future, "is trying to do the impossible. It is highly unlikely that the US will be able either to build an effective, legitimate state or to defeat the Taliban insurgency."
In he same vein, Pulitzer Prize winner journalist Steve Coll (New Yorker, October 19) writes that since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 attempts by foreign powers to shape events there have repeatedly been thwarted by what intelligence analysts call "mirror imaging," which is the tendency of the decision makers in one country to judge counterparts in another country through the prism of their own language and politics. Coll cautioned that safeguarding .American interests in AfPak region to free it from the Taliban should not be confused with the quest for an honest president in Kabul, where rulers often have not been trustworthy.
This converges to some extent with Samuel Huntington's proposition in his
book Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) that authority, even of a brutal kind, is preferable to none at all and that the degree to which a state is governed is more important than how it is governed. Huntington felt that despite ideological differences the US had more in common with the USSR than it did with any weakly ruled state. Unsurprisingly, neo-con Michael Ledeen (Rediscovering American character --September 11,2009) has called for dismissal of claims that "all people are the same, all cultures are of equal worth, all values are relative, and all judgments are to be avoided."
He calls the al-Qaeda terrorism as the "latest incarnation of servitude - this time wrapped in a religious mantie" that must be defeated. This line of thought appears to strengthen Bernard Lewis's oft quoted rage against Islam and the Muslims and of the assertion by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi that the problem facing the world was not al-Qaeda but Islam. But then. President Obama's Cairo speech has assured the Islamic world that the so-called war on terror is not directed at the Muslims but at the wayward group of Islamists bent on terror to recreate a "pristine 6th century Arabia" as an answer to Western "degenerative" modernity.
Terrorism in .Afghanistan and Pakistan, coupled with the arrest of Islamist militants in Bangladesh, furthered by the American assessment that al-Qaeda has tentacles in about sixty countries, makes it imperative that they be destroyed to safeguard our sovereignty and economic development
Kazi Anwa-ul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador