THE WORLD APPLAUDS OBAMA’S VICTORY

The US Presdient Elect Barack H. Obama,

by Eric S. Margolis

America has hopefully left the dark period of post-9/11 `temporary madness,’ to use the words of writer John Le Carré, and is re-emerging into the daylight. The grim era of President George W. Bush and his mentor (and real president), VP Dick Cheney, is at an end.

But they have handed a poisoned chalice to president-elect Obama. Three foreign wars – Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia - national bankruptcy, an enraged Russia, the entire Muslim world seething with hatred for the US, a wave of Islamophobia at home, growing anti-Americanism in Latin America, India developing nuclear weapons that will one day threaten the USA, and on and on.

Obama will have to deal with all these problems and a fast-emerging China while trying to fend off the powerful special interests in Washington that have already been putting the squeeze on him: the military-industrial-petroleum complex, big pharma, the Israel and farm lobbies, bankrupt auto makers, the finance industry, old folks, and black groups clamoring for more federal funds.

Once Obama has to face all these demons, I fear many of his supporters will be disappointed as their savior turns into a typical Washington politician who has to juggle all sorts of competing demands while the nation is plunged into financial crisis. A good start would be by bringing criminal charges against the fraudsters, mountebanks and crooks who created the current financial panic and shutting down the Guantanamo Devil’s Island.

The Republicans have certainly gotten what they so richly deserved – irrelevance and ignominy. Under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the party veered off to the extreme right, and even flirted at times with Mussolini-style fascism. The GOP became a virtual theocratic party of the rural Protestant fundamentalist far right, led by little ayatollahs preaching hate for Muslims and big city folk. Republicans are now relegated to the Southern and Midwestern boondocks of the US, its most backward, dumbed-down regions. The party of Lincoln and Eisenhower needs to purge itself of hicks and holy rollers and return to its moderate roots in the civilized, educated regions of America.

Equally important, Republicans must delouse the party of its neocon infestation and bring in foreign policy experts who put America’s interests above those of foreign nations. The Democrats also need be wary: the necons, smelling impending disaster, began jumping the Republican ship well before elections and are now burrowing into the Democratic Party.


           As a North American, I am enormously proud of president-elect Barack Obama and of the nation that elected him. Yesterday’s epic vote does much to relieve America of the lingering shame and burden of slavery and mistreatment of its people of color. I don’t think any black man will be called `boy’ again after Obama’s victory. His election marks America’s important demographic shift from a mostly white nation to one of mixed race and multiple cultures.

I can only hope and pray that Obama will end the Bush administration’s foul legacy of lying, assassination, kidnapping, torture, secret prisons, supporting despots, and whipping up hatred of Islam while playing to Christian religious fanatics and doomsday cultists. America’s once proud name was disgraced and dragged through the mud during the Bush years. I was often ashamed to be an American and racked by sorrow over how low my nation, whose uniform I once proudly wore, had sunk. I often compared Bush’s America to the old Soviet Union.

Americans have spoken with wisdom and intelligence even though the media and their leaders still deceives them over Iraq and Afghanistan. The whole world was sick of Bush / Cheney and revels in the thought they will soon be consigned to the ash heap of history. By January, the worst, most incompetent, most destructive president in US history will be gone. Alas, a lot of his most pernicious acts, like stuffing the Supreme Court and Appeals Courts with right wing ideologues, curtailing individual liberties, unleashing security organs against citizens, institutionalizing torture, and militarizing foreign policy, will continue when he is long gone.

Whether the youthful Obama will restore America’s economy, values, and world position remains uncertain. But it is hard to conceive of him and the Democrats doing worse than Bush/Cheney and the southern-fried Republican Party.

Obama’s victory speech contained the following phrase:

"And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn – I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too. "

Rhetoric, perhaps, but elegant and promising. What a pleasing change from Bush’s garbled bombast.

Some historians claim people really do not make a difference. Historic change comes from economic or social trends, they insist. Wrong. One man, Barack Obama, has made history and is going to make a lot more over the coming years. I salute him.

Photo Credits: Photo # 1 & 2 Courtesy: RateVin.com Photo # 3 Courtsy: BstonImages.com

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Is Zardari the new Musharraf?

                                 

Smiling Zardari, Another Musharraf?

IS ZARDARI THE NEW MUSHARRAF?

by Eric Margolis

          The US has been in a bizarre state of semi-war against its ‘ally’ Pakistan for months, launching covert  ground and air raids into its territory while claiming to be a close ally of Islamabad in the so-called war on terror.

          Last month, it was revealed that President George Bush gave the Pentagon the green light to launch major ground attacks inside Pakistan’s tribal territory.

         Pakistan, first under the US-backed dictator Pervez Musharraf, and now the new, US-backed president, Asif Zardari, has been put in the impossible position of waging a small war at the behest of Washington against its own pro-Taleban Pashtun tribesmen in the frontier zone known as FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) that is bitterly opposed by most Pakistanis and regarded by many as treasonous.

         Zardari, the widower of the late Benazir Bhutto, is inherits this dangerous problem and a host of other ones. Pakistan is almost bankrupt, with less than eight weeks of hard currency reserves to pay for vital imports of food and fuel. Half of Pakistan’s 165 million people live on less than $2 daily.

         Financial and political support from Washington helped engineer Zardari into power. He has been put in charge of the millions a month in overt and secret cash flow from Washington — $11.2 billion officially since 2001 — that Musharraf used to buy influence. Contrary to Washington’s claims it was neutral in the race between Zardari and his rival, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Washington spent a great deal of money and energy trying to sideline Nawaz, who has long been unpopular in Washington as insufficiently responsive to US interests.

         Zardari became notorious as ‘Mr. 10 per cent’ when he was minister of public contracts during his wife’s tenure as prime minister. Zardari claims all the corruption charges against him were politically motivated and denies any wrongdoing. But many Pakistanis, particularly in the powerful armed forces, are not happy seeing as their new prime minister a man of dubious reputation and a penchant for personal excess.

        Even so, Zardari has apparently assumed all of the sweeping powers held by former president Musharraf. Now that Zardari is seen as Washington’s new Musharraf, these charges against him will redouble. Few outside his People’s Party see Zardari as an ideal choice for Pakistan’s leader in a time of growing crisis, but he may yet rise to the occasion. He has certainly pleased Washington by vowing to prosecute the internal war against pro-Taleban tribesmen and aid the US-led war in Afghanistan. Rising violence along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border threatens a far wider crisis. There have been frequent clashes between Pakistan paramilitary units and US forces attacking inside FATA. A major overt US commando raid against a Pashtun village inside Pakistan killed up to 20 civilians last week and brought threats from Pakistan’s chief of staff, Gen. Afshaq Kayani, the 650,000-man armed forces would fight to defend the nation’s territory.

Deeply frustrated by the failure of its war in Afghanistan and inability to defeat Taleban, the Bush administration wants to expand the war into Pakistan tribal areas which are supposedly serving as a base for the Afghan resistance to western occupation. The Pentagon’s influential Special Operations Command, whose senior ranks hold a number of militant Christian fundamentalists, leads the effort to expand the war into Pakistan.

Once again, arrogance and ignorance are misleading the US into another misfortune. Increased US incursions into FATA will almost certainly arouse most of the Pashtun tribes to resist the attackers and eventually involve units of the regular Pakistani armed forces. Pashtuns, 20 per cent of Pakistan’s population, are heavily represented in the higher ranks of the military and intelligence service, ISI.

         US attacks will inevitably produce ‘mission creep,’ as American forces are sucked ever deeper into Pakistan. Worse, continuing US attacks on FATA could provoke a major Pashtun tribal uprising and re-ignite a simmering secessionist movement for an independent ‘Pashtunastan’ in the strategic northwest frontier that could tear away fragile Pakistan apart and invite Indian intervention as occurred in East Pakistan in 1971. This explosive issue is barely understood in Washington. Meanwhile, Pakistan is a ticking time bomb as the new Zardari government appears headed into a storm of instability and growing opposition.

Eric Margolis, contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada, is the author of War at the Top of the World.. Copyright © 2008 Eric Margolis

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Nepal & Pakistan: Lessons for USA

NEPAL & PAKISTAN
LESSONS FOR USA

by Swaraaj Chauhan

            

The other day I came across a very fine, sober and critical evaluation of the happenings in Nepal and Pakistan. Swaraaj Chauhan on the editorial board of a website titled “The Moderate Voice”, has posted this piece. I reproduce it for the readers of WOP.

Comments by Swaraaj are very apt in the Nepal and Pakistan context. Yet to throw some more light on the whole scenario, I have added my own comments and feelings in parenthesis).

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          Nepal and Pakistan provide good lessons in foreign policy to both Barack Obama and John McCain. The democratically-elected new Prime Minister of Nepal, Prachanda (photo above) who led a 10-year guerrilla war, now professes that his country’s era of “capitalist democracy” has begun. He was sworn in by Nepal’s first president, Ram Baran Yadav.

         

          Lesson No. 1: The president or prime minister of any country must not be sponsored / pushed by the USA to remain friendly. Good diplomacy is making friends out of enemies. (May this work for India and Pakistan as well).

          Lesson No. 2: If the USA looks for, and sponsors, loyal and subservient leaders in the world, the public in that country would rise against their own subservient/sponsored leaders and the USA.

          Lesson No. 3: It is a dangerous foreign policy to bribe foreign leaders / dictators and tempt them to follow the US policy. (It miserably failed here in Pakistan where US’s overt and covert support to a dictatorial one man regime did neither any good to Pakistan nor to the United States. With more than 10 billion US$ doled out to Musharraf, this could not help put a lid over a never ending terrorism in Pakistan; it has on the other hand generated more sympathetic layers of people finding solace in outfits like al-Qaeda and the Taliban).Only myopic policy needs to find supporters abroad with the help of bribery. Corruption would ultimately corrode the democratic functioning in the USA itself. Unaccounted billions of dollars went to the Musharraf regime.In the end the USA has become a staunch enemy of both militants and the Pakistan public.

          Lesson No. 4: To turn an enemy into a friend needs patience and sincere efforts. In other words SINCERITY and PERSEVERANCE. The BUSH and MUSHARRAF strategy of BLUFF and BLUSTER ultimately boomerangs. It also empowers / strengthens terrorism.

          Lesson No. 5: NEVER take foreign policy decisions / actions unilaterally. There is the United Nations. Only dictators act unilaterally. (Again Musharraf’s is a typical case of this bitter but dangerous fact). The USA has lost much credibility with its actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even in Afghanistan there should be UN troops, if at all. The US will never be able to justify (or get results) by only taking NATO forces. The Musharraf tangle was solved when the US involved Britain, Saudi Arabia and other countries for parleys.

          Lesson No. 6: If my neighbour has begun to treat his family violently, I can only call the police. I can’t force my way into my neighbour’s house and then tell him that I am going to stay there for years to prevent violence (as in Iraq).

          Let’s come back to Nepal. After months of bickering among the political parties, a huge majority of the assembly has elected a former rebel as prime minister who wore Western clothes (another first) but made a gesture to national custom by donning a traditional Nepali cap.

         “It has been an astonishing transformation. For over a year the Maoists have been part of Nepal’s transitional government, heading ministries and becoming ambassadors. Many poor Nepalis will wonder whether, after ten years of war costing 13,000 lives, the Maoists will now sink into the comforts of power and prestige and forget them.

         “The Maoists will have to prove them wrong. Their election manifesto called this the era of capitalist democracy in Nepal and stressed that the private sector is intrinsic to their plans. More immediately Prachanda must reassert the authority of the state, which has been badly eroded over the past two years as crime has spiralled and ethnic groups clamoured for their rights.” (Same goes for Zardari and Gilani combination here in Pakistan; where condition is far more dangerous, Govt’s writ is getting shrunk every day and people are feeling lost). Country’s northern tribal belt which was always a peaceful area barring few incidents of tribal warfare is up with arms against the central authority

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         Things are pretty bad in this land of the pure but all is not lost. Pakistani people have demonstrated amount of resilience in the past. It can do so now as well. It can meet the pending crisis but the challenges are colossal and it is now a test for Zardari-Gilani duo to prove that they can steer a course out of this challenging scenario, so that people can convince themselves they made a sensible decision while they voted the party of BB to power.

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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

Wonders of Pakistan supports freedom of expression and this commitment extends to our readers as well. Constraints however, apply in case of a violation of WoP Comments Policy. We also moderate hate speech, libel and gratuitous insults.