This article appeared in the Political Studies Association‘s excellent new publication Political Insight.
by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
No nation has ever made a frank avowal of its real imperial motives. It always claims to be primarily concerned with the peace and prosperity of the people whom it subjugates. — Reinhold Niebuhr
The ironies of US President Barack Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech in Oslo were widely noted. Not since Theodore Roosevelt had a Nobel laureate used the acceptance ceremony to make a case for war. Both men appealed to St Augustine’s authority to support the justness of their cause. However, when Roosevelt spoke he had already concluded the peace for which he was honoured; Obama’s lies distant in the purgatory of ‘hope’. In the present he remains at war — as Henry Kissinger was, when he picked up his prize — having recently ordered the second major escalation of his brief presidency. Kissinger’s war simmered on for two more years; Obama’s will likely last longer.
Afghanistan may well become Obama’s Vietnam, but his diversion is not Cambodia, or Laos, it is nuclear-armed Pakistan. History sometimes repeats itself both as tragedy and farce.
Weeks before Obama described al-Qaeda as a threat on a par with Nazi Germany, national security adviser, General James Jones, told CNN that the organisation had fewer than a hundred men in Afghanistan. Driven by institutional inertia and vulnerable to the charge of weakness, Obama appears unable to disengage. Instead he has borrowed Bush’s rhetoric of good and evil and joined the fear factory. He has subsumed al-Qaeda and the Taliban into a singular threat of global proportions whose defeat he pronounced ‘fundamental to the defense of our people’. Afghanistan, he argued,will not be pacified until the Taliban’s allies in Pakistan are vanquished. Precipitate withdrawal will restore the Taliban to power, and create a safe haven for al-Qaeda to plan more terrorist attacks on the west.
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