Well, I just listened to Charlie Rose railing at the Pakistani Ambassador to 'do more to shut down these groups', a general sentiment no doubt shared by many.
If it were that easy, it would have been done, maybe.
Consider if someone (the Soviet Union?) asked "1960s America" why it hadn't done more to get rid of the Klan, maybe. Is that a wholly inapt analogy?
Consider also that, on one Pew report from 2007, more Pakistanis thought the U.S. was a bigger threat to their country than supported Osama bin Laden and his organization...
I also heard Fareed talking about the disenfranchised Muslim population in India, ripe for radicalization. That seems to pre-judge some of what we know about radicals themselves (not the source of their public support, though, to the extent they have it).
All of it leads to Fareed's well placed hope for a new, bold foreign policy.
One of the chief 'urgencies' that cries out for transformative politics is a new public education and rework of the "war on terror". So long have we been with that poor conceptualization that we risk falling into old grooves, old language, old dichotomies, even moreso if there is another attack on U.S. soil. It's not just about changing policies, in some drawing room. It's about changing attitudes, domestically and otherwise.
Another chief candidate for true 'strategery' is a policy framework that accounts for the U.S.'s continued role as ... both wanted and unwanted hegemon. If one wants to bake into that framework a view of the U.S. as a transitional power in the 21st century, so be it, but I think that comes out more or less at the same place, the same strategic prescription, so it is not required ...
Monday, December 1, 2008
A New Security Team
