South Asian Geopolitics 101

US Confirms Lashkar Link

First Read:

A senior U.S. counter-terrorism official confirms that Indian authorities have found the names of several high-ranking members of the Pakistani-based group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, in the satellite phone used by one those who carried out the attacks in Mumbai. Lashkar is considered a terrorist group by the U.S. government.

Morever, there is evidence that calls were placed to some of the Lashkar leaders from the satellite phone.

Among those on the list: Yusuf Muzammil, head of Lashkar-e-Taiba's operations unit...

Pakistan First, Syria Next

US helicopter-borne troops have attacked an area on the Syrian border with Iraq, killing eight people, Syrian authorities say.

Deep Thoughts

Why do people think mispronunciation is a good thing? Doggone it, that kinda of bull makes me go nucular.

The Obama-Palin Doctrine

McCain has criticized Obama repeatedly for saying that the US should go into Pakistan to pursue terrorists. In a recent interview, George Stephanopoulos shows McCain a video of Palin suggesting the same course of action. When confronted with the video, McCain blames people for recording conversations and the media for assuming that anything that Palin says during a conversation is official policy.



(H/T: Open Left)

Leaving aside the ridiculousness of McCain's arguments, I actually agree with McCain on the policy being discussed. There isn't much good that can come out of publicly stating that the US would compromise the territorial integrity of a sovereign nation, especially when we are talking about a hypothetical situation. Obama's statements, I believe, are at least in part designed to make him appear strong on national defense. That may work for the campaign and for the purposes of winning an election, but the bluster is hardly conducive to diplomatic efforts.

Does that get McCain off the hook? Not so much. McCain makes a big deal about using reserve and restraint while talking about the possibility of going into Pakistan, but it seems that this talk of reserve is, well, reserved exclusively for Pakistan. He has no problems ratcheting up the rhetoric when it comes to Iran or Cuba, or Chavez, or when it comes to snubbing allies like Spain.

Given his generally hawkish stance of foreign policy, McCain’s posturing on Pakistan seems mostly designed to draw contrasts with Obama and make him look naïve. Either that or it is a continuation George Bush’s schizophrenic policy on Pakistan, which would have far worse implications than political posturing implied in previous sentence.

The Shotgun Marriage

Frank Rich's new column on McCain and Palin is a fantastic read. Here are some extracts from the column but I highly recommend reading the column in its entirety.

As is nakedly evident, the speech’s central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second most popular love that dare not speak its name.)

***

That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless.

***

We’ve already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a role in 9/11 — even after both American and foreign intelligence services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of the supposed evidence of Saddam’s W.M.D. and in his estimate of the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late 2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn’t until months after “Mission Accomplished” that he called for more American forces to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.

In other words, McCain’s hasty vetting of Palin was all too reminiscent of his grave dereliction of due diligence on the war. He has been no less hasty in implying that we might somehow ride to the military rescue of Georgia (“Today, we are all Georgians”) or in reaffirming as late as December 2007 that the crumbling anti-democratic regime of Pervez Musharraf deserved “the benefit of the doubt” even as it was enabling the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. McCain’s blanket endorsement of Bush administration policy in Pakistan could have consequences for years to come.