Oy:

LAHORE: Criticising the Bush administration’s reliance on President Pervez Musharraf’s role in the war on terror, United States presidential hopeful Barack Obama has vowed to go after Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

News One TV channel on Friday quoted him as saying in a CNN Democratic presidential debate in Austin, Texas, that the US had made a mistake by putting all its “eggs in the Musharraf basket”. He said the US should go after Al Qaeda and make sure that Pakistan was serious about hunting down terrorists and expanding democratic rule.

Promising that he would do everything to keep America safe if he were to become president, Obama said, “I will do whatever is required to accomplish that. I will not hesitate to act against those that would do America harm.”

I’m sure Obama will be a fine President – I voted for him, it looks like I’m going to vote for him again, and John McCain seems to be doing everything in his power to make ensure that I’ll have a lot of company. That said, he has said the two fucking stupidest things I’ve heard a candidate say all year – first, that he’d increase the size of the army/marines by 100,000 (a promise which, I must note, remains on his foreign policy short list, and still seems like a solution in search of a problem, one I’m afraid it will find); and second, that he’s totally committed to bombing the friendly nation of Pakistan. This go-around is certainly better than last time, when he and Hillary were getting into the grisly details of what particular ordnance they might use when attacking our allies, but it’s still pretty bellicose. Like, I get that this signals to the important soccer/NASCAR/whatever demographic that you aren’t some hippy peace fag and you’ll totally go Chuck Norris on any foreigners who look at you wrong, and I understand the rhetorical value of that. But the thing is, when you say ‘Pakistan’ – as opposed to ‘any country’, for example – it probably doesn’t go over the same way with people in, say, Pakistan. It sounds kind of hostile, I’d imagine, kind of provocative, particularly when coming from a country which has shown such an appetite for bombing the fuck out of countries in your region, with or without much reason. Full disclosure: if I knew for sure that Osama bin Laden was hanging out on your couch, I’d blow your whole fucking living room to hell without a second thought – Pakistan, Poughkeepsie, wherever. So wouldn’t anybody. But I sure wouldn’t keep talking about it out of the clear blue sky and expect you to be cool with it. This is why politicians don’t do hypotheticals (well, that, or because they’re full of shit.)

Maybe not the biggest deal in the world, maybe, but pointlessly stupid. And if you intend to coexist peacefully with very large nuclear nations, this sort of rhetoric is counterproductive in the long run. Unless you’re working on a fiendishly cunning can’t-possibly-fail plan of waging a 10,000-year-long land war in Asia, of course, in which case: mission accomplished.