"On Friday, President Barack Obama ordered an Air Force drone to bomb two separate Pakistani villages, killing what Pakistani officials said were 22 individuals, including between four and seven foreign fighters," Juan Cole wrote in Salon. "Many of Obama's initiatives in his first few days in office - preparing to depart Iraq, ending torture and closing Guantánamo - were aimed at signaling a sharp turn away from Bush administration policies. In contrast, the headline about the strike in Waziristan could as easily have appeared in December with 'President Bush' substituted for 'President Obama'. Pundits are already worrying that Obama may be falling into the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam trap, of escalating a predecessor's halfhearted war into a major quagmire." The New York Times said American officials in Washington said the attacks had dispelled for now any expectation that Mr Obama might curtail the missile attacks. Although these were the first US strikes in the tribal areas to have occurred this year, the lull in operations may not have been a tactical choice but have resulted from loss of intelligence resources. Pakistan's The News reported: "The drone attack came after a month of silence, as Taliban operating there claimed to have busted a network of US spies. The Taliban also claimed to have killed 40 out of 80 alleged US spies, captured on charges of spying on so-called Mujahideen for the US forces across the border in Afghanistan." Helene Cooper wrote: "For Mr Obama, Afghanistan is the signal foreign policy crisis that he must address quickly. Some 34,000 American troops are already fighting an insurgency that grows stronger by the month, making this a dynamically deteriorating situation in a region fraught with consequence for American security aims. Coupled with nuclear-armed Pakistan, with which it shares a border zone that has become a haven for al Qa'eda, Afghanistan could quickly come to define the Obama presidency. "Mr Obama's extra troops will largely be battling a Taliban insurgency fed by an opium trade estimated at $300 million a year. And that insurgency is dispersed among a largely rural population living in villages scattered across 78,000 square miles of southern Afghanistan. "One question for Mr Obama is whether 30,000 more troops are enough. 'I think that this is more of a psychological surge than a practical surge,' said Karin von Hippel, an Afghanistan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She said she favoured the troop increase, but only as a precursor to getting the Europeans to contribute more, and to changing America's policy so it focuses more on the countryside, as opposed to the capital. " 'In Afghanistan, the number of troops, if you combine Nato, American and Afghan troops, is 200,000 forces versus 600,000 in Iraq,' Ms von Hippel said. 'Those numbers are so low that an extra 30,000 isn't going to get you to where you need to be. It's more of a stop-gap measure.' " 'But something,' she said, 'is better than nothing.' "That last assertion, however, is also open to debate. Some foreign policy experts argue that Mr Obama's decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan is simply an extension of Bush administration policy in the region, with the difference being that Mr Obama could be putting more American lives at risk to pursue a failed policy." John Nagl, a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, who is regarded as a preeminent military authority on counterinsurgency wrote: "The essence of success is counterinsurgency, which requires boots on the ground, and plenty of them - 20 to 25 counterinsurgents for every 1,000 people, or some 600,000 for all of Afghanistan, a country larger and more populous than Iraq. The additional 30,000 American forces on tap for deployment to Afghanistan over the next year are sorely needed, but obviously insufficient to protect all 30 million people in the country." The notion that American troops are in Afghanistan to protect civilians is hard to square with the fact that it over the last year as many as 4,000 Afghan civilians were killed by US forces or their Nato allies. Reporting from Mehtarlam, Carlotta Gall said: "The American military declared the nighttime raid this month a success, saying it killed 32 people, all Taliban insurgents - the fruit of an emphasis on intelligence-driven use of Special Operations forces. "But the two young men who lay wincing in a hospital ward here told a different story a few days later, one backed up by the pro-American provincial governor and a central government delegation. "They agreed that 13 civilians had been killed and 9 wounded when American commandos broke down doors and unleashed dogs without warning on Jan 7 in the hunt for a known insurgent in Masamut, in Laghman Province in eastern Afghanistan. The residents were so enraged that they threatened to march on the American military base here." On the Pakistani side of the border, operations which have in recent months been hailed in the US press for their increasing success in targeting members of al Qa'eda, may in fact be terrorising the local population. NBC said: "many locals argue that innocent civilians are the main victims of the attacks. In North Waziristan, the drone strikes are leading to mental disorders, especially among women and children, according to Dr Munir Ahmad, a 50-year-old psychiatrist in Miranshah, a city on the border with Afghanistan that is North Waziristan's main population center. " 'The situation among the people is alarming,' he said. 'The women and children are so frightened from hours of drones circling overhead and then the thunderous noise of the missile attacks that now even a door slamming frightens them to uncontrollable tears,' he said. "Ahmad, who specialises in treating the effects of violence, told us that two years ago he used to treat about 10 patients a day for different mental disorders - he said he now sees around 160 patients a day suffering from uncontrollable fear and rage. 'I am especially worried about long-term affects on the children,' he said. "Mohammed Yaqoob, a grammar school teacher in Miranshah, blames the Pakistani government for failing to protect people from the drone attacks. " 'The children are so afraid that they can't concentrate on their lessons,' Yaqoob told us. 'They just sit in the classroom and look towards the sky watching the three or four drones that continuously hover over the town,' he said. Yaqoob said that over 30 high schools have closed in North Waziristan because parents have pulled their kids out of school and sent them to live with relatives in safer cities." In Time magazine, Aryn Baker and Omar Waraich wrote: "To understand the scale of the challenge facing him as President Obama's envoy to promote US interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke might consider the story of Amjad Islam. Islam, a school teacher in the town of Matta, refused to comply when local Taliban leaders demanded that he hike up his trousers to expose his ankles in the manner of the prophet Mohammad. The teacher knew his Muslim teachings, and had earned his jihadist stripes fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Their edict was wrong, Islam told the Pakistani Taliban enforcers, and no such thing had been demanded even by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan during the '90s. A scuffle resulted that left Islam's body hanging in the town square. To drive home their warning to the locals, the militants also shot the teacher's father. "In introducing Holbrooke's mission to promote counter-terror cooperation between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama on Thursday warned that 'there is no answer in Afghanistan that does not confront the al Qa'eda and Taliban bases along the border [in Pakistan].' But Amjad Islam was not killed in some frontier village abutting Afghanistan; his body hung, just 80 miles from Pakistan's capital, in the Swat Valley that until 2007 had been a popular tourist destination dubbed 'The Switzerland of Asia.' These days, about 75 per cent of the Valley is under the control of a particularly virulent branch of the Pakistani Taliban that has destroyed schools and terrorised the population." Yasmeen Hassan from Equality Now, an international women's rights organization, wrote: "I have such fond childhood memories of summer holidays in the Swat Valley in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, a place well known among Pakistanis for its breathtaking views, cool summer climate and lush fruit orchards. But today the Swat Valley is experiencing heartbreaking pressures, as the Taliban strike with disconcerting regularity and, among other atrocities, impose a ban on the education of girls. "Even before this ban was put in place on Jan 15, more than 100 schools for girls in Swat, as well as more than 150 such schools in the greater Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), had been shut down, many after being bombed or torched, leaving approximately 100,000 girls out of school. Radio announcements warned girls that they could be attacked with acid if they dared to attend school, and teachers have been threatened and killed. Last Monday, five more Swat Valley schools were bombed."
pwoodward@thenational.ae
