'Really intolerable consequences'

Experts: Earth Warming Faster; A Trigger for 'Dangerous' Change?

Reuters: Global warming is likely to overshoot a 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) rise seen by the European Union and many developing nations as a trigger for 'dangerous' change, a Reuters poll of scientists showed on Tuesday.

Nine of 11 experts, who were among authors of the final summary by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 (IPCC), also said the evidence that mankind was to blame for climate change had grown stronger in the past two years...

Ten of 11 experts said it was at best 'unlikely' -- or less than a one-third chance -- that the world would manage to limit warming to a 2 degree Celsius rise above pre-industrial levels.

'Scientifically it can be done. But it's unlikely given the level of political will,' said Salemeel Huq at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. And David Karoly, of the University of Melbourne, said the world was 'very unlikely' to reach the goal.

'The concentration of long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is already enough to cause warming of more than 2C above pre-industrial levels, and we are continuing to emit more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,' he said.

Obama looking at cooling air to fight warming

San Francisco Chronicle: Tinkering with Earth's climate to chill runaway global warming -- a radical idea once dismissed out of hand -- is being discussed by the White House as a potential emergency option, the president's new science adviser said...

That's because global warming is happening so rapidly, John Holdren told The Associated Press... His concern is that the United States and other nations won't slow global warming fast enough and that several 'tipping points' could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached... it increases chances of 'really intolerable consequences,' he said...

Holdren compared global warming to being 'in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.' He and many experts believe that warming of a few degrees more could lead to disastrous drought conditions and food shortages in some regions, rising seas and more powerful coastal storms in others...

Those efforts are racing against three tipping points he cited: Earth could be as close as six years away from the loss of Arctic summer sea ice, and that has the potential of altering the climate in unforeseen ways. Other elements that could dramatically speed up climate change include the release of frozen methane from thawing permafrost in Siberia, and more and bigger wildfires worldwide.

Image: A mountain is reflected in a bay that used to be covered by the Sheldon glacier on the Antarctic peninsula, January 14, 2009. The glacier has shrunk by about 2 km since 1989. (Reuters/Alister Doyle); source here.

You are being lied to about pirates

Some are gangsters. Others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling.

Johann Hari, The Independent: In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since -- and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died...

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation -- and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $3000m-worth of tuna, shrimp and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving...

This is the context in which the 'pirates' have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia -- and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent 'strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence.'...

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know 'what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.' The pirate smiled, and responded: 'What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.'

Image source here.

AfPak: It's not about 'terrorists'

The secrets of Obama's surge

Pepe Escobar, Asia Times: What if the AfPak quagmire had nothing to do with 'terrorists' but with these facts:

1. A Cold War mentality in action still prevailing at the Pentagon...

2. The US Empire of bases still in overdrive, and in New Great Game mode...

3. The fear of a spectacular NATO failure...

4. Last but not least, the energy wars...

So is AfPak the Pentagon's AIG -- we gotta bail them out, can't let them fail? Is it a Predator drone war disguised as nation building? Will it become Obama's Vietnam? Whatever it is, it's not about 'terrorists.' Not really. Follow the money. Follow the energy. Follow the map.

Globocop versus the TermiNATO

Pepe Escobar, Asia Times: NATO has nothing to do with 'nation-building,' peacekeeping or 'humanitarian assistance.' And Afghanistan proves it... No one will admit it, but many in Washington and Brussels would actually love NATO to really be a borderless TermiNATO, bypassing the UN to perform humanitarian imperialism all over the globe, taking out 'al-Qaeda' and 'terrorists' anywhere, protecting Pipelineistan and pipeline lands for Western interests in all directions.

 

The US, supported by NATO, was the midwife of a new incarnation of 'Islamic fundamentalism' which should, as it did, get rid Soviets in Afghanistan and in the former, energy-rich Soviet republics. The fact that, millions of dead and millions of displaced people later, NATO is now asking for Russian help so as not to be stranded in Afghanistan is just another bitter irony of AfPak history, and certainly not the last.

Disturber of the Peace

Robert Kagan, The Washington Post: Americans are creators of turmoil. Europeans see them the way the ancient Greeks saw the Athenians, as 'incapable of either living a quiet life themselves or of allowing anyone else to do so.' As the scholar Stephen Sestanovich pointed out in a brilliant essay on 'American Maximalism,' Democratic and Republican administrations alike over the past half-century have favored 'large, even risky' transformative strategies, whether confronting the Soviet Union, unifying Germany, fighting in the Balkans or solving global economic crises, and have abjured the safer, incremental approaches that Europeans always prefer. Yet Europe has often been dragged out of its comfort zone by this born gambler of a superpower.

Europeans love Obama, but European leaders have been fretting ever since his election. George W. Bush did the Europeans a huge favor by giving them the best excuse for inaction in transatlantic history. Now comes Obama, so much more compelling and yet, still, American.

Image: 'Check the disturbers of the peace!'; source here.

US banks insolvent, system 'a Ponzi scheme'

America the Tarnished

Paul Krugman, The New York Times: These days America is looking like the Bernie Madoff of economies: for many years it was held in respect, even awe, but it turns out to have been a fraud all along.

US banks 'basically insolvent': Soros

Financial Post: The US economy is in for 'a lasting slowdown' and won't recover this year, while 'the banking system as a whole is basically insolvent,' billionaire investor George Soros told Reuters Financial Television Monday... Mr. Soros also said the US dollar is under pressure and may eventually be replaced as a world reserve currency, possibly by the IMF's Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic currency basket comprising dollars, euros, yen and sterling.

Bill Moyers Journal

With guest William K. Black, former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention:

Moyers: So you're suggesting, saying that CEOs of some of these banks and mortgage firms in order to increase their own personal income, deliberately set out to make bad loans?

Black: Yes.

...

Moyers: You're describing what Bernie Madoff did to a limited number of people. But you're saying it's systemic, a systemic Ponzi scheme.

Black: Our system...

Moyers: Our financial system.

Black: Became a Ponzi scheme.

...

Moyers: Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?

Black: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. All right? They're scared to death of a collapse. They're afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent... that we'll run screaming to the exits.      Video here.

The US Crisis of Credit Visualized (video)

Image source here.

Understanding, or power?

Intelligence, information, truth and power

Paul Woodward, War in Context

Is information valued because it illuminates understanding, or because it can serve as a means to an end?

Information as a repository of power needs to be guarded and channeled in the most effective way. Its value becomes diluted through loss of ownership.

Information as a repository of truth acquires value if it can be tied to other information through a process of exchange. Its value is enhanced through the relinquishment of ownership.

Democracy rises or falls on its ability to sustain the free flow of information. As a practical necessity, that flow needs to be managed; yet if this is treated as an exercise in the control of power, democratic governance will be undermined.

Image source here.

Israel: Do it long enough, nobody will care

Changing the rules of war

George Bisharat, The Electronic Intifada: Israel's campaign to rewrite international law to its advantage is deliberate and knowing. As the former head of Israel's 20-lawyer International Law Division in the Military Advocate General's office, Daniel Reisner recently stated: 'If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is not based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries... International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal molds. Eight years later, it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy.

'At War With the Palestinian People'

Uri Avnery: The matter came before the Supreme Court. The petitioners, Jews and Arabs, argued that this measure contradicts our Basic Laws which guarantee the equality of all citizens. The answer of the Ministry of Justice lawyers let the cat out of the bag. It asserts, for the first time, in unequivocal language: 'The state of Israel is at war with the Palestinian people, people against people, collective against collective.' ... Of course, the lawyers did not invent this principle. It has been accepted for a long time.

The missing Mandela

Paul Woodward, War in Context: Apartheid didn't end because its opponents adopted a spiritually enlightened non-violent perspective. It ended because white South Africans were forced to recognize they were clinging on to a politically unsustainable system. Israelis still cling on to a politically unsustainable situation, but unlike white South Africans, they are still able to hold on to a security blanket stitched together by American military and economic aid and political protection.

An Army of Extremists

How some military rabbis are trying to radicalize Israeli soldiers.

Christopher Hitchens, Slate: The zealot settlers and their clerical accomplices are establishing an army within the army so that one day, if it is ever decided to disband or evacuate the colonial settlements, there will be enough officers and soldiers, stiffened by enough rabbis and enough extremist sermons, to refuse to obey the order. Torah verses will also be found that make it permissible to murder secular Jews as well as Arabs. The dress rehearsals for this have already taken place.

The Testimony from Gaza

Gershem Gorenberg, The American Prospect: Israeli soldiers' accounts of the fighting last winter further undermine the official rationale of the war... At first, it looks like necessary defense. The public rallies around in the adrenaline rush of solving an international problem by force. The critics are few, or foreign, and easily dismissed. As time passes, it becomes more difficult to name what has been gained amid the horror. The moral price reveals itself. Criticism becomes mainstream and respectable and is entirely too late.

Image source here: Palestinians pray next to the bodies of seven members of the Salha family who were killed during Israel's attacks on the Gaza Strip, 9 January. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

'Afghan women had it way better in the '80s'

Top Ten Ways the US 

is Turning Afghanistan into Iraq

Juan Cole, Informed Comment:

2. The US has actually only managed to install a fundamentalist government in Afghanistan... No one seems to have noted that the Shiite regime in Baghdad is more or less doing the same thing... Everyone keeps saying the US improved the status of women in both countries. Actually, in Iraq the US invasion set women back about 30 years. 

In Afghanistan, the socialist government of the 1980s, for all its brutality in other spheres, did implement policies substantially improving women's rights, including aiming at universal education, making a place for them in the professions... There were socialist Afghan women soldiers fighting the Muslim fundamentalist guerrillas that Reagan called 'freedom fighters' and to whom he gave billions to turn the country into a conservative theocracy. I can never get American audiences to concede that Afghan women had it way better in the 1980s, and that it has been downhill ever since, mainly because of US favoritism toward patriarchal and anti-progressive forces.

Obama's domino theory

Juan Cole, in Salon: The president sounds like he's channeling Cheney or McCain -- or a cold war hawk afraid of international communism -- when he talks about the war in Afghanistan. His latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeovers in South Asia is just as implausible as its earlier iteration in Southeast Asia... Most of the allegations are not true or are vastly exaggerated. 

There are very few al-Qaida fighters based in Afghanistan proper. What is being called the 'Taliban' is mostly not Taliban at all (in the sense of seminary graduates loyal to Mullah Omar). The groups being branded 'Taliban' only have substantial influence in 8 to 10 percent of Afghanistan, and only 4 percent of Afghans say they support them. Some 58 percent of Afghans say that a return of the Taliban is the biggest threat to their country, but almost no one expects it to happen. Moreover, with regard to Pakistan, there is no danger of militants based in the remote Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) taking over that country or 'killing' it.

Afganistan, a New Beginning

Informed Comment: Appearing on the scene as if by miracle in 1992, the Taliban's purported mission of clearing the countryside of warlords and drug dealers was received warmly by Washington's K Street lobbyists. Painted by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) as an indigenous Afghan tribal force, the Taliban were actually a thinly disguised ISI strike force paid for by a consortium of business interests.

The CIA's former chief of the Near-East South-Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations, Charles Cogan today refers to them as 'a wholly owned subsidiary of the ISI.' But former ISI Director General Hamid Gul claims his ISI also received help from Britain's former High Commissioner to Pakistan, Sir Nicholas Barrington, who 'inducted both former royalists and erstwhile communists into the Taliban movement.' For 8 years, the Clinton administration bought the idea of a 'moderate' Taliban. But the very idea was a chimera, played skillfully by the ISI in a double game that saw Washington unwittingly support ISI's interests while undermining its own.

Image source here.

IMF: Canada 'solid' and 'resilient'

The 'best prepared' award

Stephanie Flanders, BBC: I know you can't bear the suspense. The award for 'Best Prepared Country Going Into the Crisis' goes to... Canada.

Next time the [UK] prime minister talks about every country being brought down by this crisis -- or the chancellor suggests that everyone made the same mistakes -- remember Canada. Nowhere is immune, but by most key measures, the Canadians are coming out of this crisis in a league of their own.

Take the banking system. Canada's banks have not just had fewer bailouts than other countries. They've had none. Zero. Not a dime...

As the FT pointed out today, of the seven institutions in the world that still retain a triple-A Moody's credit rating, two are Canadian banks. And as their competitors have tumbled, so they have ascended the global rankings: all five Canadian banks now rate in the world top 50.

Didn't they pay a price for that boring banking -- the distinct lack of securitisation and innovation? Well, it's true, Canada didn't have a nationwide house price bubble... And they didn't have the same kind of rise in personal debt. That's one reason the IMF used words like 'resilient' and 'well-placed' in its latest survey of the country's prospects...

Despite the openness of its economy, Canada has not even been part of the global trade imbalances... Net debt last year was an irritating 22% of GDP...

And the most impressive thing of all about Canada's position is that you are probably reading about it for the first time. Canadians are so sensible they even have the sense not to brag, in case things turn out badly for them after all... On top of everything else, the Canadians have guarded against hubris.

IMF: 2009 Canada, Concluding Statement

Context and outlook

1. Canada entered the global financial turmoil on a solid footing. Through 2007, Canada experienced strong growth, price stability, fiscal and current account surpluses, historically low unemployment, and financial stability. This favorable outturn reflected strong fiscal discipline, sound and credible monetary policy, and robust financial supervision and regulation. It also reflected supportive global growth and booming commodity prices...

5. At the same time, the strains evident in other countries are markedly less serious in Canada. Canada's housing markets have been less overheated than elsewhere and booms have been localized rather than general. Financial conditions have tightened, as reflected in spreads and lending standards; but strains are considerably less severe than in other major countries, and credit growth remains solid, both of which reflect a resilient financial system.

6. Canada has responded proactively to the worsening economic outlook. Fiscal stimulus incorporated in Budget 2009 will ameliorate the downturn, and in tandem with the Bank of Canada's aggressive easing of monetary policy, will mitigate deflation risks. The financial system is stable, and recent steps to expand the toolkit for financial stabilization are appropriate given the uncertain outlook. Looking ahead, the main task for policies is to remain vigilant and stand ready to respond if tail risks materialize.

Image source here.

The use of women

Chris Selley's Full Pundit: 

The Globe and Mail's Adam Radwanski dismisses Lord Malloch Brown's contention that protecting women was 'one of the reasons the UK and many in the West threw ourselves into the struggle in Afghanistan' as the utter nonsense that it is...

If politicians had actually looked honestly at the prospects for social improvement in Afghanistan instead of just trotting them out when they needed to boost public support for the mission, they might not be as shocked, scandalized, appalled and at a loss for answers as they are now, in the face of proposed legislation that would effectively legalize intramarital rape.

Like the politicians, the National Post's editorialists admit to having 'fall[en] back' on women's rights as a justification for the mission when it was faltering militarily. And they say Canadians, having heard such arguments, can't now 'be faulted for wondering: What, exactly, are our soldiers fighting -- and dying -- to protect?'

Canadian law changed only 26 years ago

The Globe and Mail: Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai was accused of supporting a law that legalizes rape within marriage. But in Canada it was only 26 years ago that the law changed to make spousal sexual assault an offence...

Prior to 1983, rape was considered an offence outside of marriage... A year before the change to legislation occurred, NDP MP Margaret Mitchell raised the issue of violence against women. She was laughed at my MPs in the House of Commons when she demanded the government take action to stop domestic violence. The outcry from women's groups brought attention to the issue.

Image source here.

Checklist and responsibility

Erna Paris, in Long Shadows: Truth, Lies 

and History:

Following the thinking of the jurist Raphael Lemkin, genocide was defined in 1948 as 'acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group,' while other crimes against humanity concerned offences such as murder, enslavement, deportation, rape and torture committed during armed conflict and directed against a civilian population. The next category -- violations of the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions -- included the wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or any devastation not justified by military necessity, and wilful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion and education, the arts and sciences, historic monuments and works of art.

Interview with Louise Arbour: 'In our tribunal, we look only at personal criminal responsibility in a very tightly defined, narrow way and we demand proof beyond a reasonable doubt about the involvement of the individual. We do not have a mandate to establish the moral responsibility of those who saw things happen and did nothing, including people who might have had the capacity to stop the process and did nothing. But we have to be careful in thinking that just because we focus on individual criminal guilt we therefore absolve the community.'

#98 in The LRC 100: Canada's Most Important Books

Image source here.

Their day will come

Israel Can Learn from 'The Troubles'

Ellis Weintraub, in Real Clear World: Upon the arrival of Sinn Fein President and Northern Ireland Republican leader Gerry Adams into the Middle East, Israeli officials will give him the cold shoulder -- 'We expect all dignitaries who come here to make it clear that they will not dignify Hamas with a meeting,' said Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor...

Perhaps Israel's cynicism with regard to Adams comes from the long and often antagonistic relationship between Israel and Irish Republicanism. During the dark days of the Troubles of Northern Ireland, Irish Republicans identified with the far-off struggle of the Palestinians... Murals found on buildings in Belfast's Catholic neighborhoods depict Arab 'freedom fighters' in a common struggle... Many Northern Irish Catholics perceive Israel in a similar fashion to that of the Protestant community, an aggressive colonial movement usurping land from an indigenous population.

Israel's rhetoric, oddly enough, can match the idioms and language-style of Northern Ireland's Protestants. In the past two centuries, Ulster's Protestants have proclaimed their province as a beacon of Protestant liberty and freedom amidst backwaters of Papal tyranny and superstition... As the crises of Irish home rule and Irish independence unfolded at the beginning of the 20th century, Ulster Protestants refused to submit to the prospect of 'Rome rule,' and so they engineered Ulster's exemption from the Irish Free State...

Israel and its unwavering supporters have long proclaimed the country's separation from the rest of the Middle East, an enlightened democracy surrounded by Oriental barbarism and irrational hatred... During the recent war in Gaza, pro-Israel commentators wrote of Israel as a product of the Judeo-Christian culture that fostered the Enlightenment, while they regarded Israel's Hamas opponents as implacably fanatical and possessing an unreasonable medieval cultural ethos...

The rhetoric of Ian Paisley and Mark Steyn vastly simplified the Northern Irish and Arab-Israeli conflicts. They are not Manicheist struggles between good and evil, liberty and tyranny, nor are they caroonish battles between progress and darkness. Rather, they are both messy and complex clashes over territory, sovereignty, and identity... Israel should cease discouraging third parties from engaging with Hamas in ways that might clarify the movement's view and test its behavior, and Israel could start by meeting with Adams.

Image source here.

'They just bully their way in'

Paul Palango, in Dispersing the Fog: Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP:

It is normal for the FBI and CIA to have agents in Canada attached to the American embassy, just as the RCMP and CSIS have liaison officers in other countries. But the Canadian approach to such work is much different than that of the Americans, who feel it is their right to enforce their laws anywhere in the world... 'Everyone knows how the Americans are, they just bully their way in,' one high-ranking official told me... 'What were we going to do, tell them to leave?'

The FBI, the CIA, and presumably other foreign police and intelligence services have been exploiting a loophole in the Canadian system. Informed sources say it is not uncommon for foreign intelligence services to retain Canadian lawyers, who in turn hire accounting firms and private investigators -- who can then hide behind the lawyers -- while conducting an investigation. The private investigators, most of them ex-Mounties, operate without the encumbrance of search warrants and other legal niceties. They gather evidence against Canadians in Canada while circumventing the laws of the country. All of this is being done with complicity of governments, which have collectively turned a blind eye to the practice.

J. L. Granatstein, quoting Robertson Davies, in Yankee Go Home? Canadians and Anti-Americanism: Americans are 'beguiled by the notion that the fate of mankind and human culture' lies wholly in their hands. They are 'natural-born crusaders, forever in the right, even when they are least aware of what they are crusading about.'

Rachel Maddow, interviewed in The San Francisco Chronicle:

Q: You are a proud progressive, yet you regularly take on the left. What has the Obama administration done wrong so far?

A: Oh, tons of stuff. State secrets? That was in a San Francisco courtroom, wasn't it? The judge was so incredulous that the Obama Justice Department folks were going to continue with the Bush administration's argument that one of these horrible terrorism rendition cases shold be dismissed on the basis that the whole idea of it was secret. Not that a specific piece of evidence was secret, but that the whole idea of the case was about a secret thing. [And the administration] dropped the enemy combatant designation, but kept all of the meaningful things about making somebody an enemy combatant. So there's been a bunch of important national security/constitutional things where the outcome is confusing at best and a continuation of the Bush policy at worst.

Image source here.

US looking for an exit strategy

From Obama, a guide 

for avoiding defeat in Afghanistan

Tony Karon, The National: The keyword of US President Barack Obama's new Afghanistan plan didn't make it into the text of the speech in which he announced it on Friday. That would be 'exit strategy.' ... The new plan, then, is less a blueprint for victory than it is a guide for avoiding defeat...

Pakistan has made clear that it has no intention of fighting Taliban elements whose operational focus is on fighting NATO in Afghanistan. The Pakistani Army has made peace agreements with a number of Pakistan-based Taliban groups that continue to wage war in Afghanistan.

Pakistan originally installed the Taliban in power in Afghanistan to ensure that its western flank was guarded by a friendly regime... After the September 11 attacks, the then president Pervez Musharraf tried, ultimately in vain, to convince the US to adopt a strategy of trying to detach the Taliban from al Qa'eda, and persuading them to expel Osama bin Laden.

But Pakistan's generals are arguably taking a long view, assuming that the US and its allies will eventually tire of their entanglement in the Hindu Kush, and when they do, Pakistan will be in a position to restore at least some of the power of its erstwhile proxies next door...

So, while Washington hopes to change Pakistan's relationship with the Taliban, Pakistan may be aiming ultimately to persuade Washington of the utility of that relationship. After all, Pakistan will be a player in Afghanistan long after America departs, and as far as it's concerned, the Taliban will be, too.

Solid political ground

Crime and politics

Dan Gardner, Ottawa Citizen: The essential thing to bear in mind when examining the Harper government's policies on crime is that they are not about crime. They are about politics... 

So we should be suspicious about the government's announcement that it will eliminate so-called sentencing discounts for time served awaiting trial. Is it broadly popular? Absolutely. Will it please the Conservatives' disgruntled base? Certainly. Will it make streets safer or the justice system more just. Not in the slightest. It's just another small, cheap, crowd-pleaser tossed out to score political points.

Re-dismantling the terrorist infrastructure again

Paul Woodward, War in Context: By basing a war strategy on the objective of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al Qaeda, Obama is resting on solid political ground. 

The question that everyone resolutely refuses to address is this: where's the evidence that al Qaeda's capacity to operate is bound together with its ability to maintain some sort of infrastructure in north western Pakistan? Why should we not assume that if another 9/11 type attack is being planned that it may well emanate from a location far removed from al Qaeda's historical base?...

At the same time, what happens to Pakistan and Afghanistan will certainly be affected by the extent to which the West provides jihadists, insurgents and tribal fighters the foundation for coming together to combat a common enemy.

Image source here.