As I pointed out in my last post, Barack Obama has his work cut out for him in Pakistan and he did not help his cause by announcing his willingness to order military strikes on Pakistani soil. Proving that is this article (in Arabic) from Al Jazeera
The article is titled "Anxiety and Expectations in Pakistan after the election of Obama". It states quite simply that though the president and prime minister of Pakistan will welcome the leadership of Barack Obama, the citizens are nervous and fearful about his clear assertions that he will be withdrawing troops from Iraq and stationing them on the Pakistani border to bring the fight against terrorism to Pakistani soil. Says political analyst Zahid Hussein"[I] believe that the politics of Barack Obama will be more severe and more negative towards Pakistan than the exiting president George Bush concerning the war on so-called terrorism"
It appears Barack Obama will start his presidency faced with an unstable nuclear-armed nation of 164,000,000 Muslims who fear him and expect that he will fight an open war against them. I'm pretty sure that was not his intention when he made the statements he did, but the world must now live with the consequences of his rhetoric.
Fortunately, I think that as long as Pakistan has a functioning rational government, he should be able to talk himself out of this and no doubt some financial aid and a generous humanitarian effort could relieve some of the tension. The fear is that in a country which has been forcibly taken over by the military 3 times in the last 50 years, there's really no guarantee in Pakistan that the faction who runs the country today will still be running the country tomorrow - or that any single faction will really be running the country at all. Pakistan is only 61 years old and it as fractious and tribal as Lebanon and Iraq. It is definitely part of the world where change is a bad thing.
