UPDATE: I usually put updates at the bottom of a post, but this one needs to be at the top. Says Don Surber of Obama's Pakistan proposal:
Pakistan is only the second largest Muslim country, well-armed with fierce mountain people. I live in West Virginia. Please, watch “Deliverance” before even thinking about taking on mountain people.
Here’s the excerpt concerning going after terrorists in Pakistan--and elsewhere--from Senator Barack Obama’s prepared speech for the Wilson Center. It's failing the laugh test in a lot of quarters.
As President, I would make the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional, and I would make our conditions clear: Pakistan must make substantial progress in closing down the training camps, evicting foreign fighters, and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan.
I understand that [Pakistani] President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.
And Pakistan needs more than F-16s to combat extremism. As the Pakistani government increases investment in secular education to counter radical madrasas, my Administration will increase America's commitment. We must help Pakistan invest in the provinces along the Afghan border, so that the extremists' program of hate is met with one of hope. And we must not turn a blind eye to elections that are neither free nor fair -- our goal is not simply an ally in Pakistan, it is a democratic ally.
Beyond Pakistan, there is a core of terrorists -- probably in the tens of thousands -- who have made their choice to attack America. So the second step in my strategy will be to build our capacity and our partnerships to track down, capture or kill terrorists around the world, and to deny them the world's most dangerous weapons.
I will not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America. This requires a broader set of capabilities, as outlined in the Army and Marine Corps's new counter-insurgency manual. I will ensure that our military becomes more stealth, agile, and lethal in its ability to capture or kill terrorists. We need to recruit, train, and equip our armed forces to better target terrorists, and to help foreign militaries to do the same. This must include a program to bolster our ability to speak different languages, understand different cultures, and coordinate complex missions with our civilian agencies.In light of Obama’s staunch opposition to the war in Iraq and his promise, as president, to sit down and talk to the regional dictators such as Syria’s Assad or Iran’s Ahmadenijad, I find his willingness to go into Pakistan to rather curious. Okay, it’s more than curious, it’s straight unformed and uninformed BS. It’s posturing.
