Obama: ‘The cancer is in Pakistan’

Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars,
contains loads of chewy nuggets. But one that risks getting overlooked, amid
all the talk about whether Afghan President Hamid Karzai is “on meds” for manic
depression, is Obama’s own judgment that “the cancer is in Pakistan.”

Despite all the administration infighting over an Afghan exit strategy last
year detailed in the book, Obama is moving forward with his own plan. To my
mind, he explained it in his last Oval Office address when he told the American
people that his focus needed to be on digging out of the recession to help the
middle class and that maintaining a war without end would not help achieve that
goal. What will be critical is that when U.S. troops begin to pull out in July
of next year, Afghanistan is not left in a worse mess than when the U.S. and
its allies went in. Would it be politically justifiable to leave behind a
failed state or a de facto partition of north and south?


Obama rightly sees Pakistan as a much bigger problem. It is a nuclear-armed
state in strategic competition with its nuclear-armed neighbor, India. Today
its democratically elected leaders are grappling not only with an Islamic
insurgency but with the aftermath of catastrophic floods. According to Obama’s
envoy, Richard Holbrooke, the Pakistani government’s capacity to deal with the
militants is being hampered by the flooding that caused tens of thousands of
troops to be mobilized to help the homeless.

I can recall that when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary
Bob Gates were grilled in December last year by the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee on Afghan policy, the questions from Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Richard
Lugar (R-Ind.) and others kept coming back to Pakistan. They naturally wanted
to know what the policy was regarding Islamabad.

According to excerpts from Woodward’s book in today’s Washington Post and New York Times, then-Director of National Intelligence Mike
McConnell told Obama after his election that “Pakistan is a dishonest partner,
unwilling or unable to stop elements of the Pakistani intelligence service from
giving clandestine aid, weapons and money to the Afghan Taliban.”

There is no reason to conclude that this view has changed. Last November,
according to the book, Obama told his aides “we need to make clear to people
that the cancer is in Pakistan.” He believes that a more secure Afghanistan is
needed “so the cancer doesn’t spread” there.