The second paradigm failure, which Obama appears to have also fully embraced, is to continue to fail to call off the right wing jihadists and to stop supporting the underdevelopment of social welfare seeking societies of citizens who are not on the radical right fringe of society and religion. Instead he, like Bush and Cheney, is not willing to speak truth to Israel and others in the Middle East. Prashed, author of THE DARKER NATIONS: A PEOPLE ´S HISTORY OF THE THIRD WORLD (The New Press), properly notes that Hamas, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, and dozens of other extremist groups have won favor in their societies by fighting for the commonweal. That is, after fighting well in Afghanistan in the 1980s, they went home and joined movements to provide care and insurance, i.e. where the regions poor often have had no one to turn to in an age of Neo-Liberal and Neo-Conservative economics. Prashed points out that the group which bombed and attacked Mumbai last November 2008 (coming out of Pakistan) is Lashkar-al-Taiba, which is a largely popularly supported movement that provides health care for hundreds of thousands-if not millions-of Pakistanis each year.
No wonder Pakistan can't shut the Lashkar-al-Taiba down!
Recall, according to Pradesh, that until the 1970s, there were many non-sectarian groups operated in Pakistan helping the poor. Following Pakistan's fuller embrace of World Bank and IMF rules in the 1970s and 1980s, the poorest Pakistanis had to find support in their stricter and traditional religious sects, who had centuries of collateral and connections saved up. A similar story enveloped Algeria and other nation states in the same decades.
Until now, Obama has not even thought of pulling out of Afghanistan and failing to really work on development of social and human potential in Asia-instead of investing in things that go BOOM. A similar, non-military, approach is needed throughout Asia but Obama seems to be blind to the faults in his paradigms and keeps the door open for so-called good jihadists to join or rejoin governance by offering up guns or blind hope-instead of real help of develop. Obama ´s group of jihadists includes Likud party members who shoot premiers in Israel or who blindly support the bombing-the-hell-out of Gaza-e.g. breaking every international law on the books-as well as those jihadists who have joined governments in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia.
When will Obama understand that if he bombs the-hell-out-of Afghanistan and Pakistan, more jihadists will grow out of the walls and caves of the Himalayas? Until we, Americans, are ready to decontaminate a region by really helping a society instead of bombing it (because we can't control it), American foreign policy will never grow up and we will continue to waste our children's future on making war today and tomorrow.
The third paradigm of Washington's last 6 presidents, i.e. a paradigm--which like the other two--needs to be tossed out the window, is described by Vijay Prashed as the American leadership's instinct to constantly "disregard its own rule(s)" and playing favorites or turning on friends on-the-spur of the moment. In short, it is a world paradigm where often friendships outside America's small group of favored friends (like the U.K., Germany and Israel) are cheap or not taken seriously.
Prashed explains this American Let ´s-pick-and-choose-and-pick-and-choose-again-our friends worldview as follows: Suppose "you have a mass base, suddenly Washington is your pal, Washington wants you to win an election, you're going to lose the election. Why? Because everybody understands Washington's structural role in their social mal-development, and we have to recognize that."
One fact is unclear. When we switch our friends so freely, why do we constantly stand so close to Israel? How have the Israelis built peace in the Middle East lately?
Make them earn our love!
However, picking and choosing friends is perceived otherwise as a random act by non-Americans viewing American foreign behavior over decades. These non-Americans worldwide find that American support is dictated only by what the U.S. feels to be its interest or flavor of the month or year.
The bottom line for Vijay Pradesh and Historians Against War is that making more war in Afghanistan and Pakistan is just the same old line (filled with the same paradigms) we have been getting as rhetoric for three decades.
We need to demand that Obama throw out the weight of bad paradigms and get America out of the war making game. Next we need to get out of the supporting-extremist (and create more jihadists) game. Finally, let our global partners (not only the OECD states)- i.e. some 190-plus nations-grow up and develop economically, democratically, and socially.
1 | 2
