The ineptitude of this administration as it wages foreign policy knows no bounds. What makes it all the more disturbing is that the Obama administration is beginning to engage in an official effort to destabilize the government of Pakistan and potentially foment a civil war there.

On egg shells ever since Musharraf’s resignation as President and the assasination of Benazir Bhutto, USA Today has obtained a confidential State Department memo outlining how the administration intends to escalate Pakistan’s descent into chaos.

The sad thing is the administration thinks it will be helping.

The problem — according to the memo by C. Stuart Callison, an economist with the U.S. Agency for International Development — is that Holbrooke is canceling successful programs run by U.S. contractors and preparing to bypass them by giving large sums to local organizations with shaky financial track records.

Holbrooke, the top civilian overseeing Obama administration policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, has asked to personally approve every project funding renewal involving U.S. contractors, Callison wrote — and “the disapprovals already received are shockingly counterproductive.”

In other words, the United States is shifting money from efficient operations that work to inefficient operations that line the pockets of people who we probably don’t want to make wealthy, given their loyalties.

It is willfully naive. And it is dangerous.

If Pakistan falls, war will come with India. Both have nukes. The consequences for this administration’s ineptitude will be major and the lives lost catastrophic.

Maybe Obama wasn’t misspeaking during the campaign when he said he wanted to bomb Pakistan . . . er . . . Pockeestun.

Some may look at Obama’s defense funding request coming in at about $144.6 billion as a welcome reduction over the 2008 budget of $186 billion. Some may also be tempted to claim that Obama is ramping down America’s war efforts. But that would be a hasty conclusion because the numbers are a bit deceiving. On top of that some of the areas that Obama wants to shift the money to shows that the president is heading down the wrong path to a successful conclusion of our Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts and that he is perhaps foolishly expecting Pakistan to follow his lead when it is already plain that she won’t, maybe even can’t.

Pakistan

Obama’s negotiation team had already gotten a “rude shock” last month when Richard Holbrooke and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen were rebuffed by Pakistan when the pair proposed a joint operation against al Qaeda and the Taliban in her violence wracked tribal regions.

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Yesterday we learned that Congress’s most powerful appropriator has decided not to grant President Obama the funds he requested to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo. Today Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey explained why:

“I personally favor what the administration’s talking about doing, but so far as we can tell there is yet no concrete program for that,” Obey said ahead of his panel’s markup of the $94.2 billion supplemental Thursday. “And while I don’t mind defending a concrete program, I’m not much interested in wasting my energy defending a theoretical program.”

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Author’s note: This is the third installment in a seven-part series analyzing the Obama administration’s strategy for the Afghan front in the War on Terror. The administration’s white paper can be seen here, and previous installments in this series can be seen here.

THE SMALL NUMBER OF TRAINED, reliable, and effective Afghan National Security Forces presents a serious holdup in the effort to secure Afghanistan and to turn responsibility for that security over to domestic forces. President Obama’s Afghan strategy addresses this critical shortcoming. However, as currently laid out, it offers little to actually bring about that needed increase in trained, effective Afghans capable of defending their own tribal areas and of participating in the defense of the Afghan nation.

Obama’s plan is to accelerate the training of Afghan police and National Army members over the next three years in an effort to bring the former to a total of 82,000 and the latter to 134,000. The additional brigade of 4,000 trainers mentioned in the previous installment in this series will be a step in the right direction in growing the domestic security force. This ’surge’ in training team personnel has been desired for some time now by commanders on the ground in Afghanistan, and their deployment should do a great deal to multiply the raw numbers of Afghan Security Forces going through some sort of formal training before being asked to take on the dedicated terrorist threat to their tribes and their country.

However, though he has stated an intention to begin turning over responsibility for regional and national security to these Afghan forces as soon as possible, Obama’s target numbers are, quite simply, far too small to effectively achieve what he expects of them. Further, one need only look at the Iraq of just a few short years ago to see the perils of turning loose an untrained, unvetted, and overall unready national security force without proper guidance and support.

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Author’s note: This is the second installment in a seven-part series analyzing the Obama administration’s strategy for the Afghan front in the War on Terror. The administration’s white paper can be seen here, and part one of this series, “Examining Obama’s Afghan Plan: Introduction,” can be seen here.

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S IMPENDING ‘SURGE’ in the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan has been public knowledge for some time now. In fact, the roots of the plan can actually be found in the Bush administration, whose final days saw a greater emphasis placed on that eastern front in the War on Terror than had been since late 2002. The initial thought, as publicly announced by Defense Secretary Robert Gates last November, was to send approximately 30,000 additional troops to augment the 33,000 already operating in the expansive, mountainous country.

Shortly after taking office, Obama ordered that number cut nearly in half, to 17,000. Those troops – a combined force of soldiers and Marines – will be assigned to areas of the county along the border with Pakistan, where the coalition has the least control and terrorist forces are at their strongest, and will be tasked with “preventing a return of al Qadea and its allies” to the area and with providing space and security for the national government to expand its hegemony into this largely warlord- and Taliban-controlled region of Afghanistan.

In addition to this 17,000-troop counterinsurgency force, Obama has assigned 7,000 more troops to Afghanistan to perform other critically important tasks. In February, the just over 3,000 soldiers that make up the 10th Mountain Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team (BCT) deployed to two Afghan provinces near Kabul, where they are operating out of coalition outposts in an effort to tamp down the insurgency-riddled east-central portion of the country. An additional 4,000 soldiers are now awaiting deployment to the region to serve as embedded Afghan Security Force Training Teams.

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AFTER NEARLY TWO YEARS of campaigning on a platform of hasty withdrawal from Iraq and a refocusing of American efforts on Afghanistan, a country Democrats have spent years referring to as the location of “the real War on Terror,” President Barack Obama has come out with an overview of his administration’s strategy for the region.

Unfortunately, as often seems to be the case when Obama policy prescriptions are finally made public after months of innuendo, the administration’s plan for Afghanistan (and the actual central front in the War on Terror, Pakistan) is largely made up of platitudes and half-measures, and reflects a lack of understanding about – or an overall unwillingness to accept – the facts on the ground in the region and the gravity of America’s fight there.

AMERICA’S GOAL IN THE REGION, according to Obama, is “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” In pursuit of this nebulous goal, which can be categorically filed under “Would take far more time and dedication than Obama (and, unfortunately, the American population) would ever willingly put into it,” the president laid out several points of emphasis.

These points, each of which will be addressed in an installment over the next week, can be grouped into the following five goals:

• Implementing a ’surge’ of forces in Afghanistan (and augmenting that with a so-called “civilian surge”);
• Growing the Afghan Security Forces, both police and army, by such numbers and with such speed that they will be able to assume responsibility securing large portions of the country in a very short time;
• Attempting to achieve reconciliation with less-hardline Taliban militants and promoting an open, honest, and effective Afghan national government;
• Expanding international support for the Afghan mission and convincing both NATO and regional players to take a more active role in combating terror and shaping the Afghan state; and, perhaps most importantly,
• Eliminating Taliban and al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan, while simultaneously promoting democratic order within that fractured Islamic state.

Unfortunately, as the next five installments on this topic will demonstrate, President Obama’s strategy as currently laid out will do little to make a difference on any of these fronts.

Coming next: Examining Obama’s Afghan Plan: A ‘Surge’ in Soldiers and Civilians

Though the deepening economic crisis is certainly enough to fulfill most citizens’ worry quota for the year (if not longer), President Obama’s impotent flailing about on the economy shouldn’t be Americans’ only reason to be concerned about their president, a relatively young man who has shown no ability to succeed at any non-campaigning endeavor in his brief but highly publicized career. As noted here on RS before, the UK Telegraph recently quoted a source “close to members of Mr. Obama’s inner circle” as “express[ing] concern that [the President] ha[s] failed so far to ‘even fake an interest in foreign policy.’”

“Obama is overwhelmed,” the Telegraph quotes the source as saying. “There is a zero sum tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda.”

With global threats like a near-nuclear Iran, an unstable and passive-aggressive North Korea, a once again expanding Russia, a quickly-fading counterterror ally in Pakistan, and unrelenting Islamist terrorism — just to name a few — present and growing, this is a very, very bad time to have a young, untested man who is reportedly “facing exhaustion over America’s economic crisis and is unable to focus on foreign affairs” sitting in the White House making decisions that literally affect the lives of people all around the globe.

It’s even worse time to have someone at the controls who is giving strong signals, through his response to that crisis, that his reaction to domestic crises will be to attempt to shoehorn reality into his dogmatic-leftist worldview, and to international crises will be to immediately assume a position of weakness and begin negotiating for “peace” from there (ask Pakistan how well that’s working out for them so far).

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Yesterday in the broad daylight of mid-morning, a dozen masked terrorists carried out an attack on a police-escorted convoy carrying Sri Lanka’s national cricket team to the stadium in Lahore, where they were to compete against Pakistan (Note: Click here for map of region showing Sri Lanka’s location).

Six players were wounded, and five members of their police escort, which included “several” vehicles filled with regular police as well as “commandos,” were killed, according to VOA. Other reports have four Sri Lankan athletes and a coach wounded.

The coordinated ambush began when the attackers fired into the three lead police vehicles, disabling the convoy and turning the rest of the vehicles and their occupants into sitting ducks. The initial salvo was followed by an unsuccessful rocket launcher attack on the bus, which was followed with a hand grenade that missed its target and by small arms fire.

A portion of the attack was filmed by a Pakistani television network from a relatively safe distance. A still from that footage is below.

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Faced with a losing battle against strengthening Taliban elements in its Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA), the Pakistani government officially threw in the towel last week on its already halfhearted efforts to combat terrorism in the key Malakand Division of the country’s northwest, agreeing to a peace treaty with local Taliban leaders that paves the way for terrorist-administered Shari’a law in the region.

Under the agreement, called the “Malakand Accord,” official responsibility for political administration and the implementation of Shari’a law in the region will fall to Sufi Mohammed, a senior Taliban leader who was released from prison in April 2008 as part of an earlier unsuccessful peace agreement between NWFP Taliban leaders and Islamabad. Mohammed, who leads an organization called the “Movement for the Implementation of Mohammad’s Shari’a Law” (TNSM), which provided the ideological basis for the pre-2001 Afghan Taliban, had been in Pakistani custody since 2002.

Formalizing Extremist Rule

The Malakand Accord, which requires the Pakistani military to cease offensive operations against Taliban fighters in the region, does not cede new ground to the terrorists so much as it legitimizes the current Taliban occupation of the Malakand Division, putting Mohammed Sufi in the position of formally and legitimately taking over for, and expanding the holdings of, his son-in-law Mullah Fazlullah, head of the Taliban in Swat and, until now, an informal regional leader in the Pakistani Taliban hierarchy headed by Baitullah Mehsud.

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Proving his tin ear on foreign policy is still as tinny as ever, the hapless John Kerry (D, Mass.) said recently that he believes that Pakistan is “transforming” and “taking terrorists head on.” Yet, only a day or so later, Pakistan announced that it was releasing the notorious nuke trader Abdul Qadeer Khan from house arrest claiming he is innocent of charges of running a nuclear proliferation network.

By releasing one of its most notorious bad actors, it sure doesn’t sound as if Pakistan is getting any more serious about taking terrorism “head on” than it ever did before, does it?

Not only did Pakistan release Khan free of all charges, but the state is also supplying a state funded security team for his protection for his travels about the country.

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During the campaign, Barack Obama maintained that he would focus on intervening between Pakistan and India over their disputed Kashmir region. Obama repeatedly claimed that settling the Kashmir question was a “critical task” for the next administration and floated a lot of conjecture about how his administration would step in to solve the situation. But, despite all the claims that Obama made about how important Kashmir was to his developing India/Pakistan policy, the Obama administration has just trimmed any focus on Kashmir from envoy Richard C. Holbrooke’s responsibilities.

India is ecstatic over this move and has claimed a diplomatic victory over the Obama administration on the matter. No word yet from the Pakistanis over this loss of focus on a pet issue that they felt Obama had promised to help them with.

This is a turn around by Obama and a failure to live up to his campaign rhetoric. By trimming Kashmir from Holbrooke’s duties, Obama is casting aside one of the few specific foreign policy aims he claimed was so important during the campaign.

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Whipped ones, in fact, as Environmental Republican demonstrates (via Glenn Reynolds).  You see, he went looking for the Usual Antiwar Suspects’ outrage at the drone strikes in Pakistan, and discovered… well, that apparently it wasn’t really worth noting at all, really.  His conclusion?

So what con we surmise from this little investigation? How about the left-wing of this country is populated with hypocritical ideologues who not only hated Bush but had a severe dislike for America. Now that they have a leader who they feel a kinship with, well, it’s all good.

You shouldn’t be surprised: the terrorists that got attacked weren’t Europeans - which is my polite way of saying that they weren’t sufficiently white and Western for the groups running the antiwar movement to particularly care, especially since caring might embarrass a President who isn’t a Republican. Was that too harsh? No? OK, let’s try again: the antiwar movement is run by racists who only like brown people when they can be used as clubs with which to beat anybody to the antiwar movement’s Right.

Well, anyone to their Right, and Jews. A quick perusal of the major players in question indicates that they’re all really upset that Israel isn’t baring its collective neck for the knife.

Moe Lane

PS: If you won’t respect yourself, don’t expect me to respect you, either.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.