More on Obama's Pakistan policy

Josh Marshall has a good post on Barack Obama's Pakistan statement that has become such an issue, Obama and Pakistan Talking Points Memo 08/09/07. I think he has an accurate analysis of the idea behind the attacks on it by Clinton and other Dem candidates. But I also agree with him about the foreign-policy substance of the comment:

And the truth is that I think Obama's actual words are so clearly unobjectionable that this is all Kabuki theater of a particularly strained and disingenuous sort. All Obama said was that if we have actionable intelligence about the whereabouts of high-value al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, and Pakistan won't act, we will act.

Clearly, no Republican can quibble with this. They're on the record for invading countries because they might become dangers to us at some point in the future. They're hardly in a position to disagree with Obama if he says we'll hunt down people who committed mass casualty terror attacks within our borders. And I'm not sure Democrats are in much of a position to do so either.

The unspoken truth here, I suspect, is that Obama has struck on the central folly of our post-9/11 counter-terrorism defense policy - strike hard where they aren't and go easy where they are. I think everyone can see this. But Obama got there first. So they need to attack him for saying it. (my emphasis)

Although, as I've explained before, I happen to agree with Obama on the substance of the policy, it's worth taking note that people in Pakistan aren't exactly thrilled with the notion that an American Presidential candidate is proclaiming that he would militarily attack their country, a nation that has had particularly good relations with the US since 2001.

Tags: barack obama, pakistan