Chowrangi

As eight years of the Bush administration come to a close, the president and now one of his longest-serving advisers, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, are acknowledging mistakes in war on terror while steadfastly defending the war and Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, and the overthrow of Taliban administration in Afghanistan.

President-elect Barack Obama is still relying on rhetoric. He has express his approach to Pakistan in the context of Islamabad’s emphatic calls to end unilateral drone strikes against suspected militant targets on its side of the border, the president-elect has said: “What I want to do is to create the kind of effective strategic partnership with Pakistan that allows us, in consort, to assure that terrorists are not setting up safe havens in some of these border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Obama should also act differently from the Bush administration, because that is what he is supposed to do and that is why the American public has elected him in the first place.

Obama must understand that the region needs a strategic partnership with all the parties in the region, Pakistan, India and the Afghan government to stand up the kind of militant, violent terrorists, extremists that have set up base camps and that are operating in ways that threaten the security of everybody in international community. But those camps must be eradicated from throughout the region.

Other posts by Commoner

• Full Text Of Barack Obama Speech at Cairo, Egypt - June 5th, 2009
• Operation Rah-e-Rast: Tragedy Beat Goes On - June 3rd, 2009
• Vows Are Not Enough to Quell Terror - April 19th, 2009
• Pitch Dark Confusion in Pakistan - April 5th, 2009
• No Room for Disappointment, CJP - March 22nd, 2009
• Go Back to 25th Feb - March 21st, 2009
• Kudos to PML(N) for making Long March a success - March 18th, 2009
• Long March Has Ended: V-Day, not the D-Day - March 16th, 2009
• In the Long March: No Stoppage to the Marchers - March 16th, 2009
• Into the Long March : Locked Down - March 14th, 2009