When the highest-ranking officer in the US armed forces, Admiral Micheal Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admits: “We hurt ourselves more [with Muslim nations] when our words don’t align with our actions… Our messages lack credibility because we haven’t invested enough in building trust and relationships, and we haven’t always delivered on promises,” it represents a rare but welcome insight from the military about US foreign policy.
“Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are,” Mullen has written in the Joint Forces Quarterly. “We’ve come to believe that messages are something we can launch downrange like a rocket, something we can fire for effect. They are not. Good communication runs both ways. It’s not about telling our story. We must also be better listeners.”
Some Muslims, such as Haroon Moghul of New York University’s Islamic centre, optimistically greeted Mullen’s statement as a remarkable sign of change: “It shows a military that is critically thinking, and empowered to do so by a White House that seeks to develop effective strategies, not ideological categories and uncritical postures.” However, Aziz Poonawalla of Talk Islam, urges: “Fundamentally, the Obama administration needs to articulate a clear set of explicit, achievable goals for our military in [Afghanistan] – with a clear timeline for withdrawal.”
Indeed, a recent poll of Muslim countries revealed that actions speak much louder than President Obama’s eloquent words promising “mutual respect” and “partnership”. Despite Obama’s well-received Cairo address earlier this year, animosity towards the US “continues to run deep and unabated,” according to the Pew poll, especially in Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan. The most obvious reasons for such anger include the attacks by predator drones in Pakistan and the recent reinforcement of 17,000 US troops to Afghanistan, which now brings the total number of US soldiers deployed there to 57,000. (more…)
The heavy focus on al Qaeda in the new AfPak strategy could complicate America’s broader strategy of strategic public engagement with the Muslim world. The politics of the focus make perfect domestic sense, as Obama — quite effectively, in a disappointingly Bush-like way — tried to recapture the mantle of the “good war” and to focus American public attention on 9/11. And to the extent that this represents a limiting of American objectives, then I’m all for it. But the heavy focus on al Qaeda risks rescuing it from the position of marginality in Arab and Muslim politics to which it has largely been relegated over the last year — and could end up strengthening the strategic threat of violent extremism even if it weakens al Qaeda Central.
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One of the arguments frequently put forward for sending more western troops to Afghanistan is that western failure there will destabilise Pakistan.
Recently, while Pakistan’s government may have been saying the things that the White House wants to hear, the country’s media and public have often been openly hostile towards the United States.
