The Bush-Cheney Road

01 Dec 2008 10:22 am

Juan Cole prays that India doesn't repeat Bush's mistakes in the war on terror:

War with Pakistan over the Mumbai attacks would be a huge error. President Asaf Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani certainly did not have anything to do with those attacks. Indeed, the bombing of the Islamabad Marriott, which was intended to kill them, was done by exactly the same sort of people as attacked Mumbai. Nor was Chief of Staff Ashfaq Kiyani involved. Is it possible that a military cell under Gen. Pervez Musharraf trained Lashkar-e Tayiba terrorists for attacks in Kashmir, and then some of the LET went rogue and decided to hit Mumbai instead? Yes. But to interpret such a thing as a Pakistan government operation would be incorrect.

The point of terror is both to terrify and to polarize. The emotional impact affects far more than the actual targets of the attacks. What I've learned these past few years - and it has been a difficult lesson for me - is that the legitimate rage at these barbarians must not cloud our judgment in figuring out how best to defeat them. Reacting in the way the terrorists want may be morally understandable and emotionally unavoidable. But our goal must not be to give them what they want, or to compound the problem by over-reaction. If we haven't learned that from Iraq and Afghanistan, it's hard to know what we have learned.

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