As someone who thought Barack Obama really was ‘the one’, I find myself increasingly disillusioned by his South Asia policy. Is he so naïve that he believes Islamist terrorism can be fought selectively? How is it possible to fight the Taliban in Swat and Waziristan while continuing to support the Lashkar brand of jihad in Lahore and Karachi?

How can anyone believe that the Pakistan government is sincere in its fight against jihadi terrorism when it releases the man who started the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba? If you want to hear Hafiz Mohammed Saeed’s thoughts and feelings about India, go to You Tube and listen to the interview he gave last week. He accuses India of being responsible for every act of terrorism on Pakistani soil and of being behind the violence in Baluchistan. The suggestion that India is responsible for sponsoring Islamist violence is beyond bizarre. If our covert agencies were that good, we would have taken the Taliban, the Lashkar and the evil Maulana Azhar Masood out long ago. Where is Azhar Masood, by the way? Does the Pakistani government expect us to seriously believe that he has vanished into thin air?

While I was writing this piece, bombs went off in Lahore and Naushera. It is true that the jihadis have started to bite the hand that nurtured them, but is this not the inevitable consequence of two decades of breeding violent religious fanatics with the idea of making them the sword arm of Pakistani foreign policy? And, now that Pakistan appears to be coming apart at the seams, all that the new American President has come up with by way of policy is to give Pakistan more aid. If financial aid was the solution to Pakistan’s problems then it should have been saved long ago by the more than $11 billion that George W. Bush gave Musharraf to fight terrorism.

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