War On Islam – Pakistan: Lieberman pushes Obama to attack Pakistan

President Barack Obama will soon come up with the most effective strategy for moving forward in the fight against extremists in Pakistan, chief White House adviser David Axelrod said on Sunday.

‘I expect the president will make a decision within weeks,’ Mr Axelrod told a US television show, CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’.

‘And the question is: what is the most effective strategy moving forward in the context of Pakistan,’ said Mr Axelrod while explaining how would the new strategy deal with the problem of extremism in the Pak-Afghan region.

On Friday, President Obama met his services chief, his seventh such meeting since he began consulting his senior military and civil officials on the proposed strategy, to seek their advice.

‘Al Qaeda launched on us from Afghanistan. They’ve been driven to the mountains of Pakistan. We don’t want them to return to Afghanistan and make Afghanistan a base again. And that’s what this is about,’ said Mr Axelrod.

Another White House adviser, Valerie Jarrett, told ABC News the US had to ‘look at what’s going on on the ground. We have to look at what our allies are doing. We have to look at the state of the government in Afghanistan’ before announcing the new policy.

Senator Joe Lieberman, an independent lawmaker who heads the powerful Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, backed the two White House officials, telling the CBS audience that the main purpose of the new US policy should be to prevent the Taliban and Al Qaeda from coming back into control in that region. Al Qaeda’s revival, he said, ‘will destabilise Pakistan and the whole region’.

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on Nov 4 2009. Filed under Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry