Barefoot Obama

Barefoot Obama

 

Art: Bilash Rai

In 1981, Barack Obama visited his mother and sister in Indonesia. On his return to the US, he stopped for three weeks in Karachi, from where he travelled a bit with two friends from Occidental College, Muhammed Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid. This was a Pakistan in the throes of Zia ul-Haq, and Obama got to see it through the eyes of non-official but still well-heeled Pakistanis. (Based in New York, Chandoo is now a financier, while Hamid is a vice-president with Pepsico.) When asked about his inexperience on matters foreign, Obama today talks about his extensive 'from below' interactions with the peoples and cultures of the planet – thanks in part to his mother, an American who lived in Indonesia, but also to his own curiosity.

"Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world," Obama told a recent gathering in San Francisco. He then acidly derided the official junkets taken by his fellow politicians. "You go from the airport to the embassy. There's a group of children who do a native dance," he said. "You meet with the CIA station chief, and they give you a briefing. You go take a tour of a plant that started with the assistance of USAID. And then, you go." Far from such rarefied air, with Chandoo and Hamid, Obama walked the streets of Karachi and travelled in Sindh, taking in the atmosphere.

Obama's three weeks in Pakistan are no match for John McCain's five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi's jails. But those years were spent largely in solitary confinement, during which McCain, Obama's presumptive Republican opponent, did not have the freedom to stroll around Hanoi. Indeed, his worldview was seen through the windows of a fighter jet, and then the bars of a jail cell. Today, McCain sees the world as dangerous, and believes that the principle objective of US foreign policy is to guard against the many hazards that imperil the American population. Instinctively, therefore, McCain is an heir to the foreign policy of George W Bush, which seeks American security through threats and armed force, and disregards the desires of people around the world to fashion their own futures.

Obama has a more flexible approach to the world at large. He does not see it as filled with dangers, which is itself an insult to the five and a half billion people who live outside Fortress Europe and Fortress USA. It is from this instinct that Obama has called for conversations (for which he has been widely criticised) with those who have previously been treated as untouchable – such as the leadership of Iran and Cuba. Along these lines, even as the US administration hems and haws after the significant win of the Nepali Maoists in the April 2008 elections, it is reasonable to expect Obama to engage with the former rebels in Southasia. In addition, Obama has called for a revival of a multilateral approach to world affairs, which is a departure from the agenda of President Bush – and which would undoubtedly be largely continued by McCain.

It is a sign of how backward the Bush agenda has been that such reasonable and unremarkable planks as the reliance on dialogue and support for multilateralism appear now as radical approaches. One of Obama's advisors, Parag Khanna, has offered a vision for how American foreign policy must be retooled in order to come to terms with a "non-American world", a "tripolar world" with the US, the European Union and China in a dynamic equilibrium. This is the kind of thinking within the Obama campaign: that US primacy is, perhaps, to be given over to a more robust internationalism.

Sustained diplomacy
Foreign Affairs, the leading journal of the US foreign-policy establishment, recently invited the main contenders for the presidency to write an essay each on their visions. Both McCain and Obama zeroed in on the centrality that Pakistan will hold for the next presidency. Iraq is now a non-starter. For Obama, it is a distraction that he pledges to end as soon as is viable; McCain, in a Bush-like hallucination, believes that it will work itself out for the better under his leadership. It is Afghanistan, and by proxy Pakistan, that draws from them a fuller analysis.

McCain is of the view that the road to Kabul leads through the General Headquarters in Islamabad, that the US must "continue to work with President Pervez Musharraf" and help Pakistan to "resist the forces of extremism". One military man cannot resist the temptation to work closely with another, evidently, even as the calculated schizophrenia of the 'Shah of Pakistan' towards extremists is well known. Then-General Musharraf, after all, did rig the 2002 elections, and delivered the border regions directly to the Islamists. McCain, again, represents 'Bushism' unchanged.

Obama offers a different view. He does not buy into the fantasy that one must 'work with' President Musharraf, who has demonstrated that he is clearly part of Pakistan's problem rather than part of its solution. Instead, Obama writes, "I will join with our allies in insisting – not simply requesting – that Pakistan crack down on the Taliban, pursue Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, and end its relationship with all terrorist groups."

If he is going to be tough on the generals in Islamabad, Obama equally pledges to make life easier for Pakistan on at least two of its borders. Obama says that his administration "will encourage dialogue between Pakistan and India to work toward resolving their dispute over Kashmir, and between Afghanistan and Pakistan to resolve their historic differences and develop the Pashtun border region." Obama recognises that stable relations with India might make it less important for Pakistan to pursue a forward policy with the Taliban into Afghanistan, and with various extremists into India.

Meanwhile, it might well be that an Obama administration would not support the US-India nuclear deal, which is destined to create instability in Southasia. But it might not object to reviving the long-moribund prospect of an Iran-Pakistan-India natural-gas pipeline. Such a conduit could offer the material basis for peace unavailable thus far.

Long stays in Indonesia, trips to Pakistan – these are the experiences that make Obama one of the least parochial figures ever to have run for the US presidency. When he received his acceptance letter to Harvard Law School, he writes, he longed to be back in Indonesia, "running barefoot along a paddy field, with my feet sinking into the cool, wet mud, part of a chain of other brown boys chasing after a tattered kite." Feet in the mud, running alongside the rest of the world rather than always trying to lead it: such, perhaps, would be the ethos of an Obama presidency.

~ Vidya Prashad is a contributing editor for the magazine 

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