It is a race to see who can kill more people. “As President, Barack Obama would order attacks on terrorist camps in Pakistan even if its president, Gen. Pervais Musharraf, refused to give permission and would link American aid on Pakistan’s progress in rooting out its terrorist havens,” writes Marc Ambinder for Atlantic Online. “That stance, one part of the multifacted counterrorrism strategy Obama unveils this morning, is tougher than the more considered approach of the Bush Administration, which has generally avoided antagonizing its ally in public.” In other words, Obama’s selection strategy consists of outdoing the neocons and he really harbors no reservations when it comes to mass murder and adding to the horrific total exacted in human life (nearly a million Iraqis) since the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

“I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans,” declared Obama. “They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

Indeed, there are “terrorists holed up in those mountains,” never mind the United States set-up this enclave. “Ironically, rather than arresting Al Qaeda ‘foreign fighters’ who were combating alongside the Taliban [in Afghanistan], the US military actually facilitated their evacuation in military planes to Northwestern Pakistan,” notes Michel Chossudovsky, who cites Seymour Hersh:

The Bush Administration ordered US Central Command to set up a special air corridor to help insure the safety of the Pakistani rescue flights from Kunduz to the northwest corner of Pakistan …

[Pakistan President] Musharraf won American support for the airlift by warning that the humiliation of losing hundreds—and perhaps thousands—of Pakistani Army men and intelligence operatives would jeopardize his political survival. “Clearly, there is a great willingness to help Musharraf,” an American intelligence official told me [Seymour Hersh]. A CIA analyst said that it was his understanding that the decision to permit the airlift was made by the White House and was indeed driven by a desire to protect the Pakistani leader. The airlift ‘made sense at the time,’ the CIA. analyst said. ‘Many of the people they spirited away were the Taliban leadership’—who Pakistan hoped could play a role in a postwar Afghan government. According to this person, “Musharraf wanted to have these people to put another card on the table” in future political negotiations. “We were supposed to have access to them,’ he said, but ‘it didn’t happen,'’ and the rescued Taliban remain unavailable to American intelligence.

According to a former high-level American defense official, the airlift was approved because of representations by the Pakistanis that “there were guys—intelligence agents and underground guys—who needed to get out.

Now Obama wants to bomb them. Of course, this is simply political grandstanding, as the president is not really the decider guy but rather a factotum who takes orders from on-high. If our rulers want to kill “al-Qaeda”—that is to say, dirt farmers and peasants in Pakistan’s Federal Administered Tribal Areas—that is precisely what will happen, no matter if the commander guy is a Republican neocon or a Democrat neolib.

“As President, I would make the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional, and I would make our conditions clear: Pakistan must make substantial progress in closing down the training camps, evicting foreign fighters, and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan,” said Obama, who is slated to be Hillary’s running mate, never mind all the hoopla and jive indicating otherwise. “The day the Clinton-Obama ticket is announced would really be one for the history books,” averred Anna Quindlen for Newsweek a few days ago.

Finally, as if to make sure the Pashtuns—in neocon-speak, Taliban militants—of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province are correctly singled out and targeted, we learn that an “Islamic alliance” in the province “bordering Afghanistan has proposed changing the region’s name to ‘Afghania’, a provincial minister said on Wednesday…. Pashtun nationalists have long demanded the old colonial name [created during the days of the British Raj in pre-partition India] be changed as it only indicates a geographical location rather than the ethnicity of its inhabitants, as in the other three Pakistan provinces—Punjab for Punjabis, Sindh for Sindhis and Baluchistan for Baluchis,” according to Reuters.