Video: At Last! Rick Warren Finally Condemns Uganda's "Kill the Gays" Law -- A Law Written By His Friends
Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet on December 10, 2009 at 1:35 PM.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO

When Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches called Pastor Rick Warren for comment on Uganda's homicidal anti-gay law, Warren's spokesman issued a statement from the pastor saying that he had no position or comment on the proposed law. But with criticism mounting, Warren recorded a video in which he decries the Ugandan legislation.

In a video message addressed to "the pastors of the churches of Uganda," Warren says of the law, that he "completely oppose[s]" and "vigorously condemn[s]" it. He goes on to say, "[T]he potential law before your parliament is unjust, it's extreme, and it's un-Christian toward homosexuals..."

Warren is pastor of Saddleback Church, an evangelical megachurch in California, and author of the best-selling book, The Purpose-Driven Life.

As Bruce Wilson reported for AlterNet, the Ugandan proposal calls for the execution of people engaged in certain acts of gay sex, as well as for anyone with HIV who has sex of any kind. The bill also calls for life imprisonment for "homosexuals" -- a punishment already available to prosecutors under current Ugandan law.

Advocates of the legislation include Anglican Archbishop Henry Orombi, who, Posner reports, was instrumental in bringing Warren to Uganda to anoint the African country as a "purpose-driven nation," and Pastor Martin Ssempa, a former ally of Warren's with whom the California preacher says he severed ties two years ago.

Warren associate C. Peter Wagner, who served as Warren's advisor on the latter's doctoral thesis, is also affiliated with the Ugandan churchmen pushing for the law, according to a report by Political Research Associates, a watchdog group. And Warren himself has been involved in pushing California's anti-gay Proposition 8 ballot measure, which he later denied doing, despite the video evidence.

While mainstream media soft-pedaled or ignored Warren's connection to the Ugandans pushing the "kill the gays" law, Posner, Wilson, PRA and Truth Wins Out, an LGBT group that seeks to bust the "ex-gay" myth, stayed on the story, apparently causing Warren to relent and issue today's video.

However, Warren couldn't help but take a swipe at Posner, PRA and others who have been badgering him to make what could be life-saving statement about the law. "[B]ecause I didn't rush to make a public statement, some erroneously concluded that I supported this terrible bill," Warren tells the Ugandan pastors. "And some even claimed that I was a sponsor of the bill." In opening sentences of the video, Warren complains of "lies and errors and false reports" by those who linked his name to the Ugandan clerics who have advanced the bill.

At RD, Posner notes that it took Warren more than a month after the first reports of the anti-gay bill circulated in the U.S. to get around to condemning the bill. (On Thanksgiving weekend, Warren appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press," and neither spoke about the bill -- nor was he asked about it.)

VIDEO AND TRANSCRIPT AFTER THE JUMP

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"Shock'n Y'all" Country Singer Toby Keith to Perform at Nobel Peace Concert
Posted by Liliana Segura, AlterNet on December 10, 2009 at 1:00 PM.

In what is perhaps a perfect signature to Obama's Nobel acceptance speech this morning -- in which he reasserted his right as Commander in Chief to act unilaterally and said that the United States must be a "standard bearer in the conduct of war" -- that country music singer Toby Keith will be among the performers at tomorrow's Nobel "peace" concert in Oslo, hosted by Will and Jada Pinkett Smith.

This is the man whose artistic response to the attacks of September 11th was to pen a revenge anthem called "Courtesy of the Red White and Blue" that included the lines: Oh, justice will be served and the battle will rage / This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage / An' you'll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A. / 'Cos we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way.

He is also the man who celebrated the invasion of Iraq with an album titled "Shock'n Y'all."

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Obama Invokes 'Just War' as Nobel Chairman Compares Him to MLK
Posted by Daniela Perdomo, AlterNet on December 10, 2009 at 11:56 AM.

Yesterday I was reeling in advance of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, because the press had gotten wind that he would use his time at the podium to explain that Afghanistan is part of his larger plan for peace. Not surprisingly, the Orwellian slogan, WAR IS PEACE, flashed in my mind.

I was embarrassed for the committee that had awarded him the prize, as they'd made clear they were honoring him in hopes of reinforcing the international community's hopes that Obama's administration would not follow in the Bush cadre's warring footsteps. And now they were going to have to sit and hear him speak of war as a medium for its antonym -- peace. How excruciating.

My empathy seems to have been misplaced, however, because the Nobel chairman opened the Oslo ceremony with a speech in which he declared that "Dr. King's dream has come true."

Really?

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The Real Reason Obama Is Escalating In Afghanistan
Posted by Christian Parenti, The Nation on December 8, 2009 at 4:30 AM.

The real goals of the Afghanistan escalation are domestic and electoral. Like Lyndon Johnson, who escalated in Vietnam, Obama lives in mortal fear of being called a wimp by Republicans.

To cover his flank and look tough in the next U.S. election, Obama is expanding the war in Afghanistan. To look strong in front of swing voters, he will sacrifice the lives of hundreds of U.S. soldiers, allow many more to be horribly maimed, waste a minimum of $30 billion in public money and in the process kill many thousands of Afghan civilians.

It is political theater, nothing else. What are the other possible explanations for Obama's escalation? And why has he pledged to start drawing down the new deployment after only a year of fighting?

Is it to get the job done? To rebuild Afghanistan? To kill Osama bin Laden and crush Al Qaeda? No, all those goals are nearly impossible. And Al Qaeda is too small and internationally defused to destroy.

Some say the Afghanistan war and the escalation are about building a pipeline to export gas from Central Asia. Nonsense -- only a maniac would invest large sums of money in building a pipeline there. In the late 1990s the Argentine firm Bridas and the U.S. firm Unocal jockeyed for the right to build such a project. But that dream, always tentative, has evaporated. It will be many decades, at best, before Afghanistan is safe enough to host a new, foreign-owned gas pipeline.

Others say the Afghanistan war is about establishing US military bases to menace China, Russia and Iran. Indeed, because of its occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. now has bases on either side of Iran and small bases in Central Asia. But these do not require this escalation.

The real purpose of these 30,000 soldiers is to make Obama look tough as he heads toward the next U.S. presidential election.

As a landlocked, underdeveloped, fragmented buffer state with few resources, Afghanistan has long served as a means to get at other issues. Consider the history of how the United States has used Afghanistan.

First, during the cold war Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan used the country as the Soviet "bear trap." Later, George W. Bush used it to trampoline into Iraq. The Bush administration discussed regime change in Iraq at one of its first cabinet meetings. Among other things, the administration wanted direct economic control, and indirect geostrategic control, over Iraq's vast oil wealth. That has been partially accomplished, as witnessed by the recent Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell deals there.

The only credible way into Iraq was via Afghanistan. On September 15, 2001, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz actually suggested that the United States skip an invasion of Afghanistan and go directly to Iraq. But that would have made coalition-building impossible. After all, Al Qaeda was in the Taliban's Afghanistan.

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Michael Tomasky v. Michael Moore: Whose Afghanistan View is More Imperialist?
Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet on December 7, 2009 at 3:00 PM.

As I've said before, are no good solutions for the mess that is Afghanistan. But there are some that are less bad than others.  That's why I offer qualified, tentative support for the U.S. military's surge in Afghanistan. The U.S. has done a lot to make that mess, going back to the CIA's role in creating the radical madrassahs -- the religious schools -- that gave birth to the militarized religious extremism one finds in Afghanistan today.

In his open letter to President Obama last week, filmmaker Michael Moore all but accused the president of imperialist designs in his plan to add an additional 30,000 troops to the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. When The Guardian's Michael Tomasky took issue with that characterization, Lindsay Beyerstein blogged (in a Majikthise post picked up by AlterNet), that Tomasky had it all wrong, and accused him of sneering at the presumably earnest Moore. (Well, Tomasky did accuse Moore of producing a gas-filled missive.)

Before I go further, allow me some full disclosure: Tomasky is a friend and my former bossman from the days when I was a columnist and blogger for The American Prospect. Beyerstein is a friend and colleague from my stint at The Media Consortium. Michael Moore is an acquaintance with whom I interviewed for a job some 20 or so years ago.  Don't really know him, but I loved Roger and Me.

Now that that's out of the way, I'm throwing in with Tomasky.

First, I think that the knee-jerk, anti-Afghanistan-war reaction of many on the left is no less imperialistic -- perhaps even more so -- than the case for staying in. I mean, really, how progressive is it to mess with the internal politics -- to the point of arming various factions the better to vanquish one's own enemy -- of an impoverished nation for 30 years, and then leave it broken and abandoned for the second time in three decades?

When progressives make the case that American dollars would be better put to use feeding Americans than helping Afghanistan create a nation out of the wreckage the U.S. helped to create, aren't we just saying that, despite the fact that we suck up more of the world's resources than we deserve, we're better and different than the Afghans? That they somehow deserved their fate? And now that our leaders have so screwed up the global economy that we're feeling it at home, we don't want to spend the money to fix what we broke?

Anti-war progressives are acting as if the U.S. had no history in Afghanistan prior to the 2001 invasion. In his open letter, Moore invokes the disastrous end met by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan as a parallel to the U.S.'s present involvement. He leaves out the part where the end met by the USSR came at the point of Stinger missiles provided by the U.S. to the religious warriors who formed the Soviet Union's opposition, and the U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet defeat.

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2011? Did We Say 2011? Administration Officials Backpedal on Afghan Withdrawal
Posted by Staff, Think Progress on December 7, 2009 at 2:00 PM.

As administration officials touted the President’s new Afghanistan strategy on the Sunday political talk shows, they underscored that the U.S. troops may not be coming home in 2011:

Gen. David Petraeus: "There's no timeline, no ramp, nothing like that." [Fox News Sunday]

National Security Adviser James Jones: "It is not a cliff. It is a glide slope. And so certainly, the President has also said we are not leaving Afghanistan." [CNN State of the Union]

Defense Secretary Robert Gates: "Well, first of all, I don’t consider this an exit strategy. And I try to avoid using that term. I think this is a transition." [ABC This Week]

Watch a compilation.

(Go here for more).

Thomas Friedman Can't Stop Comparing Afghanistan to a "Special Needs Baby"
Posted by Liliana Segura, AlterNet on December 7, 2009 at 11:30 AM.

If you haven't heard -- and that's a big "if," considering it's everywhere -- New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has come up with a neat new way to understand the situation in Afghanistan. As Friedman metaphors go, it's sure to be a classic, a true stand-out even alongside his most mangled, ridiculous stabs at using figurative language to describe foreign policy. (Consider the time he wrote, about Iraq, “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel, as long as you remember you’re driving without one.")

Friedman, anyway, is very proud of it. So proud, in fact, he has rolled it out at least twice in the past week.

"I tried to put this in a broader strategic context," he told Chris Matthews on "Hardball" on December 3rd. And where did that lead him?

Chris, as a country, we're like two out-of-work parents who just adopted a special-needs baby.

... Yikes.

So, maybe it a poor choice of words. Maybe after the segment, someone took Friedman aside and whispered that comparing whole countries to disabled infants is just a wee bit offensive -- especially when it comes from a supposed foreign policy expert from the country currently occupying it, a man whose ideas are so Important and Influential, he recently played a round of golf with the president of said occupying country.

Then again, maybe not.

Appearing on the Sunday news programs, Friedman again rolled out his Afghanistan-as-special-needs-baby metaphor, telling CNN's Fareed Zakaria:

I feel like we're like an unemployed couple who just went out and decided to adopt a special needs baby. You know, I mean, that's really kind of what we're doing. And that's like, whoa, you know. That terrifies me.

Yes, Friedman apparently gave it some thought after his "Hardball" episode and decided his metaphor is just right, it IS "kind of what we're doing."

Later, appearing on "Meet the Press" with David Gregory alongside another much-respected journalist, the Bush-chronicling Bob Woodward, Friedman gave the metaphor a rest, instead engaging in a little bit wordplay about the 2011 so-called withdrawal date.

MR. GREGORY:  Does a withdrawal date give the enemy an advantage?  Your analysis on what you've heard the answer on that.

MR. WOODWARD:  But I think, I mean, it's pretty clear that's a non-withdrawal withdrawal date.  Other words, they were talking about...

MR. GREGORY:  A non-denial denial.

MR. WOODWARD:  A non-denial denial.

MR. FRIEDMAN:  It's a known unknown.

MR. WOODWARD:  It, it's a starting point.

MR. GREGORY:  Yeah.

Two Pulitzer Prize winners at work here, folks. Be amazed.

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Obama Advisers Backpedal on Afghanistan: "There Is No Timetable;" "We're Not Talking About an Exit Strategy"
Posted by Faiz Shakir, Think Progress on December 7, 2009 at 5:45 AM.

In his Afghanistan policy address last week, President Obama said we would "begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011." In a series of in-depth profiles of the behind-the-scenes conversations that took place in the lead-up to this pronouncement, the Washington Post and New York Times report that the President wanted a strategy to get in and get out.

"The military was told to come up with a plan to send troops quickly and then begin bringing them home quickly," the Times writes. “He had asked for a plan to deploy and pull out troops quickly,” writes the Post. Looking at a bell curve that laid out the timetable for the deployment and withdrawal of U.S. troops, Obama reportedly told his advisers: "I want this pushed to the left." The Times writes, "wIn other words, the troops should be in sooner, then out sooner."

But as administration officials touted the President's Afghanistan strategy this morning on the Sunday political talk shows, they underscored that the U.S. troops may not be coming home in 2011:

Gen. David Petraeus: "There's no timeline, no ramp, nothing like that." [Fox News Sunday]

National Security Adviser James Jones: "It is not a cliff. It is a glide slope. And so certainly, the President has also said we are not leaving Afghanistan." [CNN State of the Union]

Defense Secretary Robert Gates: "Well, first of all, I don't consider this an exit strategy. And I try to avoid using that term. I think this is a transition." [ABC This Week]

Watch a compilation:

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UPDATED: Defense Contractor Makes Up Wild Islamic Terrorism Fantasy; Right-Wingers Act Like it's 9/11 All Over Again
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 6, 2009 at 11:34 AM.

True story. A right-winger who obviously reads too many of those really hard-core Islamophobic blogs emailed around a detailed account of how he had heroically thwarted a terrorist attack on a flight from Atlanta to Houston.

According to the story, which proliferated on conservative blogs and rose as high up the wingnut food chain as Glenn Beck's website, Ted Petruna was on the AirTrans flight waiting to taxi when he saw a bunch of "Muslims" acting suspiciously. They spoke to each other covertly on their cell phones from different locations within the plane. In Arabic, of course. They refused the crew's orders to turn off the phones; instead, they started watching pornographic films (this is what religious fundamentalists tend to do before launching suicide attacks, according to Petruna). When the group stood up and started walking towards the flight deck, Petruna and a brave fellow Texan who had also noted the suspicious doings of the men took action. They manhandled the outclassed young Muslims into compliance and secured them until Air Marshals boarded the plane and took the group into custody.

Then, shockingly, the airline -- no doubt entirely staffed by PC liberals -- tried to allow the men to board again and resume their journey. But Petruna and a bunch of other fine upstanding Americans had had enough. They threatened airline personnel with violence if they weren't re-booked on other flights. The airline relented, and the flight was canceled.

All of this was of course covered up, as usual, by the terror-loving liberal media.

BradBlog offers a sampling of that feverish meme from Debbie Schlussel, who, when referred to at all, is almost ubiquitously dubbed the "poor man's Ann Coulter":

... she notes that she's spoken to Petruna, so she now knows that [her bold] "it's all true. WAKE. UP. AMERICA. We are under siege."

"As we know," the delightful Schlussel informs us, "authorities think we shouldn’t know about these things. They don’t want us to panic or to be suspicious of Muslims, when they’re busy doing outreach over shawarmeh at 'Ahmed’s Falafel Hut.'"

You know where this is all going, right?

Petruna was never on the airplane in question. He had had a reservation, but missed a connection and couldn't make the flight. There was in fact a group of brown people on the flight Petruna missed. But they were speaking Spanish. One of them didn't understand the crew's instructions to turn off his cell-phone. Crew members asked him and a companion to step off the plane and speak to security personnel, which they did without fuss. There was no altercation. No other passengers had to get involved. No air marshals boarded the plane.

Everything got straightened out, the men got back on and the flight continued to Texas without incident after a 2-hour delay.

Detailed story here, here and here.

It's a typically funny tale of conservative bravery! And I want to highlight a couple of what I think are key chunks  ...

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Krauthammer: My Pants Don't Tingle When Obama Gets On His War-Talk!
Posted by Brad Reed, Sadly, No! on December 5, 2009 at 11:33 AM.

Shorter Chuckles Krauthammer:

Uncertain trumpet

• Obama was insufficiently enthusiastic about escalating a war. Now brown people will laugh at the size of the American penis.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

This is, in a lot of ways, the quintessential neoconservative column. It isn’t enough that Obama send 30,000 troops over to fight the Taliban. No, Obama must provide the neocons with emotional gratification in the form of wanton blood lust. Look at this:

Nonetheless, most supporters of the Afghanistan war were satisfied. They got the policy; the liberals got the speech. The hawks got three-quarters of what Gen. Stanley McChrystal wanted — 30,000 additional U.S. troops — and the doves got a few soothing words. Big deal, say the hawks.

But it is a big deal. Words matter because will matters.

And this is why the neocons will never warm to Obama, no matter how many wars he eventually decides to start. It’s a personality thing, really — Obama likes to give off the air of someone who makes decisions only after careful deliberation and weighing the costs and benefits. The neocons, however, only respect fellow travelers who get funny feelings in their pants when they think about war, people who really get off on the idea of watching other people get blown up. For them, war isn’t merely an act of national defense but an emotional gratification and a validation of their personal strength.

To be fair, I can sympathize with them in some ways. When I used to play StarCraft back in the day, I’d really enjoy sending in a platoon of siege tanks to blow up Zerg encampments. But mercifully for the rest of the world, I learned to get out my primordial thirst for blood through computer games and not through becoming a member of the American foreign policy establishment. If only I’d applied to work at the American Enterprise Institute instead, I could have made quite a name for myself. What could have been and so forth.

Unfriendly Fire: Michael Tomasky Attacks Michael Moore on Afghanistan
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, Majikthise on December 5, 2009 at 10:00 AM.

Micahel Tomasky accuses Michael Moore of being a fatuous blowhard for criticizing the war in Afghanistan as a doomed imperial adventure. Now, Moore can be a fatuous blowhard, but Tomasky doesn't make the charge stick this time. 

In his open letter to President Obama, Moore warns that Afghanistan has been nicknamed "the graveyard of empires."

Tomasky sneers:

I really don't see what America's mission in Afghanistan has to do with what the British did or what the Soviets did. People love lazy historical parallels, and have a tendency to have over-learned the famous Santayana maxim and believe that invoking it makes them sound smart. But every historical situation is different. Why wouldn't someone with Moore's lefty politics be righteous in the conviction that we owe it to the Afghan people to try to help them establish a proper nation-state for the first time in their history?

Moore doesn't spell out the historical analogy, but the common threads seem obvious to me: The Afghan people have historically been implacably opposed to foreign occupation of any kind and they've been very good at resisting it.

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Jon Stewart on Swiss Minaretaphobia
Posted by Staff, AlterNet on December 4, 2009 at 8:22 AM.

The Jewish Telegraph Agency (Via TPM) reports that Swiss intolerance continues to grow:

A mainstream Swiss political leader is calling for a ban on separate Muslim and Jewish cemeteries.

Christophe Darbellay, president of the Christian Democratic People's Party of Switzerland, made the statement in a television interview Tuesday, two days after Swiss voters passed an initiative to ban minarets.

The anti-minaret initiative came from the opposition ultra-conservative Swiss People's Party and other right-wing political organizations. Critics say Darbellay is starting a "crusade" to attract voters by proposing similarly xenophobic measures.

For a lighter look at this dark story developing in Switzerland, here's Jon Stewart:

Erik Prince Quitting Blackwater to Teach High School History and Economics
Posted by Alex Seitz-Wald, Think Progress on December 2, 2009 at 4:26 PM.

 Xe (formerly Blackwater) founder and CEO Erik Prince is cutting ties with the company. A spokeswoman for the company said today that Prince will relinquish involvement in its day-to-day operations and give up some of his ownership rights. The company has been shelling out $2 million a month in legal fees to cope with a slew of federal investigations and civil lawsuits stemming from, among other incidents, the “unprovoked and unjustified” killing of 17 Iraqi civilians. Prince told Vanity Fair that after years of serving his country, “someone threw me under the bus”:

Prince has become a scapegoat for some of the Bush administration’s misadventures in Iraq. … Congressmen and lawyers, human-rights groups and pundits, have described Prince as a war profiteer, one who has assembled a rogue fighting force capable of toppling governments. … “I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions. … But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus. … I’m an easy target.”

Prince said he is instead “going to teach high school.” “History and economics,” he said. “I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too.”

NY Times: Af-Pak Speech Pitched to "Rank-and-File Americans" ... WTF?
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 2, 2009 at 12:15 PM.

NY Times reporter Jeff Zeleny knocked this out on the Times' blog last night, soon after Obama's Af-Pak speech:

The words from the president, which at times were soaring, seemed to do very little to settle the discontent from the left ...

As for the most important audience – rank-and-file Americans – it will take a few more days to get a reliable read from opinion polls of how people viewed the speech.

So we have "the left", juxtaposed against a very odd construct: "rank-and-file Americans." The latter, apparently non-ideological, are themselves part of the war effort.

As a citizen, I don't even know my rank, and I guess that's what makes me a leftist.

Now here's a very interesting fact. You could, if you so desired, go down to your local major university and enroll in an international relations program. You could sign up for a class called something like: Foreign Policy Analysis 110 -- the basics. In it, a learned professor would explain that in foreign policy, conservatives are, above all, "humble." Foreign policy conservatives believe "hubris" is the ultimate trap. They don't believe in nation-building, launching adventurous expeditions to stabilize the basket-cases of the international system or using military might to advance human rights.

Liberals, you'd be told, are the internationalists. They believe in humanitarian intervention -- in using force to prevent governments from egregiously violating their citizens' human rights. They believe in democracy's power to bring peace and reconciliation to war-torn, traumatized populations, and would, when the circumstances require, use force to impose it (or they'd say to impose an environment in which democracy can grow).

By the way, these ideological tendencies were more or less evident in U.S. foreign policy until recently -- the rise of the neocons, and the ideological reshuffling about war and peace that followed Vietnam, have obscured the philosophical differences between liberal and conservative approaches to international relations.

And contra Zeleny's narrative, traditional foreign-policy conservatism still exists in a segment of the right. Think Ron Paul, Paul Craig Roberts, Pat Buchanan, etc. -- where do they fit?

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. One could argue that it's unfair to take a reporter to task for a late-evening blog post -- that's first-draft publishing, and perhaps Zeleny would have chosen his words more carefully. But this is not a semantic point -- the labels reporters choose for a story guide the way readers receive it. "Rank-and-file Americans" suggests hard-working "real" people, as distinct not from rational thinkers who have calculated that the Afghanistan conflict is an unwinnable mess, but "leftists" -- presumably non-real Americans, elitists, weirdos from San Francisco, etc.

This kind of subtle framing is commonplace. Part of the reason I highlighted this little nugget is that I'd just read this post by Jamison Foster over at Media Matters yesterday, taking a WaPo reporter to task for similarly bizarre labeling:

Last week, Washington Post reporter Perry Bacon suggested GOP Sen. George Voinovich would vote against health care reform because he is a "strong fiscal conservative."  As I noted at the time, that's an odd use of the label "fiscal conservative," given that health care reform would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, reduce the deficit.

Well, today, a Post reader asked Bacon about that:

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Afghanistan and Pakistan: Not Just About Al Qaeda Any More
Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet on December 2, 2009 at 9:49 AM.

Listening to the president's speech last night, you may have come away thinking that the U.S. mission in South Asia was largely about depriving al Qaeda its bases of operation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. "Our overarching goal remains the same:  to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future," said President Barack Obama.

This is the mission Congress authorized President George W. Bush to pursue in 2001.

Yet if you listened to the subtext of the speech, you might find that the mission has changed. In fact, you might say that the mission in Afghanistan is as much about creating stability in Pakistan -- a nuclear power that NBC's Andrea Mitchell yesterday referred to as a nearly failed state -- as it is about Afghanistan. Last night, a senior administration official confirmed to AlterNet that the U.S. mission to Pakistan has broadened.

From the president's speech:

In the past, we too often defined our relationship with Pakistan narrowly.  Those days are over.  Moving forward, we are committed to a partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interest, mutual respect, and mutual trust. We will strengthen Pakistan’s capacity to target those groups that threaten our countries, and have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear.  America is also providing substantial resources to support Pakistan’s democracy and development.  We are the largest international supporter for those Pakistanis displaced by the fighting.  And going forward, the Pakistan people must know America will remain a strong supporter of Pakistan’s security and prosperity long after the guns have fallen silent, so that the great potential of its people can be unleashed.

In truth, the largest threat to the U.S. from Pakistan is not al Qaeda, or even, as the president suggested, the "cancer" of extremism spilling over the Pakistan border from Afghanistan. The real threat is Pakistan's homegrown extremists, who have always been there, and with the shakiness of Pakistan's democracy, have been emboldened. Bomb attacks on civilians by Pakistani Taliban and its allies in cities across Pakistan reached a fever pitch in October and early November.  Yet the attacks appear to have been fueled, in part, by U.S. military policy in the region.

Drone attacks on villages in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Provinces -- attacks that appear to be part of a covert U.S. program -- have enraged local Pashtun leaders. After a bomb attack in a Peshawar bazaar killed more than 100 on October 28, a Pashtun-language banner was unfurled that condemned the purchase of a local luxury hotel by the U.S. for use as a consulate by equating the U.S. government with the mercenary force that provides security for U.S. aid projects in the region. "Handing the Pearl Continental to Blackwater is a grave injustice," the banner read, according to Assam Ahmed of the Christian Science Monitor.

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