Joe Biden's convoluted reasoning

Not many in Pakistan agreed with President Obama's 'strategic review' of US military surge in Afghanistan unveiled last week, but what Vice President Joe Biden has added to it as his addendum is totally frivolous and uncalled for. His assertion that by carrying out drone attacks the CIA is 'trying to ensure that terrorists don't bring down the Pakistan government, which is a nuclear power' is too outlandish to be credited with a comment.
Yes, Pakistan is a nuclear power but to suggest its government can be brought down by al Qaeda is certainly a mindset that offends logic and reason. Of course, Joe Biden owes it to his people to make a convincing case justifying a revision of the much-touted troop pullout timeline.
In fact, it was Vice President Biden who led the forces that made President Obama declare July-2011 as the date marking the beginning of the troop pullout from Afghanistan. But now that he has been left in the cold over this, he is offering all kinds of excuses in support of shifting the pullout milestone to 2014 - although he is expected not to get involved so vigorously in bigger issues like war and peace.
Traditionally, the role of the Vice President in the United States is that of a sailor who went to the sea and nothing was heard of him again. Biden, however, because of his extensive experience in foreign affairs, is the most experienced individual in the Obama team. His assertions therefore cannot be taken lightly.
The logic offered by Biden in his 'Meet the Press' encounter with NBC over the weekend, in support of his thesis that al Qaeda can bring down the Pakistan government is clearly self-contradictory. On the one hand, he says al Qaeda has lost much of its clout in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan and is now moving to the Arabian Peninsula and beyond, including Yemen, Somalia and North Africa.
"We have significantly degraded and knocked off a lot of main (al Qaeda) planners and organisers and trainers," he said, adding so "they are planning a much smaller bore". If the al Qaeda has been degraded and forced to move to other landscape how then it can topple the Pakistan government. But, by the choice of his words, it appears that Biden is not as much worried about the durability of this or any other Pakistani government as his concern that the government thus being toppled would be a 'nuclear power'.
In fact, he is trying to say that Pakistan's nuclear assets can fall into the hands of al Qaeda. Such a prognosis is not entirely new, especially during the run-up to the Conference on Disarmament meeting next month where Pakistan's consistent refusal to sign the Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) is quite expectedly one of the major areas of negative comment in the West. But there is going to be no change in Pakistan's stand on the issue, which was made clear last week by the concerned quarters.
Biden is particularly satisfied with "the use of Special Forces and the like to go after individuals who make up the leadership of the al Qaeda and of the Taliban." Of course, he was referring to the use of CIA-operated drone attacks that of late, has included the Khyber Agency in its area of operation. Extensive use of drones is being justified by the US military by quoting the higher figure of casualties among the militants thanks to this technique of killing humans by robots. How ironical, nobody seems to be questioning the use of drones to kill outside the war zones. As to the number of militants killed in such attacks, figures are made available immediately but information on who is actually killed is not available to the independent media and civil society - but mind you those who lose their near and dear ones know it all. Therefore, there is no dearth of volunteers who would like to stand up to this wanton murder of innocent people and the war will go on.
So, even when in the words of Vice President Biden, the foreign forces are 'going to be gone' from this region, the seeds of hatred against foreign presence and its military-exclusive approach will keep sprouting up. No wonder, only a day after German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid a visit to the 'long-pacified' Kunduz in Northern Afghanistan last week, the Taliban stormed the local police centre killing several security and police personnel. And in a separate attack they ambushed an army bus in Kabul killing five military personnel. Irrespective of military victories here and there, the battle for hearts and minds is being lost.