(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) BOOKS BASED on official leaks published in an American election year often aim to shape a narrative that helps an incumbent's prospects. But they also make disclosures that may otherwise not come to light.
A new book of this genre is David Sanger's 'Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power'. This details how President Obama dramatically escalated America's drone wars and secretly intensified cyber warfare against Iran. The book portrays Obama as a man who cemented his national security credentials by his "bold" use of hard, covert power in a world, where occupying other countries was neither affordable nor politically feasible.
In choosing to fight non-stop wars stealthily by deploying remote control technology, Sanger is surprised by Obama's "aggressiveness". But those looking for a thorough evaluation of the legal, moral and longer-term strategic implications of this approach won't find it in the book. Sanger is sceptical of aspects of US policy but does not critique Obama's muscular 'confront and conceal' unilateralism that has evolved into the Obama doctrine.
At times the book asks the right questions - were ten years of war in Afghanistan worth it? But few answers are offered. On occasion he accurately describes the consequence of US actions - the covert raid to kill Osama bin Laden was the moment America "lost Pakistan" - but he stops short of analysing its broader ramifications.
He characterises Pakistan as 'paranoid'. But then himself says this is "hardly paranoia" because "America had an elaborate well-rehearsed plan" to seize or disable Pakistan's nuclear weapons, which has been "ramped up and revised" under Obama.
Elsewhere he contends, "there is no good plan for sweeping up Pakistan's nuclear weapons because on any given day it is not clear where they are".
But it is for a different reason that the book has attracted publicity - and launch of an official US investigation into the leaks - for detailing the US-Israeli cyber plan to sabotage Iran's Natanz nuclear facility. Dubbed as the Stuxnet affair, this has been known for some time but never confirmed.
Sanger's book for the first time cited American officials confirming that the US and Israel had been waging cyberwarfare against Iran. In the chapter 'Secret War', Sanger describes how a covert plan aimed at disabling Iran's uranium enrichment centrifuges went terribly wrong. A careless mistake released a cyber "worm" or computer virus onto the Internet. This got replicated with hackers calling this 'Stuxnet'. But this did not stop 'Olympic Games', codename for the operation, from continuing.
America's cyberwar against Iran, Sanger claims, was meant as much to retard Iran's nuclear quest as to prevent Israel from launching airstrikes and provoking a new war. The uproar this triggered in America has been more about why sensitive information was divulged than for the serious implications of waging cyberwarfare. As the Financial Times put it in a recent editorial: "the Stuxnet story provides the only example of a nation bragging about its cyberwarfare operations". Describing "cyberactivity" as " one of the world's biggest security threats", it also called for international cyberlaws to stop this new arms race spinning out of control.
Sanger echoes what Bob Woodward and others had earlier written about Obama's Afghan policy - that Obama's heart was never in the war and that he was deeply sceptical about the surge. By late 2010 Obama began to look for a path to the exits and shift to targeting Al Qaeda and degrading rather than militarily defeating the Taleban. Meanwhile his national security team was asked to explore political accommodation with Mullah Omar's Taleban.
In a revealing passage Sanger recounts Richard Holbrooke's last conversation with him before he died. Holbrooke questioned whether Obama really had the will and persistence for a peace deal or just wanted to get out of Afghanistan. From this Sanger concludes: "the only certainty is that America will leave Afghanistan - save for a small force behind high walls - with Al Qaeda mostly crippled, but the grand experiment of remaking Afghanistan largely in tatters."
Where Sanger does go beyond description is in his terse perspective on the breakdown of the Pakistan-US relationship. He acknowledges America's contribution to this as also the fact that Pakistan has been "a major loser in the region's wars". Referring to arguments still raging in Washington about how to deal with Pakistan, he rightly suggests that for now, US thinking represents an attitude not a policy. And he concludes that isolation of Pakistan is not a policy, but an act of desperation.
Dr Maleeha Lodhi served as Pakistan's ambassador to the US and United Kingdom
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