This is surreal.
This is a picture of our president seated courtside at a Washington Wizards Chicago Bulls basketball game. Joe Clark, a corporate lawyer who sat near the president…, described the experience as “surreal.”
“I couldn’t believe that he was so accessible that I could literally shake his hand and heckle him about needing to suit up because his team was losing,” Mr. Clark said. (The president was rooting for the Bulls, who lost.)
In the same newspaper we learn that Mullah Abdullah Zakir was at this same moment leading a delegation of Afghan Taliban fighters to a meeting in Waziristan with Pakistani Taliban fighters.
Mullah Zakir was captured in 2001 in northern Afghanistan and was held at Guantánamo until his release in 2007. The Pakistani fighters describe him as an impressive speaker and a trainer, and said that he was particularly energetic in working to unite the different Taliban groups.
Why was he released?
Also in the Times we read about the most recent suicide bombing in Pakistan, in a Bagiari mosque near Peshawar in a region bordering Afghanistan, resulting in some 50 deaths and three times as many wounded.
Why isn’t the country, Pakistan, waging an all out war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda extremists in their midst? Why aren’t we insisting that, in exchange for our substantial aid, they do so?
A bloody year coming up, predict the Taliban fighters in the region, as they busily prepare suicide bombers and roadside bombings to greet the additional American forces sent by President Obama.
Why do we continue to send our soldiers to become targets of an insurgency that so far our presence there seems only to encourage and make stronger?
Our president must ask himself all these questions and more. And he must know that there are no good answers. Attending basketball games courtside is perhaps one of the best, best that through all this and much more he is able to do that and root for the Bulls.
But surreal it is.
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