I agree that Obama, aside from his unique personal history and his racial profile, is pretty much a "standard" American president and is acting like one so far.

*****

Eric Margolis has spent the last 30 years traveling to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Baltistan, Waziristan, the Siachen Glachier region, Kashmir, the Northwest Frontier areas of Pakistan and India, Tibet, etc, and he is intimately acquainted with many of the principal military and political commanders in that region. He has been on numerous warfronts, bivouaced with the troops, and has friends among the commanders of, for example, the Pakistani Army and the Mujahedin, Taliban, and many other such factions. He knows what is motivating them.

He states unequivocally in his writings that a large majority of the Muslim fighters who are fighting both India and the West in those regions are NOT religious fundamentalists of the kind typically caricatured in the West, and are not opposed to modernization and/or democratization of their societies. They are nationalists. The more extreme Muslim fundamentalists who are the chosen "boogeymen" of western media (since they serve a great propaganda purpose for furthering the War on Terror) are a distinct minority among those Muslims willing to fight to get India out of Kashmir and the West out of the various occupied Muslim lands. It is incorrect to characterize the conflict as one between extreme Muslim fundamentalism and western democracy. That's not what it is. It is a fight of Muslim nationalist independence movements vs. western colonialism and western-dominated proxy governments...plus it is the ongoing bitter struggle between India and Pakistan, which is in fact the most dangerous part of the conflict by far, because India and Pakistan have a large number of nuclear weapons, and could use them on one another at any time if things get out of hand....which they well may.

If so, it will immediately kill millions and injure perhaps a hundred million more...and that will just be the beginning.