Andrew Sullivan, 2007:
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.
And how’s that going? Some of the answer comes from the Washington Post, this morning:
“When we achieve our goals in one place, we need to struggle for it in other areas,” Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan told Pakistani news services by telephone last week. “Sharia does not permit us to lay down our arms if the government continues anti-Muslim policies.” The goal, he said, is to “enforce the rule of Allah on the land of Allah.”
In the northwestern town of Mardan, insurgents attacked girls schools, forced CD shops to close, ordered barbers not to shave beards and bombed the office of a nonprofit aid agency, killing a female worker. Taliban commanders accused the agency of “propagating obscenity.” Taliban fighters occupied the Buner district for several days, closed a religious shrine and burned DVDs in the streets. They then toured the region in a convoy of trucks, even entering a secured army area while displaying heavy weapons. “The inescapable reality is that another domino has toppled and the Taliban are a step closer to Islamabad,” the Pakistan-based News International newspaper warned last week…
On a not-unrelated note, there’s Jackson Diehl’s column in the same paper, A World of Trouble for Obama.