According to a news item published in Washington papers on May 30, the US military has already completed 'dry exercises for a unilateral strike in Pakistan in case an attack on the American soil is traced back to that country. The news probably aims to convince Pakistanis that now is the time to uproot extremists because failure to do so may actually lead to an attack on the US soil, which in turn could lead to an American military invasion on Pakistan. Although Obamas doctrine of war on terror is supposed to be different from the Bush strategy, the use of military power somehow remains central to both ideologies. Bush solely used the militarist expression for settling the issues with out discriminating between combatant and non-combatant among the opponents at the receiving end of his war machine. He presumed all Pakhtoons to be Al-Qaida agents. The net effect was that all Pakhtoons turned against US which meant the US mission in Afghanistan was sunk in sands. It is till in that quagmire, wanting to withdraw but unable to do so. Had Washington invested some bit of its colossal war budget on socio-economic development of the region, the results would have been totally different. By blindly using its hegemonic powers, US has created more enemies than friends, far too many of them. Unlike George Bush, Mr Obama uses soft language but hits hard. He uses the classic carrot and stick policy. But he at least says he does not consider all Muslims to be terrorists. Nor has he ever called the war on terror a crusade. In Cairo, for instance, he spoke wisely to Muslims, touching all the right buttons. He pledged to solve the Palestine issue and even to do away with the prisons in Guantanamo Bay. But those were mere words and nothing really happened practically. As a result, the US image has been distorted further globally. The US threat to invade Pakistan now may turn out to be a false alarm but it would likely damage Pakistan immensely, eroding its sovereignty, prestige as a state and sense of safety among its citizens completely. If it is aimed to act as a spur for a new operation somewhere, it would prove to be counter-productive. The Bush administration had also planned live exercises close to the Pakistan border after Mumbai attacks in November 2008. This had caused the then National Security Adviser of the Pakistan government, Mahmud Ali Durrani, to fly to Washington to convince the Americans that such exercises would not help the fight against terrorism. Even George Bush had to relent and the US had cancelled the exercises. -ATTIQUE-UR-RAHMAN, Muzaffargarh, May 31.