On Friday, at a public address in Strasbourg, France, US President Obama emphasised that the war in Afghanistan would continue despite the change in presidencies. While his administration has ceased referring to the Global War On Terror (GWOT) as Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), he said, "I think, it is important for Europe to understand that even though I'm now the president and G W Bush is no longer there, Al-Qaeda is still a threat and it is going to be a very difficult one." In continuing the US occupation of Iraq and escalating attacks on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama seems to have adopted the same basic pretexts by Bush and all the other preceding US presidents to justify their neo-colonialist actions, including the supposed threat by Al-Qaeda. It has all the time been an infallible practice in the US that a president who was not wise enough himself was never well advised by the cronies around him. Between the years 1898 and 1934, the Marines invaded Cuba 4 times, Nicaragua 5 times, Honduras 7 times, the Dominican Republic 4 times, Haiti 2 times, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico 3 times and Columbia 4 times. The practice continued even after the World War II, in Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War between Iraq and Iran and the proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan with the help of Al-Qaeda in 1980s. The beginning of the new millennium saw the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 in October 2001, and invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Over a period of time, Washington has a record of intervening in foreign countries more than 200 times. All these interventions were not for democracy, because US foreign policy has always backed dictators, as disdain and indifference are twin hallmarks of US diplomacy. On March 27, President Obama announced a major escalation of the US war in Afghanistan and its further extension into Pakistan. His statement was presented as an outcome of a review by the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence network. All the top officials of these agencies were on board when Obama gave these remarks. The policy he announced represented a massive increase in military ferocity not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan. In plain words, Obama devoted the first part of his annotations to Pakistan, signalling that a major conclusion of his administration's strategic review was to expand the war more aggressively beyond the Afghan borders, as the US military and security position in Afghanistan was dismal. "The situation is increasingly perilous," he said. "Its more than 7 years since the Taliban were banished from power, but the war rages on, and insurgents control parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Attacks against our troops, our NATO allies and the Afghan government have steadily risen. And, most painfully, 2008 was the deadliest of the war for American forces." He continued: "Afghanistan has an elected government, but it is undermined by corruption and has difficulty delivering basic services to the people. The economy is undercut by a booming narcotic trade that encourages criminality and funds insurgency." President Obama outlined plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan that reverberated Bush's military surge in Iraq. Bush used an admixture of bribes and military violence to buy a temporary peace with various militia leaders, while directing the US reinforcements to slaughter Iraqis who were fighting against the US occupation. Obama gave a strange explanation that in Iraq the US forces had succeeded by reaching out to former adversaries and targeting Al-Qaeda. If, at all it was a success after slaughtering 1,320,110 Iraqis in a span of 6 years, what else is genocide? And Iraq is still burning under the nose of big posse of US troops permanently stationed there to protect Washington's lust for Iraqi oil wealth. Following Bush's warmongering policies in Afghanistan would mean the deaths of untold thousands Afghans and Pakistanis, the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, and the deaths of thousands of US troops sent to kill or be killed in a wider war in South and Central Asia. Control over Afghanistan gives Washington access to traditional areas of Russian influence such as the Caucasus, Central Asia, as well as Iran. It also threatens China friendly Pakistan in the Indian Subcontinent. President Obama appears to have fallen for the oldest false dichotomy in the Pentagon repertoire, and the easiest one to sell to the American people. It goes like this; the world is divided between the "evil folks" and the "good." The good folks, being what they are; are naturally pro-Americans, once they get to know us. It is the wrong interpretation of Manichean view that Bush put forward. Calling Bush's views Manichean is an insult to Manicheans who follow the teachings of Mani, a Buddhist ascetic born in Baghdad in the 3rd century AD. Manichaeism has come to describe a tendency to see things in overly simple terms as "wholly evil" or "wholly good." The word is often used in political polemic regarding the adversary as the very embodiment of evil. In calling the USSR "evil empire," President Reagan expressed the Manichean sentiment, and so was the Ayatollah Khomeini in labelling the US "the great Satan." In the new Millennium, it was Bush who used this terminology when he branded N-Korea, Iran and Iraq as "axis of evil." And now in the year 2009, President Barack Obama under the influence of Bush's protgs Robert Gates, Richard Holbrooke, Admiral Mike Mullen and General Petraeus might as well use the same terminology against Pakistan by branding it the storehouse of world terrorism. To this end, Obama has announced an Iraq-style military surge ahead of the Afghan presidential elections in August. The US is to send 21,000 additional troops, while considering the deployment of another 10,000. By bringing America's military strength to over 60,000, Obama hopes to reinforce US control over this strategic region. But, Washington still wants a substantial increase of European logistical and military backing to offset spiralling costs and to firmly entangle Europe to the war. The European powers have their own axe to grind and are happy to maintain a foothold in the Afghan operation to avoid it becoming the exclusive domain of the US, and they do not want to let it degenerate into a worst debacle than Iraq. At the same time, they are cautious to avoid being sucked into a worsening conflict that is deeply unpopular at home; a state of affairs indicated by the 30,000 protestors gathered at the two-day summit in Kehl, Germany, then at Strasbourg in France. Obama proclaimed that the NATO cohorts had agreed to deploy about 5,000 troops and trainers to advance Washington's new strategy. Apparently the trainers' job would be to tutor the Afghan and Pakistan troops to kill their own people or be killed by them to accomplish Washington's impossible strategic mission in the region. Obama's main ally in seeking a troop surge is British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who a day before the summit had offered upto ten thousand troops in the hope of pressurising others to do likewise. Britain already has a deployment of over eight thousand troops in Afghanistan. Brown failed to fulfil Obama's demand for 2 to 3 thousand more troops because of the stiff opposition in the government that blocked the move on cost grounds. As against Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy rejected any additional military commitment, only agreeing to 150 military police to help train Afghan civilian police. German Chancellor Merkel did not shift from an earlier agreement to send another 600 soldiers up to the Afghan elections and that also in non-combatant capacity. President Obama is being misled in his politico-military strategy by Gates-Mullen-Petraeus troika that is striving hard to build up a combined military force of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan under US patronage to dissipate terrorism that has engulfed the region. It seems to be a calculated move to marginalise China, Russia and Iran and would certainly backfire. It's a suicidal strategy to completely Americanise the war on terrorism under the hoax that the US, India and Pakistan are the prime targets. Why China, Iran and Russia that are equally affected, are being kept out of this US-proposed "Peace Plan?" A unilateral push by President Obama at this juncture would sink him deeper into the Central Asian quagmire left behind unresolved by his warmonger predecessor. The writer is a former inspector general of Police