Bagram Air Base A Scandal

It had to happen sooner or later: the first ambiguous signals, the first irritations from the new regime in Washington. First Hillary Clinton, on her first foreign outing as secretary of state, disappointed many hoping for clear words concerning Tibet and human rights. Then it didn’t even take a week before Barack Obama’s clear statement “no Guantanamo, no torture” was relativized. Finally, Washington announced that Guantanamo would be closed in early 2010 while simultaneously announcing its intention to keep the internment camp at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan operating. At the same time, a Pentagon report dismissed criticism of the actual conditions at Guantanamo.

Do we need to fear a regression to Bush’s old habits? That assumption would be just as wrong as were a lot of the towering hopes raised during the all-too-naïve “Obamania.” The new administration has set a foreign policy course that, in many ways, represents a clear break with the previous administration.

Clinton’s China visit fits the new approach exactly. Whereas Bush held Peking at arm’s length as a “strategic competitor,” the new Washington team wants to solidify the emerging realm of the middle in international responsibility. Partnership, instead of containment, is the new order of the day. In this way, the United States is bringing its China policy into alignment with geopolitical and economic reality. America no longer has the upper hand in the world of bilateral economic dependence. Even Bush was financing his wars with money borrowed from China. And now Obama has to sell Peking, America’s largest creditor, on the idea of financing even more American debt in order to pay for his economic stimulus package.

The fact that Clinton didn’t give the Chinese a dressing down on human rights during her Peking visit may be viewed as part of Washington’s new honesty. In dealing with China, every western nation in the past has subordinated the human rights issue to economic interests. George W. Bush pushed the chasm between America’s moral pretensions and its power projection to new depths with his “Freedom Agenda” and excessive war policy. Never had opponents had it so easy in exposing America’s flightiness and hypocrisy as at that time. The fact that Hillary Clinton did not preach to the Chinese may be a sign that Washington realizes it has to earn back moral credibility before it can start pointing fingers again.

For precisely that reason, the contradictory signals in the war on terrorism are problematic. The American prison camp at Bagram is a scandal. Inmates there endure worse living conditions and have fewer rights than the Guantanamo prisoners. To close just one of these two camps isn’t enough; internationally recognized norms of justice also have to apply to prisoners in the Hindu Kush. The same applies to the practice of “renditions,” the transporting of prisoners to avoid legal responsibilities, which Obama has also allowed to continue. And if new CIA chief Leon Panetta opens the door to more brutal interrogation methods, sympathy for a promising president and his clear words shouldn’t stand in the way.