It’s been clear since early in his campaign for the presidency that Barack Obama is committed to escalating the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has added 21,000 troops to the American military presence in Afghanistan since taking office, and is currently contemplating how many more to send (one of his generals wants an additional 60,000 soldiers). The immediate goal of Obama’s Afghan policy is to prop up Hamid Karzai — a man whose legacy so far includes widespread corruption, election rigging, and the legalization of rape — and, of course, to continue the war against the Taliban. Genuine, lasting peace in Afghanistan is not on anyone’s agenda.

Meanwhile, just over the border, Obama has been expanding the war into Pakistan with a series of air strikes, killing innocent civilians (including children) and threatening Pakistan’s already-fragile political stability — which seems like a pretty stupid thing to do if you want to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of those wacky Islamic fundamentalists. Again, it’s hard to see how this policy is doing anything to promote peace in Central Asia.

Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that ordinary people in the region are less than thrilled to learn that Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize:

“I don’t know how he can get this prize,” said Najeeb, a 30-year-old shopkeeper attending a friend’s wedding party [in Kabul]. “Maybe it’s been awarded for all the houses they are bombing, or perhaps it’s for all his soldiers that are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Obama’s deployment of the tools of war is not restricted to the Middle East. His administration has also been expanding the American military presence in Latin America. The US claims that the military installations it’s planning to use in Colombia don’t count as new military bases — they’re merely “Cooperative Security Locations” leased from the Colombian state, which somehow makes them completely different and definitely not army bases. True, the troop levels involved are relatively small (the numbers would increase from less than 300 troops to no more than 800), but it’s clear that the intent here is to step up the US drug war in Latin America. Dropping more soldiers into the middle of a 40-year-old guerrilla war is not going to create peace in Colombia or anywhere else.

All in all, it seems that the best way to win the Nobel Peace Prize is to continue with the American imperial project in a manner slightly less offensive than that of George W. Bush. I’d say the decision tarnishes the Nobel prize’s reputation, but these sorts of controversies are not exactly news: Henry Kissinger, for example, was awarded the same prize at the height of the Vietnam War, while Gandhi was overlooked despite multiple nominations. I don’t even think it’s reasonable to hope that this latest prize will lead to serious scrutiny of Obama’s foreign policy: his approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan has been receiving substantial attention and analysis since long before his inauguration, and the Colombian thing is more or less business as usual and will therefore be ignored. All you can really do is shrug your shoulders, admit that some folks in Norway decided to be particularly stupid today, and move on.