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| India-Pakistan |
| A long never-ending collective moan |
| 2008-08-08 |
| By Khaled Ahmed America’s most important non-NATO ally, Pakistan, hates America most today. The feeling is high after having pocketed US$10 billion as assistance from Washington. We hate the Americans because they gave this money to a dictator we loved in 1999 but hate now. We additionally think that America has come to the region looking for oil and hegemony, for getting hold of our nuclear weapons, etc, and is here for good, undermining Pakistan and empowering India against us. We hate America for sticking around this time, but not long ago we hated it for not sticking around after winning the Afghan war against the Soviet Union. We hated America in the 1950s for sending us the wrong sort of wheat under PL480 when we were faced with famine because of our bad local wheat seed. American wheat was reddish in colour and the Americans couldn’t help it. When in 1968 an American scientist, Norman Borlaug, got the Nobel Prize for giving Pakistan the new seed that permanently put an end to the threat of famine in Pakistan, we quickly forgot about it. More fresh was the wound inflicted by America when it turned away from us after we started a war with India in 1965. We never liked the way the Americans tended to think about us and India. Record shows that first we get what we demand, then we complain about not getting what we deserve. In his book The White House and Pakistan (OUP 2002), FS Aijazuddin quotes a 1966 State Department memorandum to President Johnson on the same theme: ‘Thus, while we can’t blame the Paks for being unhappy with us, it isn’t because we betrayed them; it is because their own policy of using us against India has failed. They know full well we didn’t give them $800 million in arms to use against India (but they did). Even so we built up Pakistan’s own independent position and sinews – to the tune of almost $5 billion in support. We’ve protected Pakistan against India; we had more to do with stopping the war Ayub had started than anyone else (just in time to save Paks).’ In later years, Pakistanis have had a tendency to over-value Pakistan and think the US should have paid more for its services. Irshad Haqqani ( Jang 22 May 2003) dwelling on what Pakistan got for helping the US win the Afghan war thought General Zia could have got up to US$50 billion out of the US because America had carried out “thousands of air attacks” in Afghanistan from Pakistani bases. He perhaps thought Pakistan had paid dearly for Zia’s Islamic reforms. If America’s strategic objectives coincide with Pakistan’s, what is Pakistan to do? Change its objectives? General Zia told us that they coincided and went ahead with his great ‘deniable’ jihad. What he did internally was not dictated by America. Why this simmering Pakistani hatred for America even as America shells out big money to cover up for Pakistan’s economically inept alternation of democracy and dictatorship? Pragmatism is not the way of life Pakistanis like. They look at the world emotionally and take their state ideology seriously. For Pakistan, a state with restricted resources, sticking to the dictates of nationalism is ever more difficult. Seeking any realistic solution to the Kashmir problem throws the country into disorder. Normalising relations with India, or starting trade with it under the SAARC agreements, pleases no one. The country’s foreign policy has been moulded by its early confrontational posture with India. There are many demons here that emerge at the most unlikely junctures. If the anti-India policy is a pillar, so is the membership of a mythical Muslim umma . There are times when Pakistan judges the world on how the world behaves towards India. There are also times when it applies the yardstick of the Muslim umma . When it comes to the umma perspective, Pakistan has reason to hate America even more for waging a crusade against Islam. Someone has made a more serious study of the subject in Washington. The scholar is Dennis Kux, a South Asia expert of the State Department, who served twice as a diplomat in Pakistan. His book The United States and Pakistan 1947-2000: Disenchanted Allies (OUP 2001) treats the theme of this ‘strange bedfellowship’ quite professionally. He thinks that the Pak-US relations fluctuated sharply across the years, beginning nicely in 1954, coming apart in the 1960s during Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, improving a bit during Nixon’s rule, but fracturing again when Carter was president. In the 1980s, the Republicans got together with Pakistan during the covert war in Afghanistan, but after the departure of the Soviet armies from Afghanistan, a Republican president clamped the Pressler Amendment on Pakistan. After Pakistan defied Clinton on the nuclear tests in 1998, sanctions were applied, compounded again in 1999 when General Musharraf overthrew democracy in Pakistan. He writes: ‘Pakistanis tend to attribute decline in American interest in Pakistan to inconstancy and fickleness. In turn, Americans often assert that the frequent twists and turns stem from Pakistan’s wrong-headedness, particularly its fixation with India’. Pakistan’s security perspective is regional; America’s is global. The clash occurs somewhere close to the where the two perspectives are sought to be joined. When that happens, the shivers first run down the spine of the Pakistan army, after which the intelligence agencies take over. The smaller you are in terms of power the bigger and more fragile your pride. After that the columnists and TV anchors form their angry phalanx, and what you have then is an orgy of unrealistic passions. Our disenchantment with America has become a long never-ending collective moan. It is the wages of a superpower with a global vision trying to couple with a state whose vision is restricted to a region. |
| Posted by:john frum |
| #2 Pls, no Pakistani Bashing, it is unca.... no wait a sec, THIS IS RANTBURG! No Paki-Bashing pls. |
| Posted by: .5MT 2008-08-08 12:48 |
| #1 Well written. I wish all countries could take an honest look in the mirror. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2008-08-08 10:37 |