A WARNING FROM THE PAST (re: America's alliance with Pakistan; SF Chron, 1/6)

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A WARNING FROM THE PAST

A noted American diplomat raised serious questions about the Pakistan army's Islamic threat nearly 40 years ago
by Vanni Cappelli
Sunday, January 6, 2008

Benazir Bhutto's assassination - not far from the jail yard where her father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged - symbolizes the tenuousness of civilian political life in Pakistan. Yet, though many in Washington assert that the killing has severely limited U.S. policy options, few are fundamentally questioning the wisdom of supporting a foreign military establishment whose values are so alien to our own.

There have, however, been sagacious voices who questioned this self-defeating policy from its inception decades ago.

In 1970, as the United States was mired in a disastrous conflict that was a colossal distraction from the real imperatives of the Cold War, Chester Bowles, one of the old liberal lions of the Democratic Party, wrote a piece in the New York Times, "Will We Ever Learn in Asia?"

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With virtuosic insight and prescience, he outlined the salient features of America's alliance with Pakistan, a relationship whose dynamics have remained constant from the early days of the Cold War to the war on terror. And he prophesied that the contradictions underlying this alliance would harm vital American interests.

Vanni Cappelli, a freelance journalist, is president of the Afghanistan Foreign Press Association. E-mail us at [e-mail].

complete opinion piece at:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/01/06/INSTU7JRN.DTL

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1. K&R! nt