NYTimes Comment #56.
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
August 30th, 2009
11:22 am
------
US DESTABILIZES PAKISTAN and ALL of SOUTH ASIA with WEAPONS and PRESENCE. That's the real story behind the NYT article.
Your latest article,(see link below) about Pakistan modifying weapons supplied to it, BY the US, comes as absolutely no surprise.
But the point is, should Pakistan be blamed? No. Successive US govts. have played a dangerous role in South Asia, particularly by subjugating Pakistan for over 55 years, to selfish US interests, beginning with the John Foster Dulles era of the US. State Dept. Pakistan became a pawn in the US machinations against the former USSR, in the Cold War which the US invented against the Soviets. Now the US is the world's largest Centrally Planned Economy(CPE), how ironic.
The US's South Asia policy under Obama is no exception. That policy is controlled, not by the White House, but by a long established State Department/Pentagon/ CIA policy of US dominance and control and consequent disaster, through the double deployment of weapons and capital, by the US, over certain regions at certain points in time.
For 55 plus years, South Asia has been an area in which the US has meddled. Now, with its diminished stature in the so-called Middle East, the US is trying, and to a large measure has succeeded, in accomplishing strategic depth in South Asia.
The US is both an ally and a partner of hapless, dependent and bankrupt Pakistan. A weak still largely feudal but dangerously US-weaponized Pakistan is no match in this equation.
Instead of helping Pakistan's ordinary people to accomplish SOCIAL JUSTICE through food security, education, healthcare, industrial and trade relations, the US has brutally attacked ordinary Pakistanis' aspirations for a better life, by weaponizing and destroying Pakistan's already fragile sovereignty.
It suits Pakistan's feudal/military leaders to depict India as the enemy. But ordinary Pakistan know that Indians and Pakistanis are sisters and brothers whose oppressor is the US, and before them, the Brits, not to mention our own national elites in our respective countries.
Such is the aftermath of the colonial -- and now neo-imperial conundrum we South Asians face at the present time.
Only India and Pakistan can resolve their disagreements. The determined and largely successful effort of the US to become a geopolitical player MUST fail, if South Asia's sovereign nation-states are to succeed, on behalf of their own diverse and long suffering peoples. The US has got to go.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------
NYTimes copyright
U.S. Says Pakistan Made Changes to Missiles Sold for Defense
By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER
The U.S. has accused Pakistan of illegally modifying American-made missiles to expand its capability to strike land targets, a potential threat to India, officials said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/world/asia/30missile.html?_r=1
=====================================================================================
