[Pak-Media] Chomsky,”The US does not care about Pakistan”……

Professor Noam Chomsky sits on the eighth floor of the quirky-looking Stata
Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US.
Former head of the linguistics department, the author and intellectual now
serves as Professor Emeritus at the university.
The man is known worldwide for his incredibly popular and polarising
criticism of American foreign policy.
"The US doesn't care about Pakistan, just like the Reagan administration
didn't care about either Afghanistan or Pakistan," says Chomski, when asked
how he sees the relationship between Pakistan and the US. "They supported
Zia, the worst dictator in Pakistan's history, and pretended they didn't
know that Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons. So basically they
supported Pakistan's nuclear weapon programme and radical Islamisation in
their bid to defeat the Russians. And that has not helped Pakistan."
According to Chomsky, the reason the Pak-US relationship hasn't worked is
because the concern of US planners is not the welfare of Pakistan, it's the
welfare of their own constituency. "But it's not the people of US either,
just the powerful sectors within the US," he said. "If the US policy towards
Pakistan happens to benefit Pakistan it would be kind of accidental. Maybe
it will to some extent, but that is not the purpose."
Chomsky believes Pakistan has serious internal problems but says there are
solutions. But, he insists, these problems have to be solved from within
instead of from outside.
"These problems have to be dealt with inside Pakistan, and not by the US;
providing them with massive military aid, carrying out drone strikes, which
enrages the population rightly," he says. "Drone attacks are target
assassinations and therefore a crime. Whether they are militants or not,
these people are being targeted because the US doesn't like them. Targeted
assassination is an international crime. United Nations' special rapporteur
Philip Alston, a very respected international lawyer, came out with a report
which simply says that it is a criminal act."
He also supports the 1973 constitution and believes it is suitable for
Pakistan. "It looks sensible on paper. It provided a degree of autonomy
within a federalised system, which makes sense for a country like Pakistan,"
he says. "Devoting resources to education, development and not military will
help."
Relationship with India
Speaking about Pakistan's relationship and outlook towards India, he said
that the Pakistani military has a strategic doctrine that they have to have
a military presence in Afghanistan to counter India. "That's a losing
proposition because Pakistan cannot compete with India in terms of military
force. Besides, the strategic position in Afghanistan doesn't really mean
anything in case of a war," he says. "Pakistan has undoubtedly supported
terrorist groups in Kashmir and terrorism in India, which has made the
situation worse."
The Americans are avoiding the Kashmir issue, he says, which is central to
the resolution of conflict in South Asia. "India has a very ugly record in
Kashmir – horrible atrocities, fraudulent elections, most militarised place
in the world. You can't just ignore it," he says.
US-India relations
Professor Chomsky says that it is a "joke" when US talks about giving aid
for civilian nuclear facilities in India. "The aid for the civilian nuclear
use can be easily transferred to military use. By granting India the right
to import US nuclear technology, it has not only allowed India to freely
develop nuclear weapons, the US has also violated the nuclear
non-proliferation treaty," he says.
Afghan war's future
"It is a complicated situation but I think there is good evidence that the
US military and political structures recognise that they cannot have a
military victory," Chomsky says.
However, he says, they [US] can conquer whatever they like, but the
Russians also won every battle in the 1980s but eventually lost the war.
"The Americans are therefore trying to find a way to extricate themselves in
some fashion, that it can be presented as a victory. They don't want to
admit they've lost the war, like the Russians."
Published in The Express Tribune, April 19th, 2011.

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