The Gates proposal to save a $400 million commitment to buttress the Pakistan military with night goggles and the like is such a drop in the bucket that it is almost laughable. It would be that if the stakes were not so high. There has been more serious attention internationally to the current flu dangers than to the manifest danger that Pakistan could fall into anarchy or worse, actual control by the Taliban, who would have no hesitation in seeking to employ the nation’s nuclear capability in ways that would endanger not merely the US but the entire planet.
The daily conference about the Pakistan situation in Washington needs immediately to expand its scope, to see that we are facing an international crisis and to rewrite global security protocols to create a peace keeping force that dwarfs past UN operations in competence, scope and purpose. We need an overwhelming international commitment to achieve a massive and effective breakthrough and begin the ending of the terror threat globally.
This must be the President’s agenda as surely as we have an international approach to financial issues and health issues. Night goggles will not restrain Pakistani forces from laying down their arms or turning a blind eye to the Taliban. Small efforts to change centuries of feudal oppression of the poor in Pakistan will not come soon enough to stanch the Taliban’s successful organizing efforts.
We need to separate two issues. One is elementary justice to the poor. The other is terrorist use of the ultimate weapons of war — of weapons of mass destruction. In any conjugation of the verb “to do”, the latter takes priority and there should be no skirting of this.
It is no news whatsoever that Pakistan has in the last few weeks taken center stage. The news is that an organization that is not far removed from juvenile delinquency is in danger of getting the keys needed to launch an eve of destruction. And we are reacting when we should be pro-acting.
