Talk:Bush lies and deceptions: The Pakistani Exception

thoughts on aticle split
the article needs some pre911 historical background. While scraping the Cato links, I skimmed a fair amount of content, and they place the pro Pakistan US policy at least as far back as the end of Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency. There was even a reference to JFK support while he was a senator.

The UofV Miller Center's online Nixon presentation has a decent transcript of Nixon talking to John Connally about his realist rationales for pressuring the Brezhnev era Soviet to get India step back from their rout in the '71 India/Pak war, eventhough India was about to cut the jugular, and (i believe) it was a Pak initiation of hostilities in E. Pakistan. (40 seconds are still out of the tape for Nat. Security rationales 34 years later)

There was a fleeting mention of Johnson too. Carter dealt with a devil in Pakistan after the Soviets moved in to shore up their Kabul puppet regime in '79.

Reagan went for the whole...well i shouldn't say that...he escalated the Carter NSA, Zbigniew (Zbigniev) Brzezinski's, savage strategy of sanguinary sanctity:


 * "I told the President, about six months before the Soviets entered Afghanistan, that in my judgment I thought they would be going into Afghanistan. And I decided then, and I recommended to the President, that we shouldn't be passive.


 * [. . .]


 * We weren't passive.


 * [. . .]


 * We immediately launched a twofold process when we heard that the Soviets had entered Afghanistan. The first involved direct reactions and sanctions focused on the Soviet Union, and both the State Department and the National Security Council prepared long lists of sanctions to be adopted, of steps to be taken to increase the international costs to the Soviet Union of their actions. And the second course of action led to my going to Pakistan a month or so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for the purpose of coordinating with the Pakistanis a joint response, the purpose of which would be to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible; and we engaged in that effort in a collaborative sense with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the British, the Chinese, and we started providing weapons to the Mujaheddin, from various sources again - for example, some Soviet arms from the Egyptians and the Chinese. We even got Soviet arms from the Czechoslovak communist government, since it was obviously susceptible to material incentives; and at some point we started buying arms for the Mujaheddin from the Soviet army in Afghanistan, because that army was increasingly corrupt."


 * Zbigniew Brzezinski - June 13, 1997 - Interview with The NSA Archives as part of their providing content to the CNN Cold War Series.

--Hugh Manatee 10:36, 19 Jun 2005 (EDT)