[Reader-list] Chomsky acknowledges 'Kashmiri Terrorism'

[Lalit Ambardar]

Chomsky’s admission
that  Pakistan  patronised Kashmiri terrorist groups &
India centric terrorism should come as a disappointment to the ‘peace loving’
azadi mongers in Kashmir who lamented at a conference in Srinagar this week
that they don’t have a ‘CHOMSKI in India’ (...to supplement Arundhati Roy &
co’s endeavour to propagate their pan Islamic agenda…????...).


May be it is also time
for the protagonists of the macabre drama of death & destruction being played
in the streets of Kashmir at the behest of their Pakistani masters for the past
two decades to acknowledge their role……

Rgds all

LA

 

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE
WITH THE International Herald Tribune



The unflattering perspective -
Part I: ‘The US does not care about Pakistan’

By Rabia Mehmood

Published: April 19,
2011

NEW YORK: 

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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