[Reader-list] Chomsky acknowledges 'Kashmiri Terrorism'

[anupam chakravartty]

Thanks for this illuminating piece. Surprisingly, Chomsky is also saying:
“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.

I couldn't ignore this one.


On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 1:37 PM, Lalit Ambardar
<lalitambardar at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
> http://tribune.com.pk/story/152219/the-unflattering-perspective-part-i-the-us-does-not-care-about-pakistan/--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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