United States foreign policy is up and running, seriously engaged in building an international coalition against terrorism. Seems like only yesterday that Mexico presented our most pressing foreign-policy problem. President Vicente Fox and President George W. Bush agreed that good relations between the two nations depended on regularizing the status of Mexican citizens working illegally in the United States. Today, Fox and undocumented Mexican workers have been eclipsed by the war on terror and the ratcheting upward of U.S. immigration controls. Not surprising perhaps, but that Mexico has slipped as a foreign-policy priority is symptomatic of the post-cold war American propensity for disregarding the interests of allies whenever our attention is drawn elsewhere, as if we can attend to only one foreign-policy problem at a time. There are consequences to this neglect-as the current crisis in Central Asia amply demonstrates.
After September 11 we must tend to our very bad relations with the Pakistanis, as well as shaky relations with Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Indians along with other members of the coalition summoned to help the United States fight terrorism.
Pakistan, once among our closest allies, collaborated with the CIA during the seventies and eighties to defeat the Soviet military in Afghanistan. We funded and armed the Afghan Mujahedin to whose cause Osama bin Laden and other Arab Muslims were recruited. The Afghanis finally forced the Russians to retreat and soon thereafter the Soviet Empire collapsed. Having no real interest in Afghanistan, the United States left its people to a miserable civil war. Then, Pakistan fell out of favor because of human-rights violations and its nuclear weapons program; ultimately, we imposed economic sanctions. Now we need Pakistan again, to curb its ally the Taliban who have ruled much of Afghanistan since the end of its civil war and to help us find bin Laden, the man behind the September 11 terrorist attacks.
President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military dictator, has agreed to assist, though this is risky to his own hold on power; there are members of his government sympathetic to the Taliban. For his support, Musharraf wants, as he says, some significant gestures that recognize Pakistan’s grievances against the United States, for example, the twenty-eight F-16 fighter planes it purchased in the eighties, which we subsequently refused to deliver and will continue to hold back, according to Secretary of State Colin Powell. For the F-16s will not be used against the Taliban, but to threaten Pakistan’s real enemy, India. At the same time, India is exacting a price from the United States for its support of the war against terror-it too is demanding weapons.
Shifting coalitions, buying and selling weapons, bribes, and alliances of convenience (after all, Stalin was our World War II ally)-this is the history of diplomacy. The current alliance building, including "rewarding" India’s and Pakistan’s support, is part of that story. But why prosecute this war by providing the means for the next? Why not provide debt forgiveness or funds to both India and Pakistan for education, health care, and development? And what about our militarization of Uzbekistan, ruled by a dictator with his own brand of Islam? Are we laying there the ground for future violence mirroring our ill-fated use of Pakistan two decades ago? Will we leave the region in the same economic and social disarray as we did Central America, which, with Afghanistan, was on the front lines in the war against communism during the eighties?
The sole superpower cannot expect to enlist the world in its battles and then abandon its allies and victims when it is finished. Just wars, which this may well be, must be followed by a just peace and by restitution. The United States has a responsibility for the conditions created and exacerbated in the pursuit of victory in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
We should not make the future worse by supplying weapons to nations all too well supplied. And finally, matters that now appear less pressing than the pursuit of terrorists-for example, the aids epidemic in Africa, global warming, and the status of undocumented Mexican workers-cannot be casually set aside.
Americans have been dismayed by the animosity shown us since September 11 in other parts of the world. We should be less worried about why we are disliked and more discerning about why we are not trusted.
