Pakistan and America

Back at the New York Times, former executive editor Bill Keller wrote a long, thoughtful piece for the Sunday magazine giving us chronically underinformed and inattentive Americans a history lesson concerning the latest sore spot in the nation's foreign policy, Pakistan. To say there are faults on both sides is trite but true.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to U.S. foreign policy in general is its perceived lack of continuity. Other countries wait on tenterhooks around every national election, knowing that a change in parties in either the White House, the House of Representatives or the Senate may signal an abrupt change in policy come January. The U.S. is structurally incapable of setting or fulfilling long-term policy goals, so it's no wonder that many other countries are reluctant to enter into complex security arrangements with us.

Pakistan is no different from anybody else in looking out for its own interests: it simply is in the awkward and unasked-for position of being in the middle of a hot spot that overheated and simplistic rhetoric by Washington politicos has declared essential to pacify. Pakistanis know they have a more complex problem than those politicos will ever acknowledge, or perhaps even understand. For instance, here's how Keller describes the Pakistani outlook on the Afghan National Security Forces:

If the U.S. succeeds in creating such a potent fighting force, that makes Pakistanis nervous, because they see it (rightly) as potentially unfriendly and (probably wrongly) as a potential agent of Indian influence. The more likely and equally unsettling outcome, Pakistanis believe, is that the Afghan military — immature, fractious and dependent on the U.S. Treasury — will disintegrate into heavily armed tribal claques and bandit syndicates. And America, as always, will be gone when hell breaks loose.

That's how the rest of the world sees us: we kick over the anthill, then walk away before the nest boils over and wreaks havoc in the area.

I'm no isolationist, but we simply and literally cannot afford to be the world's policeman any more, even if that were what the rest of the world wanted -- and it doesn't. Even if there are areas asking for our help, especially for our military intervention, we have a duty to ourselves and to successive generations to make the hard decisions about what we can and cannot do. A mature adult has to understand his or her limitations, and has to refuse to make promises he or she can't keep. The same holds true for nations of (supposedly) mature adults.