Some Perspectives on Pakistan

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General Alexander Haig, President Reagan's Secretary of State, said some wise and thoughtful things when he appeared for his confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January. Three of them are especially relevant, as I shall show, to situations in and around Pakistan. First, on the current world strategic situation, General Haig said: The central strategic phenomenon of the post-World War II era is the transformation of Soviet military power from a continental and largely land army into a global offensive army, navy, and air force, fully capable of supporting an imperial foreign policy. Second, while speaking of the need to study carefully the differences between Third World countries as part of the process of shaping Western policy toward them, General Haig said: Recent American foreign policy has suffered from the misperception which lumps together nations as diverse as Brazil and Libya, Indonesia and South Yemen, Cuba and Kuwait . . . This failure to tailor policy to the individual needs of developing nations has frequently aggravated the very internal stresses which Western policy should seek instead to diminish. Our difficulties in this regard have hardly been lessened by our propensity to apply to these emerging states Western standards which resolutely ignore vast differences in their social cultures, political developments, economic vitality, and external security. And thirdly, in speaking about the need to judge other countries by the best, and not by the worst, aspects of their performance in regard to democracy and human rightsor in other words to temper our censoriousness by common sense and comprehension, General Haig had this to say: The assurance of basic