January 11, 2002

Mark Steyn in the Spectator

Mark Steyn in the Spectator concedes that GWB "lacks the intelligence to hold down a really demanding job like columnist at the New York Times or Slate." Yet, he writes, "in the weeks before 11 September, having already spotted his predecessor’s neglect of the matter, his administration was working on new strategies to combat international terrorism. What a chump, eh?"

Steyn also has this interesting historical observation:  

Why, after all, does Pakistan exist? It exists because of a terrible failure of will on the part of the British. Indeed, all the problems Tony Blair has been swanking about Asia anxious to mediate on are the fault of his predecessors and, come to that, his party. There wouldn’t be two nuclear powers if there weren’t two powers in the first place. If Lord Mountbatten had held out against partition for another year, Jinnah would have been dead and who knows how much steam the Muslim League could have mustered? Conversely, the only reason India and Pakistan are squabbling over Kashmir is because Britain, having decided on partition, then, typically, screwed over the maharajahs and nawabs of the Princely states, which comprised a third of the subcontinent, and told them the jig was up and they had to choose which of the two nations they wanted to belong to. In Kashmir, the ruler was Hindu and the vast majority of his subjects were Muslim, but the British let him choose to join India. However you look at it, the creation of Pakistan was a mess: even the ISI was a British invention. More importantly, in accepting Jinnah’s rejection of modern, pluralist, secular, democratic India, Mountbatten and co. implicitly sanctioned Pakistan’s development as the precise negative of its neighbour: backward, narrow, fundamentalist, dictatorial.

If that’s what centuries of expertise in the region produces, then I’ll take a know-nothing like Bush any day.

 

Posted by Dr. Frank at January 11, 2002 12:13 AM | TrackBack