Stop coddling Pakistan, says Lawrence Kaplan of The New Republic:
The Bush team needs a new road map for South Asia. U.S. officials readily concede that if war breaks out on the subcontinent it will be because India invades to counter Pakistani provocations in Kashmir. The obvious administration strategy, then, would simply be to address the source of India's complaint. After all, the Bush team knows the charge has merit: "Musharraf," says an official directly involved in managing U.S.-Pakistani relations, "could clamp down on infiltration in a minute if he wanted to. He's certainly done so before." Even the Clinton team, which generally made a hash of South Asia policy, understood the proximate cause of Kashmir's woes. In a recent paper published by the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, Bruce Riedel, a special assistant to the president, recounts Bill Clinton's response when faced with the possibility of a nuclear exchange over Kashmir in 1999. Reasoning that to do otherwise would reward Pakistani aggression in Kashmir, Clinton placed the blame squarely where it belonged--publicly demanding a Pakistani withdrawal from Indian-controlled Kashmir...Posted by Dr. Frank at June 18, 2002 10:53 AM | TrackBackRather than coddle Pakistan, then, the administration might take New Delhi's warnings a bit more seriously.