January 3, 2009 ☼ democracy ☼ Foreign Affairs ☼ Japan ☼ Pakistan ☼ reconstruction ☼ terrorism ☼ United States ☼ World War II
This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
On September 2003, in the first week of its existence, The Acorn wrote:
There is no point in giving any aid to Pakistan without simultaneously strengthening its democratic institutions and disarming its military-intelligence complex. It needs more of a MacArthur like intervention which reforged Japan into a dynamic modern nation. [Can Pakistan be saved?]
For much of the last five years, the United States did neither. And then in 2008 it was forced into withdrawing support for General Musharraf’s dictatorship. That only caused the military-intelligence complex to claw back.
Yet Change.gov, the Obama-Biden transition website, has nothing much by way of change. It says “Obama and Biden will increase nonmilitary aid to Pakistan and hold them accountable for security in the border region with Afghanistan.” The United States continues to think that some variation of giving aid and supporting democratic institutions will somehow work, and the military-intelligence complex can be humoured, won over or simply left alone. Worse, despite being directly affected, India will continue to accept this.
The United States refuses to learn from its own history. Between 1945-1951, a period of just six years, General Douglas MacArthur occupied Japan, reconstructed its war-torn economy, demilitarised the state, fixed the education system and instituted a democracy that has endured since then. It should do the same with Pakistan—and it might not even have to drop two nuclear bombs either, for the Pakistan’s rulers know that much history. Hey, that’s what Robert Kagan was saying.
Update:: General MacArthur’s gameplan (linkthanks Pragmatic)
Flying in to Japan on August 30 a few hours after he had received from Washington the text of the initial policy he was to carry out, he paraphrased the actions he was to take:
First, destroy the military power. Punish war criminals. Build the structure of representative government. Modernize the constitution. Hold free elections. Enfranchise the women. Release the political prisoners. Liberate the farmers. Establish a free labor movement. Encourage a free economy. Abolish police oppression. Develop a free and responsible press. Liberalize education. Decentralize political power. Separate the church from state. [Winners in Peace/EScholarship]Sounds just like the kind of agenda for Pakistan.
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