By Stephen Blackman
Contributing Writer
Pakistan might be the most dangerous country in the world now facing the United States, according to The New York Times correspondent and Northwestern political science lecturer Stephen Kinzer.
About 35 people came to Harris Hall on Thursday night to hear Kinzer and Robert Naiman, senior policy analyst at think tank Just Foreign Policy, discuss U.S.-Pakistan relations.
“Pakistan started out as a noble experiment, but it’s a noble experiment that went wrong,” Kinzer said of 1980s Pakistan.
The Northwestern chapter of Americans For Informed Democracy, a nonpartisan group that aims to build awareness of international issues affecting America’s global role, organized the early-evening event.
The event was part of the group’s national counterpart’s “Hope Not Hate” series on U.S.-Muslim world relations, a series which The Boston Globe called “a victory of knowledge and inquiry over fear and blind pledges of revenge.”
“This isn’t activism – it’s about education,” said Becky Peterhansen, the NU chapter’s president and a Weinberg junior.
Some students in the audience said they felt Naiman and Kinzer presented an overly idealistic version of the issue.
“It was accurate from the U.S. point of view,” Weinberg senior Shamas Rehman said, “but (their view) denies the ground-level reality. They didn’t say what the Pakistani people think.”
Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the U.S. funneled millions of dollars to the Pakistani government to fund and train resistance fighters to repel the Soviets.
“We wanted someone on our side in the Cold War without stopping to ask which country represented American ideals,” Kinzer said.
As a result, U.S. funds brought thousands of young Muslims, recruited from Islamic schools and trained in guerilla warfare, to the region; among them was a young Osama bin Laden, now head of terrorist group al-Qaida.
“We sowed the seeds of the catastrophes that were later visited upon us,” Kinzer said, referring to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Both experts said the Bush administration’s unconditional support for Gen. Pervez Musharraf deserves a closer examination. The State Department’s current assumption is that, if the options are the current Pakistani government and a fundamentalist Islamic state, the U.S. is choosing the lesser of two evils, they said. The thought is, if Musharraf were to lose power, a Taliban-like Islamic regime would take over, Naiman said.
“This policy unfortunately has widespread support,” he said, noting the U.S. is willing to support Musharraf because he claims his regime is key to successfully fighting the War on Terror.
Both Kinzer and Naiman said while a military anti-terror policy might prevent attacks for now, in the future it creates deeper instability and breeds enemies overseas.
“There are parts of the world where we’re giving democracy a bad name,” Naiman said. “The perception (among the Pakistani people) is that the U.S. is not on the side of democracy.”
A democratic Pakistan could become a stabilizing force for the region and a more effective U.S. ally in the war on terror, Kinzer said.
“Pakistan can be a model Islamic democracy, but only if sources like the U.S. stop fighting the elements that will make this happen,” Kinzer said.
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