We are all observing what’s happening in Pakistan. We also know that USA is very bewildered as to how India treats USA (refusing to buy their planes, refusing to get into security pacts, refusing the sign the NPT, voting against them in the UN) and refuses to become an ally. But India knows better, being an ally of the USA is very dangerous indeed. Because with the good things, come some very bad things. Democracies tend to manage USA a bit better because the USA, ostensibly and publicly, cannot really go against the will of the people (not that it doesn't try, look at the wiki leaks papers). But for dictators who think that USA is a good ally and are accustomed to operating on the Somoza model (President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) supposedly remarked in 1939 that "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch). So Pakistan should be very very worried and I do not find it surprising it at all that its sticking two fingers up to USA.
As the quote by Lord Palmerston, an English Statesman who died in 1865 goes, Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests. Dont ascribe human emotions to nations and foreign policy. This is why I found the Labour idea of an ethical Foreign Policy stupid. Anyway…
Here’s another relevant quote if one of the moth eaten generals of the Pakistani kind decide to take power.
Alternatively, suppose Qaddafi winds up hanging from a lamppost in his favourite party dress. If you’re a Third World dictator, what lessons would you draw? Qaddafi was the thug who came in from the cold, the one who (in the wake of Saddam’s fall) renounced his nuclear program and was supposedly rehabilitated in the chancelleries of the West. He was a strong partner in the war on terrorism, according to U.S. diplomats. And what did Washington do? They overthrew him anyway. — Mark Steyn
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