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By JONATHAN POWER The truth is more prosaic: it is the West's chickens coming home to roost. If the western powers had gambled 2% of NATO's budget and met the Soviet Union's economic needs in Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost era there would have been a much less de-stabilising transition. Then, having misjudged that window of opportunity, preferring Boris Yeltsin for reasons that now appear rather ludicrous--he seemed fresher, more pro-western and more democratic - - they missed it again with Yeltsin's first government when economic policy was run by imaginative reformers like Yegor Gaidar. The West should have done with Russia what it did with Poland, what indeed it still must do, effectively write off its debts. With India and Pakistan it is different chickens but the same roost they are coming home to. Their nuclear bombs dangle like a sword of Damocles by the slenderest piece of old string. Their nuclear arms race could have been probably canned around 1979. Then the Gandhian, Moraji Desai, was Indian prime minister and was sympathetic to the idea. Indeed, Mrs Indira Gandhi crossly told me that he had unilaterally ruled out any more nuclear explosions, without even consulting his cabinet. But, short-sightedly, President Jimmy Carter pushed Desai on the wrong flank, threatening to cut off supplies of enriched uranium. This worked only to raise hackles in the Indian establishment and reduced Desai's room for maneuver. If Carter had listened more carefully to Desai he would have thrown his energies into a comprehensive test ban treaty (ironically an Indian initiative) and pushed harder on the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviet Union. Then Desai, if he could have demonstrated to his colleagues real superpower progress on nuclear disarmament, would have been happy to ban the development of India's bomb. Then the same Jimmy Carter, who built himself an undeserving image as a peace-maker, decided in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to back Pakistan to the hilt, turning a blind eye to its nuclear weapons program. It couldn't have been a more badly chosen time to take the pressure off Pakistan. Instead, Washington piled in the military and political support, backing and aiding the Pakistani military and intelligence services in the black arts of subversion inside Afghanistan. To the Afghani mujahideen guerrillas went state-of-the-art Stinger and Blowpipe anti-aircraft missiles. It was an incredibly emotional and unthought-out policy. The Soviets, even if they wanted to cross through Afghanistan and then Iran to find a "warm water" port, as the geopoliticians maintained, would have been physically unable to traverse such inhospitable terrain en masse. The main threat they posed was mainly to themselves and they should have been allowed simply to get bogged down and stew in their own juice. This rash American reaction has created "America's Frankenstein", two of them in fact. In Pakistan the nuclear bomb and, in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, leader of the so-called "Afghan Arabs", the presumed force behind the recent terrorist outrages in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. (The CIA actively set up the very camp in Khowst in the Afghani mountains that the Americans recently bombed. And Prince Salman, the Saudi King's brother, with U.S. encouragement, raised funds for it.) These "Afghan Arabs" are moving into the vacuum made by Washington's oxygen-less Middle East policy. What was promised at the end of the Gulf War by George Bush and his secretary of state James Baker to work to change the whole equation of the power balance between Israel and the Palestinians has expired. Clinton's extraordinarily modest efforts to push the Oslo accords forward have come to naught. Until the next Israeli elections and the hoped for, but by no means certain, defeat of prime minister Binjamin Netanyshu the situation can only worsen. Counter measures such as bombing can only have a limited, even counterproductive, effect, as is clear from the escape of Mr bin Laden and, according to the British foreign office, the choice of the wrong target in the Sudan. Meanwhile, Pakistan is tumbling into a state of rapid decline. Its economy is practically bust. Its popular opinion is less and less beholden to the mainstream secular parties. The authority of the government over its nuclear arsenal must be regarded as suspect. Russia's line of civilian to military authority is still intact, just. But it comes as no surprise that some of the coldest of cold war warriors on the U.S. side have been calling for urgent mutual nuclear disarmament, down from the present thousands of warheads to hundreds, even tens, some say zero. Clinton has ignored them. Short-termism has been the undoing of our world. Money has never been the problem; it is purpose, it is vision. We have started paying the price; but the worst is still to come.
September 2, 1998, LONDON Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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