Last week your editorial “Rubicon Crossed” as well as Kapil, Alpesh and the front page news article gave enough information to understand the current round of Bharat-Pakistan blows. However, the root cause of the conflict lies with the West in general but especially with the USA. Since partition it seems that the successive USA administrations and their secret services have a compulsion to care and nurture the Pakistani army. (Most countries have armies to defend the country but in Pakistan the army is there to run the country, sometimes openly and other times overtly.)
The USA has pumped more than 50 billion worth of armaments into the country. Generally we do not know their motive for such generosity. However, we do know that in the 1980s they pumped enormous amount of money and armaments to dislodge the USSR from Afghanistan and eventually dismember them. Their actions also created the Taliban and El Qaida. Is this behaviour to showcase their destruction wares or are they guided by a third party? If no armaments and money were provided to the country, the whole of the sub-continent would have progressed well economically and would have eliminated poverty forever. Would the USA change their behaviour (by stopping armaments) even at this late stage and let the neighbours peacefully sort out their differences for their mutual benefits?
Narsibhai Patel
New Malden
