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In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith experiences an epiphany during a war rally when he realizes, that «…the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax…. Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete.»i During the commotion, Smith receives a copy of an illegal, secret tome, «The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism«, written by a member of the Brotherhood, Emmanuel Goldstein. Nestled in an armchair, Smith reads about the geopolitical reality underlying the continuous wars in a chapter entitled, «War is Peace». Three super-states, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are locked in a cycle of warfare for control of cheap labor in a western Asian and African shatter zone and to mobilize their respective citizens in perpetual mobilization.

Lost In Eurasian Land Lust: A Critique of Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard - Get more documents

It's amazing how both A.Q. Khan and the Taliban benefited from the same myopic geopolitical calculation that continues to plague Afghanistan.

For a second time the American government had decided that short-term strategic considerations outweighed the future danger from Pakistan's nuclear ambitions, again opening the door to Khan and his associates. Four years earlier, the CIA had decided to let the Pakistani scientist escape Dutch arrest and continue gathering the know-how and equipment for the enrichment plant, so that the Americans could keep track of what the Pakistanis were doing on the nuclear front. Now, Carter and Brzezinski were giving carte blanche to carry on its nuclear-weapons development in exchange for its help against the Soviets. The goal of stopping Pakistan's nuclear effort was sacrificed, and American moral authority to advocate for the cause of nonproliferation was severely damaged.

Anyone who doubted the lasting damage of that decision on American proliferation policy needed only to listen to Ronald Reagan, the former California governor who was seeking the Republican presidential nomination to run against Carter. Reagan was determined to go much further. During a campaign stop in Jacksonville, Florida on January 31, 1980, he was asked his concerns about Pakistan's nuclear-weapons ambitions. "I just don't think it's any of our business," he replied.

Reagan won the Republican nomination and defeated Carter...but the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan was just beginning, and the new president wasted no time embracing the new leniency on Pakistan's nuclear program. It was decided that Washington could live with Pakistan's pursuit of an atomic bomb as long as it got the help it needed against the Soviets. Reagan's first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, told Pakistani officials that their nuclear program "need not become the centerpiece of the US-Pakistan relationship." For the next eight years, the Reagan administration concentrated on keeping Pakistan on its side against the Soviets, while Pakistan concentrating on perfecting its bomb.

The nuclear-weapons policy of the Reagan administration's relationship with Pakistan's General Zia ul-Haq, communicated during his visit to the White House in December 1982, contained three "red-lines" on nuclear weapons, all of which ul-Haq eventually crossed without American reprisal: no manufacturing; no transferring of technology; and, no embarrassing the US with a public act of progress toward a weapon.

Meanwhile, the CIA was funding the ISI's open-ended support for Sunni Afghan Talibs from its compound in Islamabad...

MR's Tyler Cowen rightly emphasizes a quote from two Matthew Yglesias posts to which I linked before. Here's the whole quote:

I don't know whether or not it's "our business" but the point is that we're unlikely to be able to do this effectively. The US, being rich and strong, has a good deal of influence to throw around in Pakistan. But it's much easier for Pakistani actors to manipulate US policy than the reverse. We don't have the know-how, we don't have the expertise, and we never will. What we need to do is focus on what we can know -- what are our key interests in Pakistan -- and articulate them clearly and consistently combined with the proviso that we're willing to work with whatever kind of leadership Pakistan has on ways to advance our interests. Trying to pick the "best" faction and then shift things around so they wind up in power seems like a doomed mission. In general, the idea that the correct response to 9/11 was for the United States to start engaging more vigorously in efforts to micromanage political outcomes in Muslim countries seems badly mistaken. We need to make our policies more robust against internal political disagreements in the Islamic world, not do a better job of picking sides.

I'm certain I wrapped Yglesias up in Brzezinski's quote and implied he supported it, so I want to correct that mistake.