Leaping to Conclusions

For the past 18 months, Pakistan has been privately urging the U.S. to re-equip its 250,000-man army (at a cost of some $250 million) in return for air bases within striking range of central Russia. To U.S. military planners, such an exchange had obvious merits:

P: Pakistan is perhaps America's best friend between Turkey and the Philippines; it has no illusions about Communism and, given help, might be made into the free world's South Asian bastion. P: Pakistan's 13-division army, re-equipped, could hold the Khyber Pass. P: From Pakistan's air bases, particularly the two great British-built airfields near Karachi, the U.S. Air Force would be within jet-bomber range of the Karaganda-Alma Ata refuge of Soviet industry, far beyond the Ural Mountains. P: A pact between the U.S. and Pakistan might spur other Moslem nations to join the long-stalled Middle East Defense Organization, and might even serve as its nucleus.

But there were difficulties. One was whether the U.S. should extend to Pakistan its guarantee to defend other peoples' boundaries (by NATO pact, the U.S. has already promised to defend 13 nations, extending in a vast crescent from Iceland to Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey). A budget-conscious new U.S. Administration is also not keen to take on another $250 million worth of foreign obligations. Furthermore, the U.S. is aware that Pakistan wants a strong army not only to protect itself against Russia, but against India, which it passionately dislikes, largely because of the Kashmir dispute.

Last week, leaping to conclusions from a Washington meeting between President Eisenhower and Pakistan's Governor General Ghulam Mohammed (who was in the U.S. for medical treatment), India's Jawaharlal Nehru gravely warned the U.S. that a military pact with Pakistan would "have very far-reaching consequences in the whole structure of things in South Asia."

Three days later, at his regular press conference, President Eisenhower said that the U.S. would be most cautious about doing anything that would create unrest and disaster, or failure or hysteria in a neighboring nation, say, in India. The Administration's effort would be to produce a friendship with the entire subcontinent, not just with one group.

In short, no pact in prospect.

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