Toronto, Dec 23 (IANS) Calling America’s ties with Pakistan a “sick relationship” that “is becoming dangerously diseased,” noted US columnist and author Christopher Hitchens says the US should recognize India as its “long-term ally in Asia.”
Writing in the Canadian daily Calgary Herald Wednesday, the author of best-selling “God is not Great” hit out at Pakistan’s duplicity in its war on the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

He said, “The United States made Pakistan a top-priority Cold War ally. It overlooked the regular interventions of its military into politics. It paid a lot of bills and didn’t ask too many questions.

“It (the US) generally favoured Pakistan over India, which was regarded as dangerously ‘neutralist’ in those days, and during the Bangladesh war, it closed its eyes to a genocide against the Muslim population of East Bengal.

“During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Washington fed the Pakistani military and intelligence services from an overflowing teat and allowed them to acquire nuclear weapons on the side.”

Despite all the preferential treatment it received from the US all these years, he asked: why the Pakistani elite hates the US.

“It hates it (the US) because it is dependent on it and is still being bought by it. It is a dislike that is also a form of self-hatred of the sort that often develops between client states and their paymasters. (You can often sense the same resentment in the Egyptian establishment, and sometimes among Israeli rightwingers, as well),” Hitchens wrote.

“By way of overcompensation for their abject status as recipients of the American dole, such groups often make a big deal of flourishing their few remaining rags of pride. The safest outlet for this in the Pakistani case is an official culture that makes pious noises about Islamic solidarity while keeping the other hand extended for the next subsidy.

“Pakistani military officers now strike attitudes in public as if they were defending their national independence rather than trying to prolong their rule as a caste and to extend it across the border of their luckless Afghan neighbour,” said Hitchens who is a columnist for Vogue and Slate.

Calling it a sick relationship which is becoming “dangerously” diseased, he it is not possible to “found a working, trusting, fighting alliance on such a basis.

“Under communism, the factory workers of Eastern Europe had a joke: ‘We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.’ The Pakistanis don’t even pretend that their main military thrust is directed against the common foe, but we do continue to pay them. If we only knew it, the true humiliation and indignity is ours, not theirs.”

This relationship will only “get nastier, more corrupt and degrading until we recognize that our long-term ally in Asia is India,” he said.

“India,” Hitchens said, “is not a country sizzling with self-pity and self-loathing, because it was never one of our colonies or clients. We don’t have to send New Delhi 15 different envoys a month, partly to placate and partly to hector, because the relationship with India isn’t based on hysteria and envy.

“Alas, though, we send hardly any envoys at all to the world’s largest secular and multicultural democracy, and the country itself gets mentioned only as an afterthought. Nothing will change until this changes.”

Hitchens said the Pakistani army is “coddling” the Taliban in Afghanistan because they have been told that the US will not be deploying there in strength for very much longer.

“Who can blame them (the Pakistani army) for basing their plans on this supposition and continuing to dig in for a war with India that we are helping them to prepare for?” the US columnist asked.