Bill Clinton s Moribund South Asia Policy

Harold A Gould The United States' south Asia policy of favouring Pakistan embodies the flaws and misconceptions inherent in the doctrine of containment. Driven by obsessive fears of the spread of Soviet and Chinese military power and sponsored domestic revolution, the US leadership made anti-communism the virtually exclusive criterion for determining a country's political value to US strategic interests. It ignored regional socio-historical realities of anti-colonialist nationalism and communalism and got enmeshed in the region's internal affairs as a partisan player. But succumbing, even in the post-cold war period, to the various parochial interests that profit from a perpetuation of the cold war subculture weakens America's chances of helping peace, prosperity and political stability in south Asia.