Consistent with Pakistan

Pakistan, renewed friend of the United States, has been a valuable ally over the last three months, providing both airfields and intelligence in the fight against al Qaeda. But its new cooperation is being tested by an old conflict, going back to its independence in 1947: the enduring battle with India over Kashmir.

Robert Edwards, former Bowdoin College president and longtime expert on Pakistan, noted at last week’s Bangor Savings Bank Community Affairs Lecture that solving the Kashmir problem in Pakistan was a key to solving Pakistan’s struggles with poverty, a lack of education and threat of terrorism and revolt. Pakistan’s allowance for terrorism within India-controlled Kashmir has done more to destabilize Pakistan than to harm India, leaving the younger nation vulnerable to a well-armed misery that dooms its future before it begins.

Justly or unjustly, India will not cede control of Kashmir, and nor will the United States pressure it to do so. In fact, the recent, blunt denial by Washington of Pakistan’s request for F-16 fighter jets gave President Pervez Musharraf a strong hint that the Bush administration views any potential aid to Islamabad as largely nonmilitary. (The 28 F-16s were seen by Washington as a chief delivery system for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.) And if the fighter jets didn’t give President Musharraf a clear sense of the pecking order for U.S. friendships, Washington’s refusal to intervene in the revived Israeli offer to sell India an airborne early warning radar system should have.

Pakistan’s military no doubt has already begun to weigh the benefits and losses of aligning itself with the U.S. operations in Afghanistan. Even with Pakistan’s heightened stature from the impending victory there, they cannot help but look at the numerous Bush administration visits to New Delhi and see the scales tilting away from them.

Mr. Edwards, who is now a board member at the Aga Kahn University in Karachi, urged the administration to find a consistent, constructive relationship with Pakistan. That may be its intention, to Pakistan’s benefit, in areas such as debt relief. Unfortunately, however, for Pakistan, it is also likely that the United States will apply consistency when dealing with India, leaving Kashmir in New Delhi’s control and Pakistan with a terrorist problem that will not soon be solved.