Pakistan: Cambodia Redux?

By Jeff Stein | September 16, 2008 4:23 PM | | Comments (0)

Pakistan is beginning to remind me of Cambodia.

Just as Pakistan gives shelter to the Taliban attacking us in Afghanistan, not to mention Osama Bin Laden, Cambodia in the 1960s provided a haven for the North Vietnamese Army, which was killing us across the border.

Just as in Pakistan, we "secretly" bombed Cambodia to get the North Vietnamese, killing innocent peasants.

When Cambodia's prime minister resisted American pressure to oust the North Vietnamese, he was overthrown by U.S.-backed generals.   

When we next sent combat units into Cambodia, there was a quantum leap of death, havoc -- and radicalization -- in the countryside, just as in Pakistan today.

Cambodia's communists now found the peasants to eager to sign up, just as Muslim extremist leaders are finding today in Pakistan.
Forty years later, we all know what happened in Cambodia, if only through The Killing Fields:  The infamous Khmer Rouge ruled for four blood-soaked years, until they were toppled by their neighbors.

Is something like that in Pakistan's future? Nobody can be sure.

We do know that the escalation of U.S. (and some Pakistani) military operations there, much ballyhooed here for killing a few al Qaeda captains, is turning more and more Pakistanis against us.

And that's a quandary for which there are no immediate answers, much less easy ones. 

But we do know there's one big difference between Cambodia and Pakistan.

Pakistan has nuclear weapons.

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