Stardate 20021013.1617

(Captain's log): Saurabh writes:

Sometime back when I questioned you on how seriously one could take the black and white characterizations of the US government when a country like Pakistan was a supposed ally, and the US was aiding it, you had said that Pakistan was "different". Now you are ready to blame the government of Indonesia for their failure to prevent the bombing. When the government of Pakistan has not been able to prevent terrorist attacks against Western targets over there you do not fault them; when the US government has a massive intelligence failure you do not blame them, but Indonesia gets your goat for some reason.

You wrote extremely heart-rending accounts of the victims of the Bali bombing, but do not stop to think that the US aid to Pakistan helps create exactly such scenes many times over in India. Or is the double standard because in one case victims are Indians and in the other the victims are Westerners? I am reminded about the hijacking of the Indian Airlines jet to Afghanistan, when most major mainstream media outlets referred to the hijackers as "Kashmiri fighters" and not one publication published my letters to the editor complaining about this double standard of calling them "fighters" when if the passengers had been Westerners they would almost certainly be called "terrorists".

If you want this to be a black and white battle between good and evil, then you should first demand the US to act in a consistently ethical fashion. Till then, each country will continue to participate in the "War on Terrorism" based on a cold-minded cost/benefit analysis, just like the US does when it plays off Pakistan against India.

During World War II, Churchill once made a quip to the effect that if the Devil came out in opposition to Hitler, that Churchill would at least endeavor to include a favorable mention of Him in a speech before Parliament. (I cannot find the specific quote.) This was in reaction to criticism of him for working with Stalin.

[Update: the actual quote was: "If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." Thanks to Bill and Keith.]

I don't want this to be a black and white battle between good and evil, because people who try to fight wars that way nearly always lose. I think it would be far better for my nation to survive as a sinner than to die as a saint. Discussions of good and evil makes for good rhetoric, but really shitty strategy. It's necessary in war to at all times keep your eye firmly on the long term goals, and it's important to recognize that sometimes in the short run you will do things which seem evil or counterproductive. A well-run war is intensely utilitarian and always involves tradeoffs.

I think that in 1938 it would have been a tossup whether Churchill hated Hitler or Stalin more, but once the UK was deeply threatened by Germany, and after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Churchill instantly began to cooperate with Stalin against the common enemy. That is the kind of compromise which must be made in war. It wasn't that Hitler was evil and Stalin was a saint (God knows) but because Hitler threatened the survival of the UK in the short term, and Stalin didn't.

So it is here. I do not grant that American aid is directly or indirectly responsible for Indian deaths in Kashmir. I grant that we have the ability to apply more pressure to the Pakistani government than we have been, but right now we have bigger fish to fry. It is a small concession to evil we must make in order to work to stop a greater one.

The one thing we must avoid at all costs is to give our enemies cause to unite against us. We must pick them apart, one by one, while reassuring the others and keeping them neutral. The last thing you ever do in war is to tell the world (and thus your enemy) your true goal and the true strategy you intend to use to accomplish it, because that virtually guarantees that you will fail. If all the Arabs actually unite, and if Pakistan also joins in, then we will find ourselves fighting a nuclear war and the death toll could far exceed that of World War II. We can avoid that by temporarily ignoring the tragedy in Kashmir.

The US has long tried to stay neutral in the conflict between India and Pakistan. I fully understand why it is that partisans on both sides dislike this, and both nations have long maneuvered to try to gain the upper hand. But Saurabh must understand that the US is not fighting this war for reasons of ethics. Presidential speeches notwithstanding, we are not the Armies of Virtue fighting against the Armies of Iniquity. We're a nation which was attacked, which is now forced to fight a war to protect itself against future attacks.

To achieve that, we're going to have to eliminate the root cause of the attacks on us, which is Arab nationalism and Islamicism, and since those things are also the source of most of the problem in Kashmir, in the long run we'll also do what Saurabh wants. But...

There's an engineering aphorism attributed to Donald Knuth to the effect that premature optimization is the root of all engineering evil. There's a time for everything, but doing something too soon is usually worse than not doing it at all. We have to plan and run this war in a fashion which maximizes our chance of succeeding in the long run, even if that means temporarily forgoing short term gains. The US could apply pressure to Pakistan, bu