We may pay an even greater price yet for our shortsighted actions. According to a long, well-sourced story in the Oct. 13 edition of "The Guardian" (UK) we made a devil's bargain with an unstable Pakistan. In exchange for that country's help in our Machiavellian scheme to give the Soviets "their Vietnam" in Afghanistan, we allowed Pakistan to acquire nuclear weapons and the means to use them. When a whistle-blower tried to sound the alarm, he was quickly swift-boated, in the parlance of our times.
"The CIA's expert on Pakistan's nuclear secrets," according to "The Guardian" was one Rich Barlow. "He prepared briefs for Dick Cheney, when Cheney was at the Pentagon, for the upper echelons of the CIA and even for the Oval Office," the paper reported. "But when he uncovered a political scandal---a conspiracy to enable a rogue nation to get the nuclear bomb---he found himself a marked man. He was thrown out and disgraced when he blew the whistle on a US cover-up of Pakistani nuclear technology."
It's as if a secret government seized control and committed foreign policy disasters that most Americans scarcely knew about. They brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands and might yet bring death to millions more as the unintended consequences of our policies in Afghanistan play themselves out.
Yes, it's fair enough to say hindsight is 20-20. The trick is to use such clarity of vision to look back and then apply lessons learned to an ever dawning future. That's called foresight.
I wonder.
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