Via Mediaite. I want to agree with Perry that it’s long past time to cut these lunatics off from U.S. military aid. Morally, that’s unquestionably true. As a policy matter, though, I don’t see what it accomplishes. We’re not going to attack so there’s no stick in our stick-and-carrot arsenal, and if we take away the carrot, one of two things will happen. Either Pakistan will replace American aid with Chinese aid, which is unhelpful given their shared interest in neutralizing India, or the Pakistani military will break down and the country will become destabilized. We don’t have much leverage via the aid we send them, but we have a little. Why give it up? And if the answer to that is that paying them creates an incentive for countries to go nuclear, well, that incentive already exists in spades thanks to the role nukes play as a deterrent to western invasion/regime change. For all the heat Bachmann takes for supposedly being a wild-eyed ideologue, she’s taking a hardnosed, unpalatable realist position here.
If you missed this post a few weeks ago, read it now. The Goldberg/Ambinder article on which it’s based (and which also supported continuing aid to Pakistan) was also the source of Bachmann’s memorable line tonight about how Pakistan is “too nuclear to fail.”
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