Professor Noam Chomsky sits on the eighth floor of the quirky-looking Stata Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US. Former head of the linguistics department, the author and intellectual now serves as Professor Emeritus at the university.
The man is known worldwide for his incredibly popular and polarising criticism of American foreign policy.
“The US doesn’t care about Pakistan, just like the Reagan administration didn’t care about either Afghanistan or Pakistan,” says Chomski, when asked how he sees the relationship between Pakistan and the US. “They supported Zia, the worst dictator in Pakistan’s history, and pretended they didn’t know that Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons. So basically they supported Pakistan’s nuclear weapon programme and radical Islamisation in their bid to defeat the Russians. And that has not helped Pakistan.”
According to Chomsky, the reason the Pak-US relationship hasn’t worked is because the concern of US planners is not the welfare of Pakistan, it’s the welfare of their own constituency. “But it’s not the people of US either, just the powerful sectors within the US,” he said. “If the US policy towards Pakistan happens to benefit Pakistan it would be kind of accidental. Maybe it will to some extent, but that is not the purpose.”
