History Weeps at the Partition of India and Pakistan

[Geee]

Human Events:

When you get into discussions about the Middle East with certain people, you start hearing that the great mistake was the partition of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. If that had somehow just not happened, you hear, everything would be all right.

That's not my view. I think the big mistake made in a British possession around that time was the partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947.

The British thought that Pakistan under the leadership of the secular lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah would turn out to be an acceptable counterbalance to an India led by Jawaharlal Nehru's Congress Party.

But Jinnah was suffering from cancer at the time and died in September 1948, 13 months after partition. And Pakistan ever since has been -- well, let's say it has been a problem.

While India has had only one brief suspension of its democratic constitution since independence, Pakistan has been ruled by generals most of the time since 1948. Pakistan was an American ally during the Cold War and helped expel the Soviets from Afghanistan.

But in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, elements in Pakistan's military and its intelligence service, the ISI, backed the Taliban in Afghanistan and supported terrorist attacks on India. They have sheltered A.Q. Khan, the nuclear scientist who developed Pakistan's nuclear bomb and conducted, as analyst Walter Russell Mead writes, "the nuclear proliferation circus that helped countries like North Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran advance their nuclear ambitions."

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf was pressured into announcing that Pakistan would support the U.S. against the Taliban after Sept. 11. But it's widely known that Pakistanis have been giving aid and sanctuary to the Taliban and the Haqqani terrorists in recent years.