Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Mitt Romney on Indonesia as example for Pakistan

The Unspun Blog notes this from the recent Republican presidential candidate debate on foreign policy:

Extract from In debate, Romney says handle Pakistan like Indonesia in the 1960s on CSMonitor.com:
He and the other candidates were asked how they’d deal with Pakistan as president. It’s a tough, important question. Pakistan is a nuclear power that the US sends billions of dollars in aid to, yet works against the American war effort in Afghanistan and appeared to harbor Osama bin Laden.
His answer? “We don’t want to just pull up stakes and get out of town after the enormous output we’ve just made for the region. Look at Indonesia in the ’60s. We helped them move toward modernity. We need to help bring Pakistan into the 21st century, or the 20th for that matter. Right now American approval in Pakistan is 12 percent. We’re not doing a very good job with that investment. We could do better by encouraging the opportunities of the West.”
So Romney's prescription for U.S. policy in Pakistan is backing military organized mass murder, increased repression and corruption.