Isolating Pakistan Won’t Work

President Clinton is right to make a brief stop in Pakistan this month on his long overdue visit to South Asia. Snubbing the country because of last October’s military coup would be counterproductive.

The president should make clear to Gen. Pervez Musharraf that the military’s ouster of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is unacceptable and that Washington expects the general to order new elections as soon as possible and return the army to its barracks. Generals have ruled Pakistan for nearly half its 52 years of independence and done little to help the country economically and nothing to assist a transition to deep-rooted democracy.

The centerpiece of the president’s South Asia visit is India, where he will spend five days. He will be the first American president to visit Pakistan since Jimmy Carter in 1978. A daylong trip to Bangladesh, struggling to remain a democracy, will be the first ever by an American president.

There are justifiable concerns that Pakistanis might seek to interpret Clinton’s stop in their country, scheduled to last only a matter of hours, as an endorsement of Gen. Musharraf. Clinton acknowledged those worries Thursday but plans to go ahead with the meeting to reemphasize that Pakistan’s backing of insurgents in Kashmir, a territory contested by India and Pakistan, is a perilous gamble, one made even riskier by the nuclear capability that both countries demonstrated in 1998 tests.

During the Cold War, Pakistan was a staunch ally of the United States and helped the Nixon administration open relations with China. It also gave aid to embattled Afghans when their country was invaded by Soviet troops in 1979. In recent years it has helped track down and extradite terrorists to the United States. But the end of the Cold War has made regional relationships more complicated. Pakistan now is one of only three nations that recognize the Taliban, Afghanistan’s fundamentalist Islamic regime. As such, Pakistan should seek to win favor with the United States by persuading Afghanistan to oust Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden from within its borders.

Washington says relations between India and Pakistan are worse now than at any time since their last war, in 1971. When Sharif visited Washington last year, Clinton helped persuade him to withdraw Pakistani troops from the Kashmir border area. If Clinton’s trip can again help break down the old enmities between the two giants of the subcontinent--hostility that has produced three major wars--the American president will have done a great service for peace.