M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — During the 1960s, the
United States had a president who did more for the underclass than most of his
predecessors put together. Lyndon Johnson introduced healthcare, civil rights
and other measures designed to provide a level playing field for people of
different classes and colors among the citizenry.
Instead of acclaim, what he got was
unpopularity, forcing him to surrender office after just one term. The reason
was an unpopular war, fought the wrong way – through the insertion of greater
and greater numbers of troops.
U.S. soldiers marauding through their land
converted several hundred thousand South Vietnamese into Viet Cong. As a recent
editorial on Afghanistan in the New York Times put it, Americans too would be
tempted to violence were a strange-looking bunch of aliens to invade and occupy
Oregon.
Those who seek conventional military
solutions to problems within other countries forget that the world is very
different from what it was during the peak years of European colonialism. Then,
mass killings were acceptable. But now, were NATO to repeat in Afghanistan the
tactics of European colonial powers in South America, Africa and Asia, their
own populations would halt such slaughter.
In the age of worldwide cable television,
significant "collateral damage" is unacceptable. This is not a
situation that would have endeared itself to Winston Churchill, the wartime
British prime minister who once favored the bombing of undefended villages in
the Middle East, and looked the other way when more than 6 million Indians died
in 1944 of starvation in the single British-ruled province of Bengal.
