Pakistan was brought into being by a leadership which hated and feared democracy

In this nation of instant gratification, instant foods, instant analyses there also roam a number of instant experts. One specimen of this genre is a man by the name of Francis Fukuyama who now sits upon the commanding heights of the State Department's policy planning group. How this relatively obscure think-tank egghead of widely acclaimed mediocre intellect came to assume so exalted a bureaucratic status is illustrative of how things work in Reaganite America.

Fukuyama is now where he is because he is the penultimate instant expert on South Asia, particularly India and Pakistan. When he addresses the instant subjects the Department's lesser minions spring to robot-like attention. Fukuyama achieved this rare distinction between May 25 and June 5 of last year.

That was when he visited Pakistan, wined and dined with the generals, and returned to write a paper about his junket for the Rand Corporation, a military-oriented research group. His paper, entitled "The Security of Pakistan" provided the Reagan Administration the geopolitical blueprint for the rearming of Pakistan.

It was exactly the kind of intellectual justification that the Administration had been seeking. Reagan's foreign policy establishment is dominated by security policy specialists who are concerned with immediate military pay offs as against regional specialists wholly concerned with cultural nuances and historical backgrounds in formulating foreign relations. The former is symbolised by a man like John Foster Dulles, the latter by Chester Bowles.

Fukuyama's abecedarian approach toward the region that he knew for about a week the promotion of US "credibility", "Pakistan's strategic importance" in the Persian Gulf, the arming of Afghan guerillas, the need to punish India for her "pro-Soviet proclivities" was all the justification the new Administration needed.

The report became the manifesto for the proposed 3 billion-dollar arms and economic package for Pakistan. And Fukuyama was crowned exalted expert of experts within the hallowed chambers of the State Department.

One of the suggestions made in the Fukuyama study is that the US should attempt to "reconcile" Indian opinion to the arming of Pakistan because Indian public opinion by its very nature is divided. The irony of this bizarre, back-handed compliment to Indian democracy by a polemicist arguing for the arms build-up of Pakistan has not gone unnoticed by Indian diplomats.

American foreign policy pundits routinely assure the disbelievers that arms and economic aid to Pakistan will not only recruit it into America's system of anti-Soviet alliance but also provide the political leverage that could induce Pakistan to liberalise and democratise its society. But no amount of past aid to Pakistan has succeeded in cajoling Pakistan into a love affair with democracy and pluralism.