Cutting Aid to Punish Pakistan

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What are programs of economic assistance for? After a dozen years of them, the question still has to be asked. Otherwise how can their effectiveness be judged? Clearly, there is no consensus. For some they are tools to stop Communism, for others to propagate Western ideas, for still others to defend Western interests. All these factors certainly enter in but they do not explain why or how such programs can have these effects. In fact, as critics are quick to point out, some assistance programs do not. Countries can swallow aid like blotting paper and at the end of the process are no more pro-Western, anti-Communist or secure and stable than they were at the start.

Here, however, may be the beginnings of an answer. The most fundamental of all Western-and, indeed, of all human-interests is the preservation of peace. Communism is a danger primarily because it is aggressive and expansive. When it is not-as in Jugoslavia or Poland-it can be lived with. But profound internal instability in the modern world is a danger to peace. States in the grip of ferment and disorder tend to become-as Cuba has done- a point of polarization in the cold war between East and West. They recreate the risk of conflict which was inherent in Balkan instability before 1914, the risk that rival power systems will seek to flow into any vacuum brought about by local collapse and, in the process, will collide with each other in fatal conflict.

In this large context of peace and war, the fundamental aim of economic assistance is, therefore, to build up stability in unstable states. This cannot be done by piecemeal patching up, by casual subsidies and handouts. The most successful of all programs of economic aid so far-the Marshall Plan-clearly illustrates the need for change in depth. If the nations of Western Europe had simply been restored to where they were before the Second World War, they would inevitably have repeated yet again their melancholy inter-war cycle of economic isolationism and national rivalry. It was America's insistence upon a joint solution of their problems that opened the era of technical modernization, supra-nationalism and interdependence. What has saved Europe has been not the reconstruction of the old order but the bold projection of a new...