Making life easier for India and Pakistan

It seems that India wants to keep the consequences of the Mumbai attacks to a reasonable level and avoid war. We should applaud that. It would also be nice if we would put our trouble in this part of the world in perspective and make things easier for the parties to stay peaceful.

The death toll in Mumbai was significant, and clearly tragic for those directly involved. But every day in India, about 2,000 children under the age of six die of diarrhea. That replicates the Mumbai death toll every two hours, and if not addressed, will do so forever.

But however insignificant in the big picture, Mumbai is a political issue of great importance and Pakistan has problems. Muslims everywhere feel threatened and for Pakistanis, Kashmir is a permanent sore point. A government that tries to be reasonable about Kashmir, however, is compromised if required to support the U.S. war against the Pashtun ethnic group that straddles the Pak/Afghan border and opposes the current regime in Kabul.

For many, many reasons we should get out of Afghanistan. This just adds another. Pakistan's government is close to civil war against a segment of its own population because they are our ally and we're fighting in Afghanistan. Tensions would fall in Pakistan if the Afghan war were to end.

It would be nice to bring democracy and prosperity to Afghanistan, but the prospects have never been good and haven't gotten better since 2001. On the other hand, India is the world's largest democracy and Pakistan has a semblance of one. They have 25 times the combined populations of Afghanistan and Iraq. For what we're pissing away in Afghanistan and Iraq, we could bring clean water and basic sanitation to everyone on the Indian subcontinent and become relatively beloved.

Iraq and Afghanistan run by people we don't like isn't a disaster. Much of the world is run by people we don't like. This would have been a better proposal in years past when the United States actually had the wherewithal to be internationally generous, but we should start by ending the wars ASAP and then, after the depression, start to do something constructive.