Should the U.S. Play a Role in Settling the Kashmir Dispute?
I was on an airplane, returning after a school vacation to my home in Kashmir, when I noticed two Americans asking the flight attendant for food. During the next leg of my journey, on a bus through the hot, dusty Himalayan foothills, I noticed that the same two Americans would not spend a nickel to buy a bottled drink. At the end of the bus trip, however, the Americans each took a two-seat foot-pedaled bicycle rickshaw to travel from the bus depot to the train station. They had scrimped and saved all day. Yet, to ease the rickshaw puller’s burden, they hired two rickshaws when only one was necessary. I am now an American citizen myself and see every day among my fellow Americans the same kind of pure goodness demonstrated by the two American Peace Corps volunteers I met in Kashmirin 1955. But American foreign policy has not always reflected such selflessness. I remember around that time reading The Ugly American, a book which chronicled the doings of an American politician who, after l
