Military hardliners called me a ‘security threat’ for promoting peace in South Asia and for supporting a broad-based government in Afghanistan.
Asia
In the Sixties, there were no guidebooks to Asia, at least none that suited young shoestring travelers. No one on the hippie highway carried a copy of Fodor’s ‘Islamic Asia.’ The route to spiritual enlightenment wasn’t revealed in the pages of the latest Baedeker. Intrepids were on a journey of spontaneity and reinvention.
I believe that democracies do not go to war; that’s the lesson of history, and I think that a democratic Pakistan is the world community’s best guarantee of stability in Asia.
What I’m really worried about is war. Will the former rich countries really accept a completely changed world economy, and a shift of power away from where it has been the last 50 to 100 to 150 years, back to Asia?
As a political current, Maoism was always weak in Britain, confined largely to students from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
On the unofficial level it was a glorious moment in our national life because young people decided that this had to stop, that they could no longer stand the shedding of blood in this tragic adventure in Southeast Asia.
Now, most of the new immigrants coming to this country are from Asia as opposed to Europe.
So in Asia I want to make – I want to succeed to make a model of what success, practicing democracy, and market economy. Then that will give a good influence over Asian countries.
Unification is one thing, and stability in Northeast Asia is another thing.
The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia – that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.