Anger builds in Pakistan

IN JULY, while many of us were worrying about a growing recession and absorbed with the headline-producing horse race for the White House, its current occupant took a historically interesting step: He allowed air strikes and ground attacks in Pakistan ("In Pakistan, anger builds over US strikes," Page A3, Sept. 13). That is to say, we have been in a shooting war with a nuclear-armed power. As this war goes on, the options left to Pakistan's civilian and military leadership narrow, and the possibility of either an intended or accidental atomic response widens.

None of us has been given any reason to believe that our president and his advisers are any better prepared to anticipate, and react rationally to, that or any other Pakistan response to our attacks. The political necessity of some non-rhetorical response by our ally in the war on terror can be gleaned from stories, editorials, and letters in The Frontier Post, published in Peshawar and Quetta. There we find, expectably, descriptions of the United States as a "rogue nation" making "brutal attacks . . . on an ally" as its leaders, "obsessed with the cynical ideas of war, deaths and destructions, pursue their foreign policy around the world"; and this question: "Isn't the Pakistan Army obliged to counter-attack?"

Let us pray.

PARKER CODDINGTON
Sudbury