Sarah Paine

Total mess.

Meanwhile,

But for Pakistan, as all this is going on, the Shah of Iran falls in, I think it's like February 1979, and then the Russians invade Afghanistan in December 1979, and suddenly Pakistan is totally essential once again.

And the Pakistanis are really getting sick of being kicked around.

So outgoing President Jimmy Carter offers them, I don't know, $400 million or something.

This is Zia here going peanuts to the peanut farmer.

The incoming Reagan administration then ups it to $3.2 billion.

And that money gets funneled through the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate.

It's like the, I don't know, the CIA plus plus plus in Pakistan.

And when you put that kind of money into that kind of bureaucracy, you're going to make them incredibly powerful.

And then they're the ones who decide how they're going to allocate money to insurgents in Afghanistan.

And I got it.

There weren't any great choices, but they're arming some really anti-Western folks in there.

Probably some guy named Osama, last name Bin Laden.

But anyway.

Anyway, I'm not sure of the details on that one, but it is going to have 9-11 follow-on effects.

And also, the Pakistani, the ISI is also taking some of that money and putting it into Kashmir, which is going to have real problems for India later on.

So there are real ramifications for all of this, of needing Pakistan, but actually what is happening anyway.

And then throughout, the Pakistanis are getting closer and closer to building the bomb.

So when the Russians go piling into Afghanistan, here's Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security advisor, telling him, our security policy cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.