Pak Alert Press reports on a US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing on US Strategy toward Pakistan, held on 12 May 2009, where there was a candid interchange between Congressman Ron Paul and Ambassador Richard Holbrooke [Statement]. A transcript of the interchange, available on You Tube, is provided below.

PAUL Welcome, Mr. Ambassador. I have a couple [of] concerns I want to express. The main concern I have is, I was hoping to see maybe a change in our foreign policy, from the last administration; but of course we see just more of the same, more nation building, more policing of the world, more involvement, and it just seems like we never learn from our past mistakes. We don’t learn from what kind of trouble the Soviets got into, and yet we continue to do the same thing; and even your last statement, its a grandiose goal that you would… that we want to work for a vibrant, modern democracy. Wow! What a dream! But think of how we are doing this. I mean we label everybody that opposes what we are doing, we call them “Taliban” and all of a sudden there are many, many thousands of Pushtuns that are right smack in the middle of getting killed by our bombs and then we wonder why they object to our policies over there.

This to me means that we’re into this for the long haul, and it’s gonna cost a lot of money, and its gonna cost a lot of lives, and if the members of Congress had ever realised what Iraq would end up costing us, in the number of deaths, in the number of dollars, now trillion dollars, they would have been a little more hesitant. They admit that, even now maybe we shouldn’t have… but who knows what this is going to end up costing in terms of lives, and the odds of it working are so slim, this is what my great concern is. You know in 1999, Sharif was the Prime Minister, and we were supportive of a military coup, and Musharraf comes in and we support him. But now, its said that we’ll have relationships with Sharif. Everybody knows exactly what that means. It means that we are involved in their elections. That’s the way we’ve done it for so many years. You know the Pakistani papers report it as US taps Sharif to be the next Pakistani Prime Minister. Now, whether or not we literally can do that, I think we can have a lot of influence. That’s what they believe in. How do you win the hearts and minds of these people if we’re seen as invaders and occupiers.

And here we are just doing nothing more than expanding our role, you know, in Pakistan, and in Afghanistan. I don’t see any end to it. But my patricular quesion is this, it has to do with the Pushtuns that have been killed by our bombs. We are bombing a sovereign country. Where did we get the authority to do that? Did the Pakistani government give us written permission, did the congress give us written permision to expand the war and start bombing Pakistan? Why do we as a Congress, and as a people, and as a representative executive branch just so casually and carelessly expand the war and say that well today we have to do this, we’ll worry about tomorrow.

What about our national debt? We have $1.8 billion national debt  facing us    we think nothing of $3.5 billion, which will turn out to be tend of billions of dollars after this. So, I’d like to know where you stand on this. The innocent killing of pashtuns, are theyall Taliban, or are there, is there some innocent people being killed?

HOLBROOKE: Congressman Paul, I did not say exactly what you imputed to me, but I have thought a long time about the issues you raise. And, you mentioned Iraq, Afghanistan-Pakistan is not Iraq. The reason we are in this area, not withstanding its immense difficulties, is because the people in this area attacked our country on September 11, 2001 and stated flatly they intend to do it again. They’ve done all the other things we mentioned earlier. And, therefore it is not Iraq and it is not Vietnam, despite the fact that many people say it is. It’s about defending our country.

It is not easy, I agree with you; it’s not cheap. And having seen wars on three continents, having been shot at for my country, I sure don’t feel comfortable in the situation where you ask brave young American men and women to risk their lives and sometimes pay the ultimate sacrifice. However, the President of the United States reviewed everything in regard to this and came to the conclusion not that its the same policy — we spent the whole meeting today, talking about the differences, and there are dozens of others — its not the same policy, but our goal has to be to defeat Al Qaeda, we cannot let them take over an even  larger terrain and move into other parts of the world and then plan what they are planning, in my view.