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U.S. diplomat explains Afghan-Pakistani history

by Chris West
Public Relations
In a timely address, students, faculty and administrators were treated to a historical discussion regarding the United States’ relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan.
 
Dennis Kux, former U.S. Ambassador to the Ivory Coast, presented a discussion Monday to a full Gazes Auditorium. The standing-room-only event was a brief history of Pakistan and Afghanistan and their relationships with one another. Kux traced the history of the countries from their inception, through the Cold War and Pakistan’s former alliance with the United States to present day relations.
   
Supporting and citing from his new book, “The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000, Disenchanted Allies,” Kux led the attendees through a guided tour of past relations between the two countries and their efforts to solve the problems of Pakistan and its two volatile neighbors, India and Afghanistan in the face of Cold War Soviet and U.S. presence.
   
Kux, a retired State Department specialist on South Asian affairs, has done more than a decade’s worth of work in that part of the world. Serving first at the U.S. embassy in Karachi, he moved on to work in Pakistan at the embassy in Islamabad. 
 
Throughout his career on foreign soil, Kux has served three times in India and Pakistan and worked for seven years in the state department of South Asia.   Other tours of service included Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence Coordination and as U.S. Ambassador to the Ivory Coast.
 
In lieu of the Sept. 11 attacks, the discussion provided a background into some of the factors that may have precipitated those events. Where the discussion did not directly address the groups that may or may not have been responsible, it did grant those in attendance a small glance at Afghani, Indian and Pakistani sentiment with regards to the U.S. 
 
Kux is currently a Senior Policy Scholar, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author and editor of three books on South Asian affairs. He has also written more than a half dozen other chapters on U.S. relations with India and Pakistan since his retirement from the State Department in 1994 with the rank of career minister.