No More Band-Aid

In place of the presidential bromides that traditionally accompany Administration foreign-aid bills, Lyndon Johnson last October hoisted a storm warning. From his sickbed in the Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Md., he said: "While our wealth is great, it is not unlimited. It must be used not merely to apply Band-Aids to superficial wounds but to remove the cause of deeper and more dangerous disorders. That is why I do not intend for American aid to become an international dole. Our assistance must and will go to those nations that will most use it. Action, not promises, will be the standard of our assistance."

The President's blunt message put the world on notice that after 20 years and $115 billion worth of U.S. aid dispensed, Washington henceforth would evaluate assistance programs not in terms of nations' needs alone but in the light of their economic policies and political attitudes as well.

Sternest Test. There have already been encouraging results. When the U.S.-aid agreement with Egypt expired in June, the Johnson Administration pointedly let it lapse until such time as Cairo cleared up some "unresolved policy differences" between the two nations. Within weeks, the U.A.R. agreed to a cease-fire in its nasty little war in Yemen, moved to settle private U.S. claims against its government (including $500,000 for a USIS library that was wrecked by a mob), and began a series of U.S.-suggested domestic economic programs. In response, President Johnson has authorized negotiations that will send some $55 million in aid to Egypt next year.

Last week, as Washington prepared for U.S. visits from Pakistan's President Mohammed Ayub Khan (on Dec. 14) and India's Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri (in early 1966), the Administration was ready to put the tough new foreign-aid line to its sternest test yet.

Alone on the Ranch. Aid to both India and Pakistan was curtailed early in the autumn, during the conflict over Kashmir, in which each side violated its agreement with Washington not to use U.S. arms against the other. India and Pakistan have between them received some $10 billion of U.S. aid in the past 14 years. Yet Pakistan has persisted in cozying up to Red China, all the while ostensibly remaining a partner with the U.S. in the anti-Communist SEATO alliance.

India, thanks to ever-growing torrents of surplus U.S. food, has been able to concentrate on a prestige-building industrial program instead of making a serious effort to expand agricultural production. Its population is growing far faster than its food supply; with this year's severe drought, India faces its most critical food shortage in two decades. Apart from its domestic problems, India in the past adopted a holier-than-thou attitude toward American efforts to thwart the Communists' grab for South Viet Nam, but clamored for U.S. military help to repel Red China's threat to its own territory.

The time has come, Lyndon Johnson believes, for practical, politician-to-politician talks with Ayub and Shastri.

To that end, the President hopes to hustle both men off to the isolated acres of the LBJ Ranch. There, without retinues of advisers, Johnson hopes to apply his inimitable techniques of suasion to extract from his visitors a reasonable quid pro quo.

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