NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
December 15, 2001
In triplicate
In an outburst of calendrical me-too-ism the Israelis and Indians are now using 12/1 and 12/13 respectively as their counterpoints to 9/11. The hits on Jerusalem and Haifa by Hamas a fortnight ago and on the Indian Parliament on Thursday -- we may safely assume by Kashmiri jihadists -- have contributed to the creation of an unspoken "trilateral commission" or triple pact. Here is what's unspoken: "We three bourgeois democracies agree in light of our common experience as victims of terrorism from the same extended family of Islamic fanatics that barring some truly unforeseeable future event we will no longer even ask each other to pull any punches." It is an unusual but predictable kind of alliance -- the sort I was predicting on Oct. 7. Under a real threat democracies pull together. Only Turkey is yet missing from what I expect to be the core regional anti-terrorist alliance; though it too is already nominally aboard. I counted the U.S. as a "regional ally" because as a hyperpower it is present everywhere. And as to anxieties expressed yesterday throughout the more moderate Arab media that in its toleration of Israeli escalation the U.S. is once again disengaging from the region the answer must be: "In your dreams." What the Bush administration looks forward to now is the emergence of Israel India and soon Turkey as effective U.S. proxies in the fight against essentially the same enemy. Call it imperialism if you please. It is in reality the natural convergence of interests between democracies against tyrannical outsiders who have pushed too far. We saw it in the fight against Hitler and in the NATO containment of Soviet Russia and we see it again against the Islamic jihad. In the long run Europe is onside too and Japan South Korea Taiwan. They don't need reasons to be allied against terrorism or rather they already have the big reason. But every other ally -- Egypt Saudi Arabia Pakistan for instance -- has to be bought off. The attack on India's Parliament Thursday was extremely significant in the formation of Indian opinion both in government and at large. The significance has been downplayed in the Western press. The attack had already been dress-rehearsed on Oct. 1 when a similar strike force gutted the Legislative Council of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir at Srinagar leaving dozens of corpses. On Thursday the six terrorists (one seems to have escaped) who included Afghan and Pakistani nationals breached gate security in a motorcade inside an officially marked and decorated Ambassador car with tinted glass windows. They were dripping with explosives of Chinese manufacture. Their mission was to penetrate the chamber and kill as many MPs as they could; they knew that most of the senior Indian leadership would be inside the building. The preparations for the strike were immaculate. A large organization had to be involved. A simultaneous terrorist hit was happening in Jammu. Only the high alertness of Indian commandos assigned to post-9/11 security prevented the terrorists from reaching their goal and limited the loss of life to five of themselves plus a driver and a gardener who was tending chrysanthemums. Unfortunately it usually takes huge death tolls to stir democracies into action. Only a slight miscalculation prevented Iraq-sponsored terrorists from bringing down the World Trade Centre in 1993 and spreading cyanide gas through the middle of Manhattan. Because only six died instead of tens of thousands the U.S. didn't then wake up. But in the present atmosphere neither Israel nor India has needed such a nudge. It is still a little startling to see India's prime minister A.B. Vaypayee now referring approvingly to Israel's response to Palestinian terrorism. He does this politically in the face of India's 150 million Muslims and in abandonment of the last vestige of India's "non-aligned" but traditionally "anti-Zionist" diplomatic posture. And the first unqualified gestures of sympathy arrived from Jerusalem and Washington. The theory behind Kashmiri terrorism is the same as we find among Islamists elsewhere: that democracies are inherently unstable so that if you give them a good hard knock they will fall apart. They assume that India with her extraordinary variety of languages and ethnicities and religions and cults is unified politically by sheer inertia. She could not possibly go to war against a "unified" Muslim state such as Pakistan without disintegrating into warring factions; therefore they'll start the war. The truth is fairly obviously the opposite: democracies permit great internal diversity but pull together when they are attacked. In the United States I was pleased to see Blacks whites Hispanics and Asians immediately singing from the same hymn book in the moments after 9/11. Likewise Indians across their many internal divides though they might warmly detest each other in fair weather remember their common freedom in foul. They know that for all the cumbersomeness and flaws the bureaucracy and corruption of Indian democracy they would not want to live under the political conditions in any neighbouring country. And the achievement of a secular Indian state is something even governing Hindu-party coalitions unceasingly maintain in defiance of their own extremists. Almost everyone grasps that were the secular state to fall the jaws of Hell would open. Whereas paradoxically it is multi-ethnic but mono-religious Pakistan that is torn by unresolvable internal dissensions. Radical Islam operating within a state committed to the expansion of Muslim Sharia law and the creation of an exclusively Islamic identity tamped under the thumb of politicized generals several of whom are religious nuts themselves is the country that may split apart. It is the Islamists who want to put Pakistan in a mould that will crack before it sets. In the meanwhile Gen. Pervez Musharraf -- whom we have every reason to adore after his volte face on the Taliban -- is caught in one of the fissures. Suddenly he sounds like Yasser Arafat one moment extending his fervid condolences to the victims of Kashmiri terrorism the next waving his lathi against any Indian thought of mounting reprisals. In the circumstances that emerged after Sept. 11 he was able to detach himself from relations with the Taliban and through them with Al Qaeda. But the same terrorist camps that trained jihadists to hit against U.S. interests all over the world were graduating insurgents into Indian Kashmir. The same Pakistani madrasas are raising another generation of little orphan boys to go off killing for Allah. And if anything the loss of the Taliban alliance makes Pakistan's own state doctrinal adherence to the cause of Azad ("free") Kashmir the more untouchable. So Gen. Musharraf must bite another bullet. Since Thursday India has decided that with or without the world's approval Kashmir's "freedom fighters" will be expunged. Either Pakistan can be delegated to do this internally or India will reach in. As Gen. Musharraf will further understand Pakistan's vaunted "nuclear deterrence" is unlikely to count for much in the approach of real war. By now both the U.S. and India will be extremely well-informed about the deployment of the force which is not large -- less than two dozen low-yield warheads and almost certainly slow-to-load. These could be gone within minutes and I should think the Americans would be holding the stopwatch while the Indians took them out. (At least officially; unofficially they might be taking them out themselves.) In the absence of a credible Pakistani nuclear threat there is no chance India would use its own more numerous nuclear weapons. The prevailing winds would put most of the fallout onto India itself. (No those nuclear weapons are designed to deter China.) It would be a conventional war if it came to that and India is just a whole lot bigger. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top