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COMMENTARY
May 25, 2002
Steam engine
Will India and Pakistan go to war? It would have started by now were it not for the fact that both sides have nuclear weapons. Paradoxically this remains the one thing holding them back and giving the Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf the two months he says he needs (entirely off the record) to respond effectively to Indian demands. Moreover should an Indian attack begin in the meantime it is likely that its objects would be quite modest and fully signalled. It would consist of no serious territorial threats and instead commando actions against suspected "jihadist" terror camps within Pakistani-held Kashmir only. This again thanks to the proliferation of nuclear weapons -- at least into the hands of regimes that don't really want to use them. The tea leaves would indicate something slightly better than a 50/50 chance however that the Indians will do something in the next few weeks (it is already too hot to fight but then comes the monsoon). Reading my way through the sludge I notice no end of tiny indications that the Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is actually preparing for battle. Things like putting the Merchant Marine under the Navy and posting reserves at the back of his front lines and letting his chief cabinet yahoo the home minister L.K. Advani tell the Army to "read the War Book" (raj-speak for active orders) and sending his defence minister Yogendra Narain to Washington to brief incredulous undersecretaries at State and Pentagon. Across the border the Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf still does not appear to lift a finger against those terror camps in Kashmir though they are fairly apparent to satellite photography. He orders macho tests of his missile systems for tomorrow through Tuesday details not published but probably to include his " Shaheens" and "Ghauris" Chinese firecrackers which have ranges sufficient to hit Delhi and Calcutta respectively. For good measure he even irritates the Americans by shifting troops that were actively participating in the "hunt for Al Qaeda" from Pakistan's western to eastern frontier. The key problem is not Pakistan's dictator however -- who while he may not appear to co-operate has already proved that he can turn on a paisa. But he was making a sound calculation when he abandoned a decade-old Pakistani policy of sponsoring the Taliban and by extension the Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan (not against the West but against the Northern Front). This seemed to be in Pakistan's interest so long as the U.S. didn't care; and through the long years of the Clinton administration the U.S. didn't. But when after Sept. 11 the U.S. suddenly did care a lot the poles reversed. From Mr. Musharraf's view it was a good bet that he could reign in the forces within Pakistan itself allied with the Taliban. Or mostly ignore these people -- almost all the crazies being Pashtuns in the outermore reaches of the anyway lawless North West Frontier Province. The Pakistani policy of demanding an entirely Azad ("free" i.e. Pakistan-controlled) Kashmir and by extension jihadist advances into Indian-controlled Kashmir goes back to the foundation of Pakistan itself in the partition of India. Mr. Musharraf is here dealing with a fundamental an "identity" issue. The "K" in Pakistan stands for: "Kashmir". In other words the problem is with Pakistan itself. For almost 55 years every Pakistani has been committed as an article of patriotism to the "recovery" of the rest of this predominantly Muslim state. As I've argued before there's no point in going into the history the present facts are what we deal with in the present; we can't change historical causes and therefore must deal with historical effects. We should try harder not only to understand where President Musharraf is coming from but also what kind of man he is. He may appear outwardly to frustrated observers in the West who notice "revolving doors" in his prisons and the many other discontinuities between his rhetoric and his practice to be "another Arafat". But he's not. In the case of these missile tests Mr. Musharraf has told U.S. diplomats to tell Indian ones that they're just for show and to his domestic audience. Behind several of the "revolving door" incidents is a more complicated story: in which Mr. Musharraf has tried to cut "gentleman's agreements" granting some of his incarcerated fanatics freedom in return for promises that they will try to persuade their colleagues to desist. But only gentlemen can be trusted with gentlemen's agreements and several of these deals have blown up a little too visibly in Mr. Musharraf's face. (The Karachi explosion in which 11 French were killed was the most spectacular lapse of judgement.) And he now has much less control over the Kashmiri jihadists than he once did. He lost that control when he changed sides over Afghanistan and it was not Mr. Musharraf abandoning terrorism but more irretrievably the terrorists abandoning him. A kind of proof of this emerged this week when Islamist terrorists (almost certainly) assassinated Abdul Gani Lone the most moderate of the Kashmiri separatist leaders and the one most willing to negotiate with India. Operatives for the notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency in Islamabad that used to know such things in advance were desperately calling journalists to find out where the dastardly deed had occurred. I very much doubt they were faking it. Moreover ultimately Pervez Musharraf imagines himself a valiant loyal Pakistani a captain who would go down with the ship. By comparison Yasser Arafat would join his wife in Paris to watch the annihilation of Palestine on TV then ask the UN to retrieve his Nobel Peace Prize from the rubble. Mr. Musharraf doesn't want a war & he doesn't want to surrender. But he's going to have to make up his mind. There is no way short of launching his own "jihad" against Kashmiri terrorists that he can keep the Indians permanently at bay. Which means turning the attention of the same substantial Pakistani terrorist underground from their current focus on India to a new focus on himself. I would not wish to be in his position. Prime Minister Vajpayee has meanwhile put himself into a position from which he can only disastrously retreat. His threats get a little ahead of his ability to deliver on them. His party has been taking a thrashing in Indian polls and recent state elections. He comes close to being held to account for the Indian performance against the West Indies (I refer to the fifth test match of their cricket series not a pretty scene.) He now has Sonia Gandhi president of the opposition Congress second-guessing him like a Tom Daschle. And more than half-a-million troops getting bored for months along the Pakistan border wondering what all the rhetoric's about and when they'll see some action. Democracy creates its own problems. A limited exchange in which India merely delivered Pakistan a bloody nose without any territorial implications would be almost the ideal result -- even for Mr. Musharraf -- if it could only be stage-managed with complete assurance. It would let the Indians release some steam and let the Pakistanis absorb some. But the risk given the nuclear weapons is so great if it gets out of hand that one cannot decently wish for such a thing. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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