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COMMENTARY
May 29, 2002
Musharraf's nerve
The late great polymath Herman Kahn made an enviable living "thinking the unthinkable" about nuclear war and in his memory I turn to the unthinkable possibilities India and Pakistan are now offering the world. I shall maintain my serenity though as a man who spent the most memorable part of his childhood in the beloved city of Lahore I am hardly indifferent to the situation I am describing. The lives of some millions of people are at issue here and large sections of the Punjab if not other regions could be rendered uninhabitable. That is why it is so important to think about the "unthinkable" to be prepared for anything. The first observation is that India would not be the first to use nuclear weapons. This is not because India (unlike Pakistan) has forsworn first use -- there are no binding promises in love or war not any more -- but because it cannot lose a conventional war. The Indian army is not only larger but I think better trained and more disciplined after a couple of decades of ideological and religious tampering to the Pakistani army on the other side. And the Indian economy can more easily sustain a war effort. Not only has India seven times Pakistan's population; the per capita income is now much higher. For while in the last decade or more India's economy has been opening towards free trade Pakistan's has been whipped in circles by the whirlwinds associated with Islamism. Pakistan has nuclear missiles because India's primary enemy China chose to bestow these on Pakistan as a gift. The Pakistani missiles are of Chinese manufacture and design; only the names they have been given are indigenous to Pakistan. Pakistan's own nuclear research has been under the direction of men like Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chaudhry Abdul Majeed -- who when they were not consorting with such as Osama bin Laden were hatching plans to generate electricity by tapping into the astral power of "djinns" (fairy spirits in the Islamic cosmology). To be fair the Chinese can't be blamed for everything. Much of the uranium enrichment expertise was supplied by Atomic Energy of Canada and Sultan Mahmood learned his stuff on a Candu reactor near Karachi -- the only one in Pakistan from the 1970s until the year before last when a second Chinese-built reactor came online. Indeed the fifty or so leading Pakistani nuclear engineers of the first generation were trained not in China but in Ontario and New Brunswick. And if the radioactive plutonium that is the raw material for these bombs did not come from the spent fuel of that Candu reactor it must have come from the djinns. We performed a similar service for the Indians incidentally (who proved quicker on the uptake). So if there is a nuclear catastrophe on the subcontinent we have the satisfaction of knowing that it may only have been possible thanks to your tax money and mine. Like the Europeans we help create problems. We assume it is up to the United States to solve them. Even without knowing anything "above my paygrade" I could guess that the U.S. has not only gone to considerable trouble to locate Pakistan's nuclear installations and deduce how weapons would be armed and launched (their three missile tests over the weekend will have helped the U.S. monitoring considerably). They must also have put in place a contingency plan to take these missiles out by commando action the moment a real threat of their use arises. It is pure speculation on my part but I should think events since Dec. 13 (when Kashmiri jihadists attacked the Indian Parliament) would have been enough to push any such plans onto a front burner. So that one of the imponderables should war begin between India and Pakistan over the Line of Control in Kashmir is what might happen suddenly in the background. The circumstances in which Pakistan might first use nuclear weapons was sketched out in war games played in the U.S. several years ago in which it appeared that any kind of escalation of a confrontation in Kashmir would lead inexorably to a subcontinental Armaggedon. To simplify the most likely scenario is: 1. India sends commandos into "Azad" Kashmir to close terrorist camps. 2. This ignites a full battle between Pakistani and Indian armies in Kashmir in which the Pakistanis are pushed back a distance sufficient to cause the government in Islamabad to teeter. 3. To compensate the Pakistanis look for the weak point along the Indian border elsewhere and advance there hoping at least to grab territory for later exchange and at most to incite international (i.e. American) intervention to stop the Indian advance. 4. The Indian army now moves towards Lahore and the Indian navy towards Karachi. 5. On the brink of a replay of the battle for Bangladesh (when "West" lost "East" Pakistan in 1971) and with the prospect of an Indian occupation of all the Pakistani lowland the Pakistanis drop one nuclear bomb on the largest concentration of the advancing Indian army. 6. India then retaliates with everything it has. Of course either Pakistan or India might take step 6. earlier depending perhaps literally on which way the wind is blowing and in the vain belief that the first strike wins. Any president of those United States once the battle is started might decide that the risks associated with prophylactic strikes against the Pakistani nuclear force now outweighed the risks of sitting tight. The worry is that the Indian government may come to rely on just such a calculation; and indeed I've been told by a not-necessarily-reliable source on the Indian side that We already assume the U.S. has Pakistan's nuclear arsenal under lock and key. Bad assumption. In particular Pakistan will have contingencies against the U.S. contingencies; or a U.S. intervention could be botched. There are no sure things on this planet which is why it is wise never to lose one's temper when one is fully armed. On Monday Pervez Musharraf the Pakistani dictator made an address to his nation that could please no one outside it. While he repeated his promise to prevent Kashmiri jihadists from infiltrating Indian Jammu and Kashmir it is a promise the Indians are tired of hearing whenas Mr. Musharraf never acts upon it. The speech was on balance shockingly belligerent for the leader of a country in Pakistan's situation. Coming on the heels of Pakistan's missile tests it seemed almost designed to trigger an Indian assault. Thinking he was calling an Indian bluff Mr. Musharraf may have been calling his own. George W. Bush replying from Europe went pointedly beyond the bounds of diplomacy. He said that Mr. Musharraf would be better employed suppressing Kashmiri jihadists than testing his missiles. The U.S. state department followed up with an excruciating flurry of calls to Mr. Musharraf's aides. They took note of orders from the dictator in direct contradiction to previous promises: for instead of assigning Pakistani troops to close terror camps in Kashmir he has put all of his local forces on an advanced war footing towards the Line of Control. And Jaswant Singh the Indian foreign minister was able to use Mr. Musharraf's speech to make huge progress in persuading European governments of the justice of India's cause. The standard journalistic and diplomatic cliche is that "the slightest miscalculation could lead to disaster". But Mr. Musharraf's recent behaviour represents a major miscalculation. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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