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COMMENTARY
June 1, 2002
Duck
It is hard to resist speculating about why Donald Rumsfeld the secretary of defence and not Colin Powell the secretary of state is being sent by President Bush to see if war can be averted between India and Pakistan. The obvious explanation is that Mr. Powell is focusing on the Middle East where he can do most good; but even on that front I notice Mr. Bush sends Pentagon people with State people paired wherever they go as if the latter can't be trusted alone. As if Mr. Powell's lead has been shortened for whatever reason. But another explanation is the mission itself. Mr. Rumsfeld is better equipped to discuss the current military situation between the two powers. For the relationship between them has got beyond mere diplomacy. The problem Mr. Rumsfeld faces in Islamabad is a Pakistani dictator who is absolutely cornered. It isn't entirely Pervez Musharraf's own doing though many of his own past mistakes and misjudgements have returned to roost. He truly cannot control the movements of Al Qaeda nor indigenous Kashmiri jihadists (the latter operating on both sides of the Kashmir Line of Control). And by persisting in dividing them into a range of categories from "Al Qaeda" (definite enemy) to "Kashmiri freedom fighter" (definite friend) he goes somewhere a little beyond political myopia -- into that mysterious darkness where evil and stupidity become impossible to tell apart. All the groups are in league with one another there are no longer such distinctions to be made. And yet Mr. Musharraf is not without alternatives. He would seem to have precisely two. He can risk losing his own power and fomenting something on the scale of a civil war by ordering his army and police to ignore India and go openly after the whole terrorist infrastructure within his realm -- which after reinforcement from Afghanistan has become very substantial. And as we see from for instance the sale of Osama bin Laden impedimenta in Pakistan's bazaars a not-insignificant proportion of his country's people will be inclined to side with the terrorists -- higher the more Kashmir appears to be at stake. And the one practical alternative to this is war with India. War is just what Al Qaeda wants and is doing everything in its power to cause. It is the best chance the Kashmiri jihadists have to ignite all the powderkegs in Indian Jammu and Kashmir. For all factions of violent Islamists today the safest possible environment would be a Pakistan reduced to the security conditions of Afghanistan with the frontier between India and Pakistan erased. There are plenty of reports for instance of Al Qaeda cells setting up shop in Lahore preparing to turn the Punjab's leading metropolis into another Karachi the moment Mr. Musharraf drops the glove. Mr. Musharraf's bluffing and playing for time is more and more obviously desperate. (One of the bluffs now appears to be shifting troops away from the Afghan frontier which has now been officially announced at least four times but I have learned isn't happening.) I am told from Indian sources that he keeps sending messages to them through anyone who can carry: "Give me two months!" As one of them said We are now in the sixth month of, 'Give me two months!' He is pleading with Beijing for help in enlarging the conflict by providing an additional front to distract the Indians. The Chinese are already meddling in Nepal by training equipping and providing shelter to Nepal's indigenous Maoist terrorists on what appears to be a growing scale. (Their ambition in the long run is to knock Nepal from the Indian into the Chinese orbit and thus move into a position to threaten the Gangetic plain.) The Chinese long ago occupied and annexed large sparsely populated sections of mostly Indian territory of vaguely Tibetan ethnicity to the east of Kashmir proper and could be helpful to Pakistan by suddenly inventing some additional territorial claim then escalating it into a new crisis. Even better from Mr. Musharraf's point of view would be an explicit threat to invoke alliance with Pakistan should Indian troops cross the Line of Control. India's allies against China -- Russia and the U.S. -- meanwhile pressure Beijing's dictators to resist the temptation. Paul Wolfowitz the U.S. deputy defence secretary (and a future secretary of state?) is already in the region seemingly holding the Indians down until his boss arrives. Mr. Rumsfeld will come next week with an extraordinary array of U.S. intelligence data from satellites and other sources to lay before both sides. The idea here is to put almost everything that can be known on the table so no one is acting blindly and both Indian and Pakistani governments may refer to the same sets of facts. What the Americans are being told by the Indians is just what they don't want to hear. For Indian officials at cabinet level are mulling their national interest both short and long term. They speak aloud about the long-term threat Pakistan has been posing not only in Kashmir. For in their view Pakistan evolved from its secular democratic foundation into a state which has formally embraced an Islamic ideology. A state which thus considers itself to be perpetually in "jihad" against the "Hindu secular entity" that controls the rest of a subcontinent once under Muslim rule. Sooner or later according to this thinking India must deal with the long-term threat by neutering "West" Pakistan the way she did "East" Pakistan in the foundation of Bangladesh. Indeed there is one school of Indian geopolitical thinking that envisages a solution to Kashmir that would consist of granting it full autonomy while at the same time dividing Pakistan along its ethnic faultlines into similar autonomous "statelets" (Muslim Punjab Sind Baluchistan Pashtunistan etc.) -- all becoming Indian dependencies in the divisum et imperium tradition of the British Raj. It is not a very helpful "vision" for them to be having at this time. It makes the Americans pull their hair out. But I think inside the mind of even the essentially moderate Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is the thought now or never . It is on the lips of the less moderate faction leaders within his ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party. Combine this with the fact the Indians are convinced -- regardless of what the U.S. envoys tell them -- that in the event of war the U.S. will have no choice but to abandon Mr. Musharraf and take sides with them. (And they are probably right about this.) One begins to understand why the U.S. Canadian and other Western governments are advising their nationals to get out. Not just away from the front line but out right out of the whole region. * * * * * There's a certain craft amounting to sleight of hand in any effective diplomatic operation. There must be given the existence of the mass media with their Heisenbergian ability to alter the story they are observing. Almost any problem is easier to solve may at least hold still while media eyes are elsewhere. So with the world's attention turning to the likely war between Pakistan and India it is worth checking back on the Middle East. Sure enough the Bush administration is now employing Egypt even more determinedly that it has been Saudi Arabia in its effort to tame the Palestinian Authority and manoeuvre Yasser Arafat away from power and into something like the seediest imaginable constitutional monarchy. The Egyptians have quietly undertaken to do what the Jordanians have been doing all along on their turf: stop the rogue shipments of arms through Sinai to Gaza. Intelligence agencies of Israel Egypt and the U.S. are all pushing their feet into a new Palestinian Authority security service that is being assembled around the relatively moderate Muhammad Dahlan the PA's present Gaza security chief. (Both Israelis and Americans seem to trust him for reasons they know and I don't.) The idea is to build this up while tearing down the other various militias around Mr. Arafat all of them steeped in terrorism and all of their leaders in blood up to their elbows. And the hope is that eventually an alternative can be created to the Israeli military to do the hard job of exterminating Hamas Hezbollah and Islami Jihad (whose leaders are in blood up to their ears). It will certainly take time and the latter organizations to say nothing of Mr. Arafat himself have no interest in making the process easy. Hosni Mubarak visits President Bush at Camp David the end of next week. A tremendous amount of diplomatic traffic has passed through Cairo in preparation for this event including senior representatives of the CIA Pentagon and State Department (George Tenet Douglas Feith and William Burns respectively); with further multinational shuttles to Riyadh Jerusalem and Amman. The less you see of it on CNN the more is being accomplished. For what "moderate" Arab leaders need is a quiet space within which to act sanely; the moment the cameras are on them they must grandstand and go shrill. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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