Asia Times: Echoes across South Asia


	September 12, 2001	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Echoes across South Asia

By Sandeep Shenoy

The terrorist attack on the United States on Tuesday is likely to have powerful echoes in capitals around the world, but the effects will be felt more strongly in New Delhi and Islamabad than anywhere else in Asia.

What will predictably follow is a massive retaliation against the perpetrators - and all fingers point to the organization of Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi exile in Afghanistan who is wanted in the US on international terrorist charges.

Pakistan condemned the violation of its airspace when the US launched cruise missiles against bin Laden in 1998 soon after the US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya for which he was blamed. But given the magnitude of the latest attack, Islamabad will have to do quite the opposite, and more, to stay in the good books of the United States.

Pakistan's military rulers will be expected to provide support, intelligence or logistics to likely US missions against bin Laden's hideouts in Afghanistan, no matter how unpalatable this might be to their domestic audience and radicals within the establishment.

The support that bin Laden enjoys within Pakistan, especially in the northwest provinces bordering Afghanistan and among extreme political groups, should not be underestimated, though. Militant Islamic forces in Pakistan which share a common ideology with bin Laden and which consider the West to be their enemy, can and will challenge the military establishment. The greatest danger for the Pakistani military at this point is to be seen to be acting as a stooge of the United States, which would weaken forever the bonds it has managed to cultivate with the radicals.

Pakistan will also have to reckon with a hardening US attitude toward the well-funded networks of Islamic organizations, whose overt objectives are to provide education and welfare but which incubate radicals because of their extreme interpretations of Islamic theology, such as those espoused by the popular Deoband school of thought.

These organizations have nurtured both the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Mujahadeen in Kashmir. The question, then, is whether Pakistan can afford to weaken this network when insurgency in Kashmir has reached such a crucial state. The answer is that it cannot because Kashmir for Pakistan is too important an issue - it lies at the very core of the country's identity and existence.

So the United States and Pakistan may have to agree to a compromise where the network continues to operate, but limited to supporting the ongoing struggle in Kashmir. Any destructive anti-American elements will have to be crushed before they can harm US interests. Washington and Islamabad probably have been working along these lines in the past, but the current events point to the failure of this approach. Radical energies are difficult to contain even when they are channeled in the desired direction (Kashmir), but they are explosive when let loose in all directions.

Another danger is that even if bin Laden is killed, he will become a martyr in the process. Ideally, due judicial processes should be used to prove his guilt or otherwise. But it is unlikely that the Taliban will ever hand him over for trial, as is required among a number of United Nations sanctions imposed against the Taliban. Indeed, it is possible that his network would survive him and swell in ranks as more radicals elevate him to greater martyrdom - even sainthood.

The Pakistani leadership will hopefully spend a few sleepless nights pondering which direction their nation is heading in, and wondering whether it is worth their while having a zoo full of snakes in their own backyard.

India, on the other hand, now has an opportunity. In the surge of outrage within Washington it may try to shelter under the American anti-terrorist security blanket without being tied into any formal security framework as an ally. This goes to the very heart of Indian and American ideals since both countries are open and secular democracies and therefore may see a common enemy.

For years India has suffered from a spillover of Islamic radicalism within the large minority of Muslims within its borders. Although it is not completely reasonable to put Kashmir in this category, India does have a burgeoning Muslim population, poor and illiterate, which can be shepherded away from the nation's secular philosophy or drawn into radicalism.

Few readers may realize that the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York is a sequel to the large-scale bombings that occurred in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1993. The purpose of both attacks was identical - attacking the nation's economy by destroying the financial nerve center in the financial capitals. The Bombay bombings were in retaliation to mob violence committed by Hindus against Muslims after the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya.

The perpetrators of the Bombay attacks, the Dawood Ibrahim gang and the Memon brothers, today enjoy a lavish lifestyle under the patronage of their Pakistani hosts in the heart of Karachi, as confirmed by a prominent Pakistani newspaper recently - but denied earlier by Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf during the Agra summit.

Pakistan's blatant patronizing of these individuals is no different from Afghanistan's attitude toward bin Laden. The crimes of these people are condoned as long as their hosts feel such acts are justified or the hosts benefit from their presence. India may thus feel justified in seeing the Taliban and Pakistan as common enemies.

The sophistication of the terrorist attacks in New York, though, should remind India of its own vulnerability, and it does not have a fraction of the resources that the United States can marshal in retaliation against terrorist networks. Yet it may have to deal with terrorist attacks of unprecedented devastation. At present the insurgency in Kashmir is mostly contained within that region. But if the militants become more ambitious they may extend their attacks to soft targets in other parts of the country.

It is difficult to predict the future course of history. But the events unfolding in the United States, Pakistan and India - and the most likely retaliation against bin Laden - will draw a new equation in South Asia. Not only will the world's reigning superpower avenge the attack on its citizens, it will also make clearer distinctions between friends and enemies.

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