Asia Times: India/Pakistan


	June 27, 2002	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

India, Pakistan: Talking heads achieve little
By Praful Bidwai

NEW DELHI - Two weeks after Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee agreed to ratchet down the level of hostility by exchanging assurances through their US mediators or "facilitators", they continue to trade shrill bellicose rhetoric and indulge in boastful, dangerous nuclear saber-rattling.

The Indian government has lowered the level of military alert, pulled back some warships, and relaxed airspace restrictions following Pakistan's actions to stop cross-border infiltration of militants into Indian-administered Kashmir.

India's Defense Minister George Fernandes has said that Indian troops could be pulled back if incursions remained halted for a month or two. But most of India's 700,000 troops remain at the border, as do Pakistan's 300,000 soldiers.

Should another potential "trigger event" - such as a terrorist attack - occur, it could instantly detonate a major confrontation as South Asia continues to be on a short fuse. Unless and until there is complete demobilization of troops on the India-Pakistan border, and the level of hostile rhetoric is sharply reduced, the danger of war will not pass.

Yet there are few signs of either happening. Last weekend, Vajpayee told a right-wing Hindi paper that his government did not rule out war as an option. He said India and Pakistan were very close to the "brink of a confrontation" and that a nuclear war had been "averted only because of the guarantees given by Pakistan to end cross-border infiltration".

Vajpayee also boasted that India "won a significant victory over Pakistan without going to war" and "the nation has reason to be satisfied at [this] diplomatic success". India succeeded, he said, because it "was ready for war" and was prepared even for "nuclear war".

Musharraf, meanwhile, on June18 said that South Asia's "strategic balance" and Pakistan's conventional and nuclear weapons had deterred India's aggression. He boasted that India's "hesitation, frustration and inability" to "attack Pakistan" in a so-called "limited war" were premised upon Pakistan's nuclear prowess. It was no coincidence that Musharraf said this at a dinner hosted in honor of Pakistani nuclear scientists and engineers.

India attacked Musharraf's statement as a manifestation of "Pakistani irresponsibility, loose talk and undiluted hostility towards India and the continued concoction of doomsday theories to justify its use of nuclear blackmail".

However, virtually identical belligerent signals are emanating from India, where the ruling alliance, led by the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party, has nominated missile engineer A P J Abdul Kalam to run for the presidential election. The BJP's backing for him is rooted in its attempts to stoke anti-Pakistan sentiments, while shielding itself from criticism for its sponsorship of the anti-Muslim pogrom in the state of Gujarat, because he is Muslim.

Besides similarities, there are sharp differences between the dominant Indian and Pakistani attitudes to recent events. The mood in India's strategic community is that of self-congratulation and triumphalism. In Pakistan, by contrast, there is resentment, breast-beating and sullenness. Both attitudes misrepresent reality and are profoundly mistaken.

The argument that India's "coercive diplomacy" succeeded only because it mobilized 700,000 troops at the border is fundamentally specious. It is positively adventurist to hold that India "called Islamabad's nuclear bluff" or that it has dramatically "broken out" of the "mental block" imposed by nuclear restraint.

Pakistan certainly "blinked" when it agreed to put a permanent verifiable end to infiltration across the Line of Control (LoC) that cuts across disputed Kashmir. But it was not India that stared it down, it was the United States. America's aggressive mediation played a key role in securing Musharraf's commitment and India's promise gradually to lower the level of tension and alert, and take conciliatory diplomatic measures.

Musharraf reiterated his pledge on stopping cross-border infiltration during a phone conversation with US Secretary of State Colin Powell over the weekend. Indian leaders are loath to use the word "mediation" because that might herald external intervention in Kashmir. But the recent transactions between the US, India and Pakistan fully fit the dictionary definition of "mediate".

Hawkish Indian commentators are even more mistaken in thinking that the standoff legitimizes nuclear muscle-flexing in the eyes of the international community. On the contrary, it highlights the need for nuclear restraint. To secure Musharraf's commitment to ending cross-border infiltration, India had to agree to an exceptional level of military cooperation with the United States, including possible joint operations against al-Qaeda elements should they cross over into Indian Kashmir.

India told US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that al-Qaeda militants had indeed crossed over. Rumsfeld was deeply ambivalent: in New Delhi on June 12 he affirmed al-Qaeda's presence in Kashmir, but contradicted this in Islamabad the following day.

However, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah has also disclosed that during the Rumsfeld visit, Washington offered to deploy troops in Kashmir. Pakistan hotly denies al-Qaeda infiltration. The gloomy current mood there is premised on the view that the United States now decisively tilts in India's favor. There are also fears that by agreeing to suspend support to the Kashmir militancy, Musharraf is in effect giving up the cause of Kashmir's "freedom" just as he earlier turned against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Indeed, there has been something of a tilt in Washington in India's favor. But this started two or three years ago, around then president Bill Clinton's 2000 South Asia visit. Simultaneously, India totally abandoned non-alignment in pursuit of "strategic partnership" with the United States. September 11 raised Pakistan's utility in Washington's eyes. It recruited Islamabad as an ally in the war against terror, much to India's resentment.

Since then, Indian leaders have successfully exploited Washington's own rhetoric about "terrorism" as the principal, if not sole, threat to security everywhere. India also produced some evidence of Islamabad's clandestine backing for jihadi militants in Kashmir.

During the fever-pitch confrontation after the May 14 terrorist attack in Jammu, Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations said on May 30, "India should not have the license to kill with conventional weapons while Pakistan's hands are tied." This alarmed the international community about a possible nuclear confrontation in South Asia and turned opinion against Pakistan.

If it severs relations with the Kashmiri jihadis, Islamabad may pave the way for a possible resolution of the Kashmir issue. This will certainly help Pakistan evolve into the "normal", "moderate" state that Musharraf pledged to create in his January 12 address to the nation. Of course, India must put Kashmir on the negotiating table.

However, India and Pakistan are unlikely to begin the process of reconciliation on their own. New Delhi, under the spell of chauvinist triumphalism, will be particularly reluctant to make the first move. Unless there is international pressure to demobilize troops and to begin a dialogue, South Asia's present crisis is unlikely to be defused.

(Inter Press Service)