Crisis India-Pakistan:
Achtergrondinformatie, analyse en nieuws
uit de Indiase, Pakistaanse en internationale media.

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The Praful Bidwai Column for the week beginning June 10, 2002

Military Force Is No Solution - Dispel the clouds of war

By Praful Bidwai

Going by the signals emanating from Almaty and Singapore, and from Washington, New Delhi and Islamabad, the level of official rhetoric of India-Pakistan hostility has come down by a few decibels during the past week. This must be heartily welcomed. But the lowering of the pitch of hostility is not consistent and pervasive, nor yet reflected on the ground. The military mobilisation at the border remains as frightful as ever-with more than a million soldiers eyeball-to-eyeball, and on high alert. Not only is this the greatest military mobilisation anywhere since World War II. It has an extraordinarily scary and unique nuclear dimension too.
Compounding this grim reality are shrill calls to discard all diplomatic options in favour of 'decisive battles' to settle India-Pakistan disputes 'once and for all'. These calls emanate from official sources (e.g. Ministers Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Uma Bharati and I.D. Swamy), political leaders (e.g. Jana Krishnamurthy and Giriraj Kishore), and Right-wing commentators known more for obsessive militarism than for wisdom. As if this weren't bad enough, there is generalised smugness about the danger of a nuclear catastrophe, whose very possibility is being denied.
Hopefully, if present trends continue, some of the war hysteria will get diffused as the realisation sinks in of how seriously alarmed is the rest of the world about a possible nuclear outbreak in South Asia. The news of thousands of foreign nationals leaving, tourist and hotel bookings being cancelled, business contracts being put on hold, and the economy being badly hit will have an impact, favouring a cooling of India-Pakistan tensions. As will the visits of Messrs Rumsfeld and Armitage.
The best news, however, is that New Delhi says General Pervez Musharraf finally seems to be acting on his assurance that he would put an end to infiltration of militants into Kashmir. The Indian government has intercepted messages to this effect. If this trend holds, Pakistan will have substantively addressed the issue that aroused India's anger and precipitated the present crisis in the first place.
The time has come to defuse tensions, de-escalate the alert level and demobilise troops. It is important to reiterate the argument against war and even against 'limited strikes'. Politically, in the present circumstances, war against Pakistan is an inappropriate and wrong means to resolve the issue of 'cross-border terrorism'. There is no doubt whatever that Islamabad has over the years fomented and supported such terrorism. But there is plenty of doubt about its involvement in recent incidents like the May 14 Kaluchak killings and Abdul Gani Lone's assassination. No clinching evidence exists of this. Pakistan's relationship to jehadi militants changed post-September 11, especially after the stationing of US troops on its soil. It makes little sense for Gen Musharraf to order the ISI to conduct terrorist operations when he is under close US watch. If rogue elements carried out such operations, it makes no sense for India to punish the non-rogues. Militarily, war is a bad, high-risk option. There exist no military targets close to the border, which match specific political objectives and which can be attacked-without provoking major retaliation, with a spiralling potential for full-scale confrontation. There is some ambiguity even about the existence of the 36 (or is it 70?) makeshift ìtraining campsî in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The Indian army itself believes many have been disbanded. Hitting non-specific targets risks reprisal. There are no crisis-limitation mechanisms, and no confidence-building measures between India and Pakistan, to prevent limited engagements from escalating to full-scale war.
Full-scale war spells a likely nuclear catastrophe. In nuclear war, there are no winners, only losers. It doesnít matter if a nuclear adversary has 15 or 60 atomic bombs. One bomb can produce a Hiroshima-lakhs of deaths, and devastation lasting thousands of years. Nuclear weapons are Great Equalisers. The damage they cause is mind-boggling. Studies show that a single nuclear bomb is liable to kill 800,000 people in Mumbai or Karachi, and poison vast swathes of land, and water and vegetation, with over 200 radioactive toxins, some of which won't decay for hundreds, even thousands, of years. For instance, the half-life of Plutonium-239 is 24,400 years. And the half-life of Uranium-235 is 710 million years!
There can be conventional wars that are just, e.g. against tyranny and occupation, or for liberation. There can never be just nuclear wars. There is no justice or legality in a war that kills non-combatant civilians massively, and produces damage lasting a number of generations. Yet, our hawks irresponsibly talk of 'calling Pakistanís nuclear bluff'.
This is an extraordinary proposition. Pakistan isn't bluffing. There is no doubt that it possesses nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to many big Indian cities. By teasing, chiding or challenging Pakistan to use them, our hawks are in fact threatening millions of us citizens with genocide. This is morally sickening. It is irrelevant that India has a second-strike capability and Pakistan lacks it. Retaliation against a first strike can only be an act of senseless revenge, not one of gaining security.
A second reason why hawks like K. Subrahmanyam and Brahma Chellaney cavalierly dismiss Pakistan's nuclear threat lies in their fond hope that the US will somehow 'neutralise' Islamabad's arsenal before it can be used. The assumption is that the US knows where each missile and warhead is stored, and can safely, reliably, destroy these with its own weapons. Alternatively, Gen Musharraf will voluntarily hand America the key to his arsenal.
This assumption is dangerously wrong. No Pakistani ruler will give up control over that jealously guarded strategic 'asset' or 'trump card'. There have been credible reports since October that Islamabad has been looking for (and found?) sanctuaries for its nuclear weapons, possibly in China. It has also dispersed them within its own territory. The US cannot find or destroy such weapons without risking a catastrophe. The costs of American failure in this regard will be colossal. Clearly, our hawks' uninformed but wildly wishful thinking knows no bounds.
Diplomatically, India has not exhausted all its options to impel Pakistan to sever links with Kashmiri 'freedom-fighting' terrorists. It hasn't even attempted to move the UN Security Council invoking Resolution 1373 which obligates all states to act against terrorism-on pain of punitive sanctions. New Delhi has only practised 'coercive' diplomacy based on nuclear brinkmanship. This is now working against it, just as it is working against Pakistan. There is all-round condemnation the world over of 'irresponsible South Asians' the caption of a New York Times editorial-for causing today's stand-off.
The exodus of diplomats and citizens of many major states from South Asia will have damaging consequences. Aid cut-offs and sanctions could follow if the standoff continues. Gen Musharraf seems to have understood this and ratcheted down his bellicose rhetoric. Mr Vajpayee too must read the writing on the wall-especially because there is action on the ground, via interception of militants' border-crossing.
This is not a plea for trusting Pakistan and naively accepting that the interception is permanent. This must be rigorously verified. The verification should be done not by the US, the UK or NATO, as is being proposed by the Americans. It is best done by a neutral, independent multilateral agency on an institutionalised long-term basis. The road-map for troop demobilisation and restoration of full diplomatic relations should now be clear:
India and Pakistan should thin out their troops and withdraw from the International Border and the Line of Control. They must immediately hold a summit to formalise a solemn commitment to oppose terrorism and violence in all its forms, to negotiate serious confidence-building measures, to sanitise their border, and discuss all disputes and differences in the spirit of the 1972 Shimla Accord and the 1999 Lahore agreement. Above all, they must move towards reducing the nuclear danger either through bilateral denuclearisation, or by creating a nuclear weapons-free zone in South Asia, which all major states respect and guarantee.
Perhaps the greatest lesson from the present crisis is that there is no alternative to ridding this part of the world of nuclear weapons. So long as these weapons exist in South Asia-the world's sole region to have experienced a continuous hot-cold war for half a century between the same two contiguous rivals, there will always be a danger of nuclear catastrophe. Preventing one is the legitimate business not just of India and Pakistan, but of the whole world. The consequences of nuclear war are global. The global community has every right to prevent such a war.
New Delhi and Islamabad must not wait until such nuclear-restraint arrangements are put in place. They must return to the Shimla-Lahore agenda after rapidly restoring diplomatic relations and communication links. A Shimla-II will, of course, demand will and boldness on the part of Messrs Vajpayee and Musharraf. In India, Mr Vajpayee must be pressed by all political leaders and the public to shed the sectarian sub-agenda behind the border build-up related to the BJP's narrow political calculations-of diverting attention from misgovernance and the Gujarat carnage, while fomenting communalism.

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Sanctuary Asia [Bombay], June 10, 2002
www.sanctuaryasia.com/features/detailfeatures.php?id=202

Statement of Shared Concern

We the undersigned invite you to add your name to our Statement of Shared Concern, in the belief that we can collectively achieve what may not be possible individually. In the words of the musician-prophet, John Lennon: "Imagine all the people living life in peace."

STATEMENT OF SHARED CONCERN

To the leaders of all countries that currently possess, or aspire to possess nuclear weapons, we submit the following statement and petition.

A nuclear war between India and Pakistan is unthinkable, for the people of both nations, the region, and the world. We therefore call on the governments of India and Pakistan to renounce the use of nuclear weapons; abolish nuclear weapons from their respective countries; and seek political solutions to the conflict over Kashmir.

Furthermore, a two-tier world in which some countries destroy their nuclear arsenals while others maintain them is an inherently unstable world. We therefore call on the United States, which bears the primary responsibility for global nuclearisation, and the other nuclear weapons states, to take the same steps: renunciation of nuclear weapons; and the unilateral, verifiable and unconditional abolition of nuclear arsenals. Until these steps are taken by all nuclear weapons states around the world, the survival of humanity, and of all life on earth, is threatened.

Background

In the interests of life, of democracy, of feeding the hungry, healing the sick, protecting the young, and sharing a healthy planet with all non-human species; and in the belief that where governments endanger the very survival of their citizens, those citizens must lead; we call for a global campaign for the unilateral, independent and unconditional abolition of nuclear weapons.

We cannot wait for political systems, institutions, and leaders to institute change at a glacial pace. We have seen that this amounts to opting for the status quo, with extended multilateral negotiations and mothballing for future use, rather than the immediate destruction of all nuclear weapons. We are motivated by the current military and political crisis between India and Pakistan, and the nuclear threats being delivered by both sides. The crisis reminds each of us that the use of nuclear weapons would not simply represent another way of waging war. Nuclear weapons remain the most dangerous of all weapons of mass destruction, harming human generations yet unborn, and destroying the ecological foundations upon which any future peace could be built.

A nuclear war between India and Pakistan is unthinkable - for the inhabitants of those countries, for the region, for the world. It is estimated that twelve million people in India alone - and millions more in Pakistan - would die immediately in a full-scale nuclear war. Many, many more would die in the following days, weeks, and months.

We call on the governments of India and Pakistan to seek political solutions to the conflict over Kashmir, solutions, which respect democratic and human rights of the people in the region. And we call on the governments of India and Pakistan to immediately renounce the use of nuclear weapons, and to implement a process leading to the abolition of those weapons from both countries.

The situation between India and Pakistan cannot legitimately or effectively be addressed in isolation from the rest of the world. The threat posed by nuclear weapons world-wide is a dual one: from the arsenals of the original nuclear powers - the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, and France - which collectively possess some 35,000 nuclear weapons; and from the ongoing spread of nuclear weapons around the globe.

Although the U.S. is urging the Pakistani and Indian governments to step back from the nuclear brink and seeks the role of regional policeman, what credibility can those efforts have, in the eyes of its own people, of Indians and Pakistanis, of the world? More than any other country, the United States, with its active plans for continued development and deployment of nuclear weapons, and its pursuit of military, political, and economic hegemony, serves as the primary catalyst for the spread of nuclear weapons worldwide.

More than a decade after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. is finding new justifications to maintain and modernize its nuclear arsenal. The U.S. has proposed a policy of "offensive deterrence," under which it threatens preemptive attack, including possible nuclear attack, against nations that acquire or threaten to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

The Moscow Treaty signed by Presidents Bush and Putin in May 2002 is pure political theater: it does not require the destruction of a single nuclear warhead, nor does it constrain or eliminate tactical nuclear weapons or short- and medium-range nuclear delivery vehicles.

What better definition of "state-sponsored terrorism," or "rogue state" could there be than the nuclear policies of the current American administration? Russia, China, Great Britain, and France also bear heavy responsibility for the spread of nuclear technology and delivery systems, such as advanced aircraft and missile technologies to countries in South Asia and the world.

The actions of the United States and other nuclear weapons states do not excuse the pursuit of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction by other countries. But if the United States truly wishes to lead, in the conflict between India and Pakistan and elsewhere, it ultimately can only lead by example.

We call on the governments of the United States and all the nuclear weapons states to abide by their obligations under international law and Article VI of the Nonproliferation Treaty by renouncing the use of nuclear weapons, and taking immediate, unilateral and verifiable steps toward abolition of their nuclear arsenals. Further, we demand that the United States sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and continue as a signatory to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

We also call on the United States and the other nuclear weapons states to cease the global trade in conventional weapons because it promotes the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as regional arms races that could make the use of nuclear weapons more likely.

Any campaign calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons that does not acknowledge the permeable boundary between the military and so-called peaceful uses of nuclear energy, will fail. We call on the United States and all other nuclear states to phase out their civilian nuclear power programs that contaminate the earth for generations, and replace them with non-nuclear renewable energy sources.

Whatever risks there may be in pursuing disarmament are completely outweighed by the risks inherent in continued global nuclearisation. Living under the threat of nuclear cataclysm undermines the dignity of human life. Indeed, all life on earth is betrayed by the existence of nuclear weapons. We call on all citizens to join us, in the belief that change will come because, finally, we will make it come.

Signatories

Mrs. Lalita and Admiral L. Ramdas, Retd. Chief of Indian Navy and Chairman, National Committee, Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, India
Harsh Kapoor, South Asians Against Nukes
Achin Vinayak, New Delhi, India
Bittu Sahgal, Editor, Sanctuary Magazine, Mumbai, India
Jennifer Scarlott, Sanctuary Magazine, New York, USA
Philip Carter, Vancouver, Canada
Debi Goenka, Bombay Environment Action Group, Mumbai, India
Nityanand Jayaraman, Corpwatchindia, India
Ashish Kothari, Kalpavriksh, Pune, India
Hugues Vitry, Republic of Mauritius
Ajit Kaujalgi, Intach, Pondicherry, India
Ann Leonard, Director Multinationals Resource Center, USA
Vijay Crishna, Mumbai, India Jyoti Punwani, Mumbai, India
Nicholas Claxton, London, U.K.
Lata P.M., Mumbai, India
Pervin Jehangir, Mumbai, India
Sarosh Framroze, Mumbai, India
Rao Tarte, India
Shashi Mehta, India
Rajni Bakshi, India
Dr. Udayan Desai, India
Dr. (Mrs.) Rajani Desai, India
Kush Singh, India
Mayank Gandhi, India
Sudipt Sen, K-West Citizen's Association, Mumbai
Joanne Landy, New York

To add your name to the petition, please email info@sanctuaryasia.com

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[ SAJA--South Asian Journalists Association AWARDS 2002 (winners for work executed in calendar year 2001)
The essay below by Amitava Kumar is one of the winners of the The Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding story on South Asia Print ]
http://web-dubois.fas.harvard.edu/transition/wagah.htm

Splitting The Difference

The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.
-- W. H. Auden

On the day when they behold the angels, the evildoers will not rejoice.
The angels will say to them: "You shall never cross that barrier."
-- The Holy Qur'an
[by ] Amitava Kumar

There is a tall brick gateway on each side of the border. One side proclaims in Hindi, "Mera Bharat Mahan." Our India Is Great. On the other side, the sign is written in Urdu: "Pakistan Zindabad." Long Live Pakistan.

I had arrived in Lahore a few days before, on a Pakistan International Airlines jet. Passport in hand, I took my place in a line before a row of desks where customs officials sat. Two men in mufti fell in beside me, and one of them asked for my papers. He had recognized my Indian passport. His right eye was filmy, and it remained fixed on something to my left while he questioned me about my itinerary: where I was going, where I would stay, how I knew my hosts. I looked up to notice that the line had disappeared. An official waved me over, ignoring the plainclothes policemen. "Welcome to Pakistan," he said.

It's a forty-minute drive from Lahore to Wagah, where the border lies. The road to Wagah wends its way through small pastoral villages full of brick kilns, buffaloes, and mustard fields. There were boys playing cricket in dusty plots by the roadside. There were gaudily decorated buses -- one of them had an F-16 painted on the driver's side, with the word "Pilot" emblazoned underneath. There were cattle, bullock-carts, and turbaned men on foot. Every few minutes, we passed another emaciated dog, barking insistently, guarding its stretch of broken highway. I was just thinking how similar this was to the landscape on the other side of the border when Anwar Muhammad, my driver, asked, "Do you have wide roads like this in India, too?" I lied and said no. I was trying to be friendly to each and every Pakistani. I was going to the border, after all.

Suddenly, Anwar pulled over. We would have to walk the rest of the way. Anwar explained that the only vehicle allowed to cross the border was a bus that ran between New Delhi and Lahore. The route was opened in early 1999, and Atal Behari Vajpayee, the prime minister of India, had made the inaugural trip. The words "Sada-e-Sarhad" (Call of the Border) were painted on both sides of the bus. Vajpayee had greeted his Pakistani counterpart, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, here at Wagah. But only a few months later, war broke out. The fighting was once again along the Line of Control that functions as the border in the disputed territory of Kashmir. The battle was fought in and around a town called Kargil, among snow-covered Himalayan peaks. Soon after the cease-fire that ended the fighting in Kargil, Sharif was deposed in a military coup. Still, the bus soldiers on, rolling through the gates at Wagah four times a week. When we got out of the car to walk, I noticed that Anwar was carrying a light machine gun.

As I approached the border post, a young Pakistani guy walked just ahead of me, cigarette in hand. Two men were sitting on chairs by the side of the road. One of them gestured sternly at the cigarette. The azaan, the call to prayer, had just sounded from a nearby mosque. "It's Ramzan," the man said in Urdu. The smoker quickly stamped the cigarette out. The man on the chair told Anwar to remove the magazine from his gun and give it to the guards farther up the road.

After passing under the arched gateway, you walk for a long stretch toward a guard who protects a white line across the tar road. This is the Zero Point. The border between India and Pakistan is approximately 1,250 miles long, but the Zero Point is the only place where you're allowed to cross. White arrows point at the line from either side, as if you could miss it.

* * *

Wagah. Throughout the subcontinent, that single word conjures memories of Partition, the monumental act that carved Pakistan out of India in 1947. The idea of a separate Muslim state, free from Hindu domination, had first been voiced in 1930 by the poet Mohammed Iqbal. Seventeen years later, when the idea became a reality, the creation of a new country for Indian Muslims was accompanied by unimaginable violence. More than a million people died. Partition precipitated the largest exodus in recorded history. How many migrated across the brand new border? Fourteen million? Eighteen million?

The British, preparing to grant India its independence, had announced the plan in June of 1947. Three weeks later, they set up a Boundary Commission to separate the Muslim-majority areas from the Hindu-majority ones. In a matter of weeks, the British had created Pakistan. Little thought was given to the millions who lost their homes overnight. People who had only just won their freedom from Britain were now told that they were refugees. The principal architect of Partition, Cyril Radcliffe, had never been to India before. He knew nothing about it, save what he picked up in five weeks in a New Delhi office, studying unreliable maps and outdated census statistics. The day before Independence, Radcliffe wrote to his nephew:

Down comes the Union Jack on Friday morning and up goes -- for the moment I rather forget what, but it has a spinning wheel or a spider's web in the middle. I am going to see Mountbatten sworn as the first Governor General of the Indian Union at the Viceroy's house in the morning and then I station myself firmly on the Delhi airport until an aeroplane from England comes along. Nobody in India will love me for the award about the Punjab and Bengal and there will be roughly 80 million people with a grievance who will begin looking for me. I do not want them to find me. I have worked and traveled and sweated -- oh I have sweated all the time.

When you go to Wagah and stand near the white line that divides the two countries, it is impossible not to think of Radcliffe. Perhaps it's too easy to blame the British. The novelist Khwaja Ahmad Abbas once asked, "Did the English whisper in your ears that you may chop off the head of whichever Hindu you find, or that you must plunge a knife in the stomach of whichever Muslim you find?" And yet Indian nationalism was a response to British rule. The ideology of nationalism is an ideology of difference, a return to roots, a vision of wholeness. That's why so many visitors to Wagah seem to take comfort in a white line painted on the ground. The line assures the viewer that the border exists, clearly defined and zealously protected. The line returns more than one-sixth of the world's inhabitants to a moment in their history, more than fifty years ago, when they awoke to freedom.

Those who seek such reassurance are severely tested by other lines. I'm thinking of the lines composed by Urdu and Hindi writers who write about Partition. Many of those visiting Wagah are familiar with Saadat Hasan Manto's classic short story "Toba Tek Singh." It tells of Bishan Singh, an old inmate of a lunatic asylum, who is also called by the name of his village in Punjab: Toba Tek Singh. When he is told about Partition, Singh exclaims, "Uper the gur gur the mung the dal of the laltain." That is neither Punjabi nor English nor Hindi nor Urdu -- it's just gibberish. In the story, no one seems to know whether Toba Tek Singh belongs in India or Pakistan, and his insanity becomes a mirror that reveals the fundamental absurdity of maps and nations. "Toba Tek Singh" ends with an aerial view of its eponymous character.

There, behind barbed wire, on one side, lay India and behind more barbed wire, on the other side, lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.

Where did Toba Tek Singh lie? If the painted line is the border, then where is the "bit of earth" in between? In Wagah, that's what the young man who'd been asked to extinguish his cigarette wanted to know. He addressed his question to a Pakistani Ranger. At that moment, the guard was showing me the hobnailed soles of his standard-issue sandals. He looked up at the young man and gestured vaguely toward the barbed wire.

* * *

A week later, I was at a literary festival in Delhi, listening to Gulzar, an Urdu poet and filmmaker from Bombay. Born in a village called Deena in what is now Pakistan, Gulzar crossed into India by train during the riots in the months before Partition. As he remembers it, "I was still a child then, and I had to step over the corpses." At the festival, Gulzar sat on a panel devoted to Partition literature, and he had invited me because he knew that I had just been to Pakistan. The meeting was held in a sunlit brick amphitheater, with strings of marigold hung from the surrounding trees; mustard flowers waved in the fields beyond. Gulzar read a series of works, concluding with a poem entitled "Toba Tek Singh."

Gulzar's poem is faithful to the details of Manto's story: the poem's narrator wants to go to Wagah in order to tell Bishan Singh that the ordeal of Partition still continues. There are hearts that have yet to be divided; 1947 was only the first partition. Bishan's Muslim friends have succeeded in crossing the border, though some only as corpses. Bishan's daughter used to visit him once a year, an inch taller each time; now she is diminished by an inch with every passing year. The poem opens with the narrator hearing the call from Wagah:

I have to go to Wagah and meet Toba Tek Singh's Bishan
I have heard that he is still standing on his swollen legs
exactly where Manto had left him.
He still mutters "Uper the gur gur the mung the dal of the laltain."

Listening to Gulzar read his poem, my thoughts returned to the young man in Wagah. The truth is, there is no neutral territory between India and Pakistan. In his new book Amritsar to Lahore, Stephen Alter writes:

One of the great disappointments of my own journey was to discover that there is no such thing as a no man's land. At both the railway and road crossings, the territory of each country is entirely contiguous. Nothing separates these two nations, except for manmade structures like fences and gates. . . . Pakistan ends precisely where India begins.

So why is the myth of the no man's land so persistent? I think it has something to do with the power of literature. Alter himself admits that Toba Tek Singh came to mind when he visited the border. Indeed, for many readers, Toba Tek Singh has long been the symbol that captures the meaning of Partition. Bishan is the fool who does not know whether he belongs to India or to Pakistan, and his no man's land is a limbo of existential doubt and despair. But I think another reading is possible. Maybe Bishan is staking a claim to the "bit of earth which had no name." Maybe he is saying yes to both nations. And maybe a no man's land is the only place where he can do that.

* * *

On May 11, 1998, three explosions rocked the desert wastes of Rajasthan. Hours later, Prime Minister Vajpayee held a press conference, announcing that the world's largest democracy had conducted a test of its nuclear weapons. Of course, this was no mere scientific experiment; the test was a threat, intended to intimidate Pakistan. Newspapers and governments around the world denounced the detonations, but India was unbowed. By the end of the month, Pakistan had exploded its own nukes, realizing the dream of an "Islamic bomb" and answering India's challenge in kind. When fighting in Kargil erupted the following year, Indian and Pakistani leaders exchanged nuclear threats no fewer than thirteen times. The most remarkable thing about the contest of tests was the rhetoric, a kind of medieval machismo. Bal Thackeray, leader of the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena Party, was positively exuberant: "We have proved that we are not eunuchs any more." India had named its missile system Prithvi, Hindi for "earth." But Pakistan assumed the Prithvi in question was Prithvi Raj Chuhan, a twelfth-century Hindu king who resisted the Afghan invader Shahabuddin Ghauri, founder of the first Muslim kingdom in India. As it happened, Pakistan had just named one of its own missile programs after the aforementioned Afghan invader.

To all appearances, the two countries were more divided than ever. And yet despite all the military posturing, ambivalence about Partition runs deep. Indeed, even as they flaunt their nuclear arsenal, the ultra-nationalists of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) harbor fantasies of erasing the border: their dream is to reunite the territories, by force if necessary, in order to create an undivided India. Theirs is a dream of unity -- albeit a murderous dream. The dream exists on the other side of the border, too. In Pakistan, a militant Islamic group recently resolved to wrest Kashmir from Indian control and then use the province as a beachhead for a jihad against the whole of India. No one better embodies this Pakistani dream than Maulana Masood Azhar, leader of the militant Harkat-ul-Mujahideen group, who was released from an Indian jail on New Year's Eve 1999 in exchange for hostages from a hijacked Indian Airlines flight. Azhar has warned India:

Allah has sent me here, and if you cast an evil eye towards my beloved country, I will first of all enter India with 500,000 of my mujahideen, inshallah. That is why I am touring almost the whole nation these days. Half a million are ready, and according to the messages I am getting from across the country, I have many more mujahideen than these. The mothers are giving me their sons and asking me to make them like Bin Qasim [the Arab conqueror of Sind in 710 A.D.], not the worshippers of the West. The sisters are handing me their brothers and asking me to convert them into the warriors of Islam. The elders are telling me that our beards are white but even today we are ready to take up guns and come with you.

For fundamentalists on either side, the present is just a prelude to the past. Both sides dream of rolling back the clock -- and rolling back the border.

These competing fantasies of unity have bred a new kind of affinity on the subcontinent. As the filmmaker and peacenik Anand Patwardhan puts it, "Cross-border solidarity has been the only silver lining in the mushroom cloud." We were sitting in a makeshift editing room in Patwardhan's Bombay apartment. As we talked, I looked at a freeze-frame on his monitor. It showed a famous Bollywood personality, mouth open, in the midst of uttering a patriotic inanity about how each bit of dirt is sacred to Indians. Patwardhan continued: "Ever since India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998, relations between peace activists in India and Pakistan have blossomed." While much of the country was celebrating the first nuclear blast, he explained, Pakistan-India People's Forum for Peace and Democracy deepened a dialogue between citizens who want to work for peace in both countries. In seven years, the forum has sponsored four successful conferences, and peace activists now gather every New Year's Eve at Wagah for a candlelight vigil at the border.

Do good fences make good neighbors? The peace activists certainly want better relations between India and Pakistan, but they aren't lobbying for unification. Although they are eager to ease restrictions on travel and trade across the border, they nevertheless want the border itself to remain intact. In a better world, they suggest, borders won't mean so much; indeed, the nuclearization of the subcontinent reveals the arbitrariness of the division. Who needs armed guards and a white line when you can exterminate a city with the push of a button? The white line at Wagah seems almost obsolete, an artifact from an era when fighting a war meant moving troops across a border.

* * *

The metal gates on both sides are pulled shut at sunset, at the same precise instant, by opposing teams of guards. This evening ceremony is called Beating Retreat, and it's the most popular tourist attraction in Wagah -- on the night I saw it, there were visitors from all over the world. Soldiers from both India and Pakistan present arms. Then the national flags are lowered amid much blowing of bugles. Commanders from the two border patrols march up to one another and shake hands. The tourists applaud. Before the event is over, spectators on both sides are allowed to rush forward and gaze at each other from a distance of about fifteen feet. Throughout this ceremony, the guards mirror each other perfectly: their goose-stepping, their aggressive gestures, their shouted commands, all in sync. But the two enemies make sure not to cross the line that holds them apart. So how do they learn to perform this intimate dance? How well do we know each other? How hard do we work to remain enemies?

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Monterey Institute of International Studies, June 10, 2002

Research Story of the Week

India's Compellance Strategy: Calling Pakistan's Nuclear Bluff Over Kashmir

By Gaurav Kampani

Related links: Background Analysis of the Indo-Pakistani Standoff, March 2002 (PDF format)

Just when it seemed that the Indo-Pakistani military standoff had begun to show signs of de-escalation, tensions have flared up again. In response to the recent terror attacks (April-May, 2002) by Pakistan-based insurgent groups in Indian controlled Kashmir, India's Vajpayee government has threatened to prosecute a limited conventional war against Pakistan to punish Islamabad for what New Delhi describes as "cross-border terrorism." Pakistan has denied culpability in the terror attacks. Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf claims that his government lends only moral and political support to disaffected Kashmiri militants fighting Indian security forces in Kashmir. However, New Delhi and the international community disagree. Exasperated with Pakistan's mendacity, the Indian government has threatened strikes against militant camps and related infrastructure in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.

In turn, Pakistan has expressed alarm at the threat of war and warned India of a ferocious response. In late May, Musharraf threatened that if attacked, Pakistan would take the war into Indian territory. More ominously, Pakistani government representatives have made it plain that if pushed into a corner by its larger and more powerful neighbor, Pakistan would not hesitate to use its nuclear arsenal in self-defense.[1] To reiterate this point, Pakistan conducted a succession of ballistic missile tests in the last week of May. Although the tests were aimed primarily at a domestic audience, they once again highlighted the dangers of larger conventional war in South Asia and how such a war could easily take a tragic nuclear turn.

However, military tensions that peaked in the last week of May now appear to be winding down. International pressure has forced Pakistan to back down in the crisis; the Musharraf regime has capitulated before Indian demands to end the cross-border insurgency. Both India and Pakistan are now taking steps to defuse military tensions. In an acknowledgement that Pakistan is indeed taking positive steps to halt cross-border infiltrations, India has lifted the overflight ban imposed on Pakistani commercial jets following the attacks on the Indian parliament in December 2001; the naval armada massed in the North Arabian sea has also been ordered back to its home base. India is also expected to upgrade diplomatic relations with Islamabad and shortly undertake other steps that would signal a symbolic stand down from war time alert.

This paper begins by presenting a brief overview of India's and Pakistan's respective narratives on the post-1989 Kashmir insurgency. Next, it explains the rationale behind India's compellance strategy and how the Indo-Pakistani crisis is viewed in Washington. After reviewing the twists and turns in Pakistan's post-September 11th Kashmir policy, this paper concludes that Islamabad's apparent decision to accept war termination in Kashmir on New Delhi's terms essentially implies that India may have finally called Pakistan's nuclear bluff over Kashmir.

What is the Problem?

Although the international community is focused on the prospects of another war in South Asia, India and Pakistan have actually been at war for nearly 12-years. For more than a decade, Pakistan has preyed on India's political mismanagement in Kashmir to finance, train, and arm Kashmiri and foreign civilian combatants to wage a low-intensity or sub-conventional war against Indian security forces in Kashmir. The sub-conventional war in Kashmir is a spin-off of Pakistan's success in using Mujahideen proxies to defeat the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s; it is also part of a policy of deploying semi-autonomous radical Islamic groups to achieve foreign policy and strategic goals abroad.

Pakistan supports the insurgents in Kashmir for several reasons. First, it argues that India is responsible for "state terrorism" in Kashmir and military pressure alone will force New Delhi into granting the "oppressed Kashmiri Muslims" their right of "self determination." Second, the insurgents tie down a disproportionate number of Indian military and paramilitary forces in domestic fire fighting operations, which erodes India's overall conventional edge against Pakistan. And finally, Pakistan hopes that the defeat of the Indian military in Kashmir will be sweet revenge for New Delhi's role in Pakistan's break up after the 1971 Bangladesh War. More significantly, Pakistan's prosecution of the sub-conventional war against India has been facilitated by the acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability since the late 1980s. The military establishment in Rawalpindi until very recently believed that its nuclear arsenal would deter India from widening the war and force New Delhi to fight the insurgency in Kashmir on terms determined by Pakistan.

India admits that the root causes of the insurgency are the consequence of myopic policies pursued by successive governments in New Delhi since the 1950s. But it blames Pakistan for the insurgency and the endless spiral of violence, which in its view has prevented India from negotiating with the disaffected groups and restoring normalcy in Kashmir. In India's view, misgovernance is not confined to Kashmir per se; it is a tragic consequence of the poor quality of Indian democracy, which affects other Indian provinces as well. New Delhi also blames Pakistani sponsored militants for destroying Kashmir's syncretic culture (a blend of Sufi-Islam and Hinduism), ethnically cleansing the region of its Hindu-Pundit minorities, and promoting a Talibanized brand of Islam. The Indian army is also tired of fighting a reactive war of attrition against a hostile population that it cannot possibly win. The 12-year war has sucked in nearly 200,000 Indian military and paramilitary troops. New Delhi has estimated its military and civilian casualties during this period between 35,000-70,000. Cumulatively, these losses exceed the combined losses of all four conventional wars that India has fought Pakistan during the last five decades.

As a result, New Delhi has concluded that it cannot resolve the Kashmir problem politically short of terminating the insurgency in Kashmir. Since the insurgency cannot be defeated by fighting the civilian combatants in a reactive campaign in Indian-controlled Kashmir alone, India must take the battle into Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. This can be achieved in two ways. First, India can either politically coerce Pakistan by threatening war to end support to the insurgents in Kashmir. Or alternatively, India can change the terms of the insurgency in Kashmir by initiating a limited conventional war to raise the costs of the sub-conventional war for Pakistan to a point where they become unsustainable.

The meaning of the limited war strategy is that India has reached a point where it is willing to test Pakistan's nuclear resolve over Kashmir

Why Is India Doing What It's Doing?

The Indian government has essentially capitalized on the political opportunity created by the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States and the Bush doctrine against international terrorism to resort to a high-stakes strategy of coercive diplomacy to compel Pakistan into making a U-turn on its Kashmir policy. The events of September helped create a favorable environment for India to act in three ways.

First, the attacks by Al Qaeda highlighted the role of Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies in supporting the Taliban and other radical Islamic militant groups in Afghanistan and Kashmir. U.S. pressure forced Pakistan into abandoning the Taliban. As there was an organic link between Pakistan's support for radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan and Kashmir, India succeeded in framing Pakistan as part of the problem of terrorism.

Second, the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan created a strategic convergence between the United States and India as both countries saw terrorist-related national security threats from radical Islamic groups operating out of Afghanistan and Pakistani-controlled territories. India and the United States were thus able to apply joint pressure on Islamabad to abandon support for such groups.

Third, the events on September 11th blurred the distinction between terrorists and "freedom fighters." The magnitude of the violence unleashed by Al Qaeda swung international opinion behind governments fighting radical non-state actors, especially when the targeted state was a democracy. In particular, India was able to frame the insurgency in Kashmir as a war between a multicultural democracy and "monocultural" sectarianism.

Although the Indian government is prepared to allow coercive diplomacy to run its course, several Indian leaders believe that Pakistan's diplomatic isolation, economic bankruptcy, and conventional military inferiority have created a strategic space where India can successfully fight a limited conventional war with Pakistan short of an all out conflict or nuclear exchange. Such nonchalance in the face of Pakistan's nuclear threats might be part of an Indian strategy of nuclear brinksmanship. Alternatively, the Vajpayee government may have concluded that Pakistan would be unlikely to escalate to the nuclear level due to fears that the United States would effectively restrain Islamabad from using nuclear weapons. Likewise, India's national security managers have probably also accurately calculated that in the event of a limited conventional war, the United States would intervene to either terminate or limit any shooting war between India and Pakistan to safeguard its strategic objectives in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

India's current belligerence stands in sharp contrast to its diffidence in the early and mid-1990s. At the time Indian elites feared that an Indo-Pakistani war would internationalize the Kashmir dispute and generate pressure on India to cap and roll back its strategic nuclear and missile programs. In the present strategic environment, however, Indian leaders are confident that the great powers including the United States share India's perceptions of the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism and sympathize with New Delhi's stance on Kashmir. In fact, in the present crisis, great power intervention has favored India as the United States, European Union, Japan, and Russia have applied unremitting pressure on Islamabad to stop cross-border infiltrations into Indian territory. Similarly, India's growing strategic partnership with the United States and relative success in persuading Washington to accept its case for a minimal deterrent have provided the Vajpayee government added confidence that the diplomatic repercussions of a limited conventional war in South Asia can be kept within tolerable limits.

How Does The United States View The Indo-Pakistani Standoff?

As tensions simmer in South Asia, the United States has emerged as the principal mediator between India and Pakistan and led international diplomatic efforts aimed at conflict avoidance. While the U.S. alliance with Pakistan is tactical, the growing partnership with India is based on a longer term post-Cold War convergence of strategic interests. Washington is well aware of Pakistan's past involvement with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and its present role in aiding and abetting the cross-border insurgency in Kashmir. But it also believes that President Musharraf's regime is perhaps the best antidote to Islamic militancy in Pakistan. Therefore, the United States has attempted to safeguard its emerging partnership with India by leaning on Pakistan to terminate support for the Kashmir insurgents in a manner that avoids humiliating President Musharraf publicly or compromising his domestic credibility. Above all, Washington has sought to prevent a nuclear conflagration in the region.

The United States regards Pakistan as an important ally and frontline state in the battle against global terrorism. There is much appreciation in Washington for Pakistan's role in helping "root out" the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Following the exfiltration of Al Qaeda leaders from Afghanistan into the "no-man's-land" that constitutes Pakistan's tribal areas, the Musharraf regime has taken the unprecedented step of deploying the army and paramilitary forces to arrest them despite considerable tribal opposition. Pakistan's security agencies are also cooperating with the United States in trying to net Al Qaeda leaders who are presumably taking shelter in Pakistani cities.[2]

The Bush administration is justifiably concerned, therefore, that a war in South Asia and continuing military tensions with India could distract the Pakistani army from its operations along the Afghanistan border; withdrawal of Pakistani forces from the tribal regions could allow Taliban and Al Qaeda forces to regroup.[3] Indeed, one theory circulating is that Al Qaeda members are collaborating with militant groups in Kashmir to create incidents to provoke an Indo-Pakistani war; the rationale being that such a war would release pressure from the Pakistani army to hunt them down.[4] Similarly, domestic turmoil in Pakistan, a consequence of a potential war against India, could undermine the Musharraf regime, and seriously constrict its capacity to combat Islamic militant groups at home. Senior U.S. officials also fear that in the worst case scenario, a war might force the United States to evacuate its forces from Pakistan.[5] Such a move would invariably break the momentum and possibly disrupt U.S. military operations against the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders hiding in the treacherous mountainous terrain along the Pakistan-Afghan border.

The official and unofficial view in Washington is that the concept of a limited conventional war under nuclear conditions is a dangerous proposition. There are no guarantees that such a war could be kept limited; wars have a momentum of their own, and there exists a high risk that such a conflict could soon spin out of control. As U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage put it bluntly in a recent interview, "the problem is once the iron starts to be engaged between the two sides, then reason and logic seem to go out of the window."[6] The U.S. understanding is that nuclear deterrence in South Asia is based on crude nuclear arsenals and delivery systems that are relatively vulnerable and unstable, rudimentary command and control, weak communications, and poor intelligence. At the same time, both India and Pakistan are geographically proximate, have a history of misperceiving each other's intentions and resolve, and have scant understanding of the nuclear "red lines" on either side of the border. Under such circumstances, New Delhi and Islamabad could end up in a nuclear war accidentally, or through inadvertence or miscalculation. Should such an eventuality come to pass, it would create a human and environmental disaster on an unprecedented scale and set Indian and Pakistani societies back by several decades.[7]

But despite these concerns, the United States has implicitly and explicitly accepted India's argument that Pakistan is part of the problem of terrorism, and has rejected Islamabad's claims that it lends only moral and political support to the civilian combatants in Kashmir. During the first phase of the Afghan campaign (October-December 2001), senior Bush administration officials were guarded in their public criticism of Pakistan's role in fomenting the sub-conventional war in Indian-controlled Kashmir. That was largely because Islamabad's logistical and intelligence support were critical for the success of the campaign against the Taliban. At the time, the United States also wanted to avoid embarrassing and undermining President Musharraf, who was then facing considerable heat from Pakistan's religious parties and Islamic militant groups who opposed his decision to abandon the Taliban and support U.S. war-related efforts.

But as India and Pakistan stand on the brink of war, senior Bush administration officials from the president on down have publicly admonished President Musharraf and demanded that he deliver on his promises to stop cross-border activities of civilian combatants into Indian-controlled Kashmir.[8] High-level diplomatic emissaries from the United States, Britain, and the European Union have unanimously made the point that the onus lies on Pakistan to reduce the political temperature in South Asia.[9] Washington has also made it plain that it will no longer countenance the Pakistani government's characterization of the militants fighting the insurgency in Kashmir as "freedom fighters." Instead, the United States expects Pakistan to dismantle the camps and related infrastructure for these groups permanently; the United States will also independently verify this using national technical means.[10] Should Pakistan fail to comply with U.S. demands, it risks jeopardizing its post-September 11th relationship with Washington.

Simultaneously, the United States has exercised considerable diplomatic pressure on India to exercise restraint and let diplomacy run its course before initiating any military action. Bush administration representatives have urged that once Pakistan begins to dismantle the insurgent training camps, and levels of cross-border infiltrations decline, the Vajpayee government should reciprocate by demobilizing its forces currently deployed along the border. India should also reciprocate by restarting a diplomatic dialogue with Pakistan on all issues, including Kashmir. More significantly, India should hold free and fair elections in Kashmir, and begin a serious dialogue with Pakistan, with U.S. and international facilitation if necessary, to find a political and peaceful resolution to the Kashmir dispute.[11]

Can Musharraf Deliver?

Pakistan's Kashmir policy has clearly failed. Despite waging a sub-conventional war against India for more than a decade, Islamabad is nowhere close to its goal of wresting Kashmir from Indian control. To the contrary, Pakistan is now confronted with the possibility of a conventional war with India, a war that it does not want, and one that it cannot win. And despite the overall alienation of the Kashmiri Muslims from Indian rule and India's record of human rights abuses in the region, the international community has rejected Pakistan's Kashmir policy. Equally significant, the international community has made it plain to Islamabad that regardless of the moral legitimacy of Pakistan's claims on Kashmir, its policy of waging a sub-conventional war using Islamic fundamentalist proxies in Indian-controlled Kashmir is unacceptable.

Pakistan was forced to make the first U-turn in Afghanistan in September 2001 after U.S. pressure forced it to abandon the Taliban. At the time it was clear that Pakistan would sooner rather than later have to end its policy of arming insurgents in Kashmir, given the organic link between its Afghanistan and Kashmir policies. In both cases, Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment deployed militant Islamic proxies to achieve foreign policy and strategic goals. But the generals in Rawalpindi and Pakistan's radical Islamic parties and groups refused to pay heed. In September last year, President Musharraf disingenuously attempted to defend the military establishment's ignominious failure in Afghanistan, especially the abandonment of its Taliban ally, by arguing that it was done to safeguard the Kashmir cause.

In January 2002, President Musharraf responded to international pressure and India's military buildup by making a seminal speech in which he spelled out his vision of Pakistan as a moderate Islamic state.[12] Musharraf boldly declared his government's resolve to stamp out Islamic militancy in Pakistan. He also made public assurances that Pakistan would not allow its territory to be used for terrorist activities anywhere in the world, including Kashmir.[13] Pakistan's international interlocutors interpreted this statement as a signal that Islamabad would finally begin reigning in the militant groups waging sub-conventional war in India. But these assurances turned out to be false. Although cross-border infiltration into Indian- controlled Kashmir showed a visible decline in January and February, after March 2002, they bounced back to their earlier levels; according to preliminary data, the number of violent incidents against Indian security forces between March and early May 2002 actually exceeded the number of similar incidents in April-May 2001.[14]

Perhaps the military establishment in Rawalpindi genuinely believed that as long as Pakistan cooperated with the United States against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Washington would turn a blind eye to Pakistan's policy in Kashmir. Or in other words that the Bush administration would continue to paint the Taliban and Al Qaeda with the brush of terrorism, but accept the civilian combatants trained and abetted by the Pakistani military to fight the insurgency in Indian-controlled Kashmir as "freedom fighters." This proved to be a grave miscalculation.

Even worse for President Musharraf, Pakistan's domestic elites stand divided on his Kashmir policy. Although the Islamic parties want him to continue the supposed Jihad in Kashmir, mainstream opposition parties and liberal intellectuals have made a strong case for terminating the insurgency. The latter have forcefully argued that perpetual confrontation with India has financially bankrupted the Pakistani state; the policy of carving a political space for radical Islamic militants in Pakistan's civil society has led to the growth of militant Islamic sectarianism within Pakistan. These liberals and several mainstream politicians maintain that so long as the military-intelligence establishment continues to allow such groups to operate from within Pakistani territories and arms them to wage wars abroad (as in Afghanistan and Kashmir), Pakistan will be unable achieve domestic and external peace.[15]

Slowly though inexorably, the Musharraf regime has begun to change Pakistan's decade-old Kashmir policy.[16] There are indications that in the last week of May, President Musharraf finally ordered his military to reign in militant groups operating from Pakistani-controlled territories. Militants have been advised to stand down and desist from crossing into Indian territories; their wireless communications have been cut off; and camps where militants were housed and trained are being dismantled.[17] Those militant leaders resisting the Pakistani army's diktat have been placed on a watch list and implicitly threatened with arrest.[18]

The two key questions now are whether Musharraf can successfully implement a U-turn on Kashmir and contain the subsequent domestic fall out without jeopardizing the stability of his regime. And second, whether Pakistan's army and intelligence agencies can actually force the Islamic militant groups to do their bidding and halt insurgency operations in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

Domestically, doing an about turn on Kashmir will be a tough sell for President Musharraf. Last year, when the Musharraf regime abandoned the Taliban and cracked down on the Islamic political parties and groups protesting that decision, it enjoyed extensive support from Pakistan's silent majority and the mainstream political parties. However, after Musharraf imposed himself as president for a period of five years in May 2002 through the instrument of a rigged referendum of doubtful constitutional legality, he stands politically isolated. The liberal elites and mainstream opposition parties who applauded Musharraf enthusiastically for his bid to reign in Islamic militancy in Pakistan, now stand united in their opposition to his rule. Hence, Musharraf is now trapped between the devil and the deep sea. On the one hand he risks war and possible national ruin for Pakistan; on the other, he is vulnerable to accusations of being a national sell-out.

At present the Musharraf regime is engaged in a war against Islamic militants on two fronts. It is assisting U.S. forces in their fight against the remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership, which has melted into Pakistani cities and most likely taken shelter in the mountainous terrain along the Pakistan-Afghan border. Simultaneously, it is battling militant Islamic sectarian groups and terrorists at home. The regime is now confronted with the onerous responsibility of reigning in the militant proxies fighting the Indian security forces in Kashmir. In the last six months, Al Qaeda and domestic terrorist groups in Pakistan have carried out a series of murderous terrorist attacks in retaliation against the military's crackdown on militant Islamic groups as part of the U.S.-led global campaign against terrorism.[19] There is now the very real possibility that the militants trained by Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies for insurgency operations in Kashmir could ally themselves with these terrorist groups to wage a war against the Pakistani government.[20]

There is also the question whether Pakistan can effectively control the militant proxy groups to do its bidding. The militants trained and armed by Pakistan's army and its intelligence agencies are not entirely creatures of the Pakistani state. They are semi-autonomous in nature and often pursue their agenda independently of the priorities and policy shifts in Islamabad. After receiving state patronage for nearly two decades, the militant Islamic groups have developed deep roots in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and Pakistan's civil society in general. Indeed, some banned militant groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba have vowed to continue the fight in Indian-Kashmir, regardless of any changes in Islamabad's agenda.[21] The possibility that such renegade groups might continue receiving help from the middle ranks within Pakistan's military-intelligence agencies is also not far fetched. There is also the possibility that some groups or individuals might team up with remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda to carry out terrorist attacks in India with the goal of sparking an Indo-Pakistani war.

Hence Musharraf needs a political cover to cloak his retreat in Kashmir. Thus far, the Indian government has refused to oblige. If India ends up humiliating the Musharraf regime by desisting from making any reciprocal concessions such as demobilization, or restoring the dialogue to discuss a political solution to the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan, then the Musharraf government might find its credibility at home entirely compromised. There would then be the danger that the Islamic political parties, alienated Kashmiri militant groups, and the remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership might regroup and exploit the discontent within Pakistan's civil society and sections of the military establishment to destabilize the Musharraf regime. In the worst case, Musharraf might himself become the victim of assassination or be toppled in a coup from within the army ranks.

Pakistan will therefore have to make careful domestic and foreign policy choices in the next several months. If President Musharraf and the Pakistan army deliver on their promise to reign in the militant groups waging war against Indian security forces in Kashmir, they will win economic and political support from the international community. The onus will then be on India to grant political autonomy to its alienated Kashmiri-Muslim populace and more significantly, to negotiate a political solution to the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan. However, should Pakistan's military leaders renege on their assurances and return to their earlier policy of waging a sub-conventional war with India, they will risk international political isolation, economic sanctions, and possibly war with India.

Preliminary Conclusions:

The crisis in South Asia that reached its peak in the last week of May 2002 now appears to be winding down. India has publicly acknowledged that President Musharraf is making good on his promises; during the first week of June, cross-border militant infiltrations have declined substantially. According to the Indian foreign ministry, the shift in Pakistan's policies marks the beginning of a "promising process." India's foreign minister Jaswant Singh has also declared that if General Musharraf's pledges are "converted on the ground into action...India will reciprocate in a manner that is befitting."[22] This statement is being viewed as an indication that India will shortly reciprocate Musharraf's actions by both upgrading its diplomatic relations with Islamabad and as well taking symbolic steps to signal a reduction in military tensions before U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visits the region.[23] Similarly, across the border, President Musharraf has also acknowledged that the chances of a war in South Asia are now "minimal."[24]

Prime Minister Vajpayee has proposed that India and Pakistan follow up by establishing joint military patrols along the line of control (LoC) to monitor cross-border infiltrations.[25] Although Pakistan was initially cool to the idea, it has not rejected it out of hand.[26] Pakistan would prefer the deployment of UN monitors along the LoC. Islamabad is also receptive to the idea of having a joint U.S.-U.K. border patrol. But India has rejected both proposals. New Delhi believes the LoC is too vast to be policed by a small international force. But more to the point, India does not want to internationalize the Kashmir dispute and prefers that both India and Pakistan reach a modus vivendi on Kashmir bilaterally.[27]

However, regardless of Indian sensitivities, the Kashmir dispute has become internationalized. In the recent crisis, the great powers -- United States, Britain, European Union, and Russia -- played a significant diplomatic role in conflict prevention. And despite public noises to the contrary, India welcomed international diplomatic efforts aimed at pressuring Pakistan into changing its decade-old Kashmir policy. So whether India likes it or not, the great powers are likely to take a greater interest in the Kashmir dispute than in the past. Although it is unlikely that the United States will follow up with a major peace initiative like in the Middle East, a low-key effort on the part of the Bush administration to facilitate an Indo-Pakistani dialogue is a possibility.

Ironically, this crisis demonstrated that the internationalization of the Kashmir issue favored India and not Pakistan. Historically, it was Pakistan that has always tried to internationalize the Kashmir issue in the hope that third-party mediation would counterbalance India's greater strength. From the early 1990s, it was Pakistan that beat the drum of a potential nuclear war over Kashmir to try and draw the attention of the international community to pressure India into accepting international mediation efforts and into making good on its promise for a plebiscite. However, as it turned out, the U.S. campaign against Islamic fundamentalism and Washington's new approach of "zero tolerance" towards terrorism turned the tables on Pakistan. Much to Islamabad's chagrin, international pressure focused on Pakistan to end cross-border infiltrations. Similarly, the threat of a larger conventional war in the region and Pakistan's nuclear first-use doctrine brought international pressures on Islamabad to back down in the crisis. Worse, Pakistan's international image has taken a beating. Pakistan is now not only regarded as the "problem child" in South Asia, but is also viewed as a revisionist as well as an irresponsible nuclear power.[28]

The Pakistani military-intelligence establishment's decision to end cross-border infiltrations and ultimately dismantle the militant training camps and related infrastructure, marks the logical end of policies initiated following the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States last year. In the first phase, Pakistan abandoned the Taliban in Afghanistan. In the second phase, Islamabad initiated a crackdown on Islamic militancy within Pakistani territories. Now it has decided to stop radical Islamic militants from waging sub-conventional war in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Although the Pakistani government might not admit it, all three decisions are organically tied to one another. These decisions cumulatively mark the beginning of an attempt to reform Pakistani society domestically; they also constitute an attempt to rethink and recast Pakistan's national security goals. General Musharraf's decision to end Pakistan's two-decade old policy of using the instrument of Islamic radical proxies to achieve foreign policy and strategic goals now offers the best hope for his regime to crush Islamic militancy domestically as well as to achieve a viable and lasting peace with both India and Afghanistan.

Pakistan's capitulation to Indian demands to end the cross-border insurgency constitutes a triumph of India's strategy of compellance. Islamabad has tacitly acknowledged that India's threat to wage war was credible; that there probably existed a strategic space between a sub-conventional war and a full-fledged conventional war, where India might have been able to fight a limited conventional war in Kashmir effectively. Should this latter conclusion be borne out by subsequent evidence, it could mean that India has finally called Pakistan's nuclear bluff over Kashmir.

The international media's hype notwithstanding, it was probably never India's intentions to either inflict a major defeat on Pakistan's military or occupy a substantial part of Pakistani territory. Rather, New Delhi's goal all along was to raise the costs of the sub-conventional war in Kashmir for Pakistan to the extent where they would become unsustainable. India achieved this by first imposing the huge cost of war mobilization on Pakistan, which strained an already overburdened Pakistani economy. When this strategy began to yield diminishing returns, New Delhi threatened to attack militant camps and the Pakistani army's assets and infrastructure in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. In effect, India threatened to lock Pakistan's military into a limited war of attrition in which India could exploit its numerical superiority. India's national security managers also calculated that Pakistan's conventional military inferiority, financial bankruptcy, domestic political divisions, and international isolation would give it very little space for maneuver. The other side of that assessment was that U.S. stakes in Afghanistan and the stability of the Musharraf regime as well as fear of a potential nuclear conflict, would invite severe international pressure on Islamabad to retreat before India's threat of war. Indeed, the initial outcomes of this crisis have validated the accuracy of these calculations.

Although India has emerged from this latest standoff successfully, the Vajpayee government will now have to think through the various possible endgames in Kashmir. Until now, India's approach has focused disproportionately on ending the problem of Pakistani-sponsored insurgency operations in Kashmir; little attention has been paid to meeting the aspirations of the alienated Kashmiri populace. Now that Pakistan has decided to terminate support for the cross-border insurgency, international pressure will focus on India to restore the democratic process in Kashmir and negotiate a political solution to the dispute with Pakistan. Unless India can alleviate the alienated Kashmiri-Muslims' sense of grievance against Indian misgovernance and find some way to satisfy Pakistan's irredentism, the possibility of another Indo-Pakistani conflict will remain, and peace will elude South Asia.

Sources:

[1] Dharam Shourie, "Defiant Pakistan threatens to use nukes," Rediff on the Net, 30 May 2002, http://www.rediff.com
[2] "U.S. issues fact-file on Pakistan's assistance," Dawn, 28 May 2002, http://www.dawn.com
[3] The Associated Press, "Pakistan Shifts Troops From Border With Afghanistan," New York Times, 30 May 2002, http://www.nytimes.com
[4] William Safire, "Al Qaeda Provoking War," New York Times, 30 May 2002, http://www.nytimes.com
[5] "Plan to protect U.S. soldiers in Indo-Pak war," Daily Times, 8 June 2002, http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/
[6] "Kashmir is a bilateral issue: Armitage," Rediff on the Net, 4 June 2002, http://www.rediff.com
[7] Tom Shanker, "12 Million Could Die at Once in an Indo-Pakistan War," New York Times, 27 May 2002, http://www.nytimes.com
[8] Elisabeth BuMiller and Tom Shanker, "Bush Presses Pakistan and Orders Rumsfeld to Region," 31 May 2002, http://www.nytimes.com
[9] Saukat Piracha and Imtiaz Gul, "Freedom fighters are terrorists: Straw," Daily Times, 29 May 2002, http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/
[10] Sridhar Krishnaswami, "Make action evident, U.S. tells Musharraf," Hindu, 8 June 2002, http://www.hinduonnet.com
[11] C. Raja Mohan, "Musharraf vows to stop infiltration: Armitage," Hindu, 8 June 2002, http://www.hinduonnet.com
[12] "In Musharraf's Words: 'A Day of Reckoning'," New York Times, 12 January 2002, http://www.nytimes.com
[13] Ibid.
[14] Jim Hoagland, "Misreading Musharraf," Washington Post, 23 May 2002, http://www.washingtonpost.com
[15] "Change of regime can avert war, Benazir," Dawn, 26 May 2002, http://www.dawn.com; Irfan Husain, "Giving peace a chance," Dawn, 1 June 2002; Shafqat Mahmood, "Rethinking national priorities," The News International Pakistan, 7 June 2002, http://www.jang-group.com/thenews/
[16] Celia W. Dugger and Tom Shanker, "Indians See Hope as Pakistan Halts Kashmir Militants," New York Times, 8 June 2002, http://www.nytimes.com
[17] Munir Ahmad, "Kashmir Militants Say Camps Shut Down," Washington Post, 7 June 2002, http://www.washingtonpost.com
[18] Mohammad Imran, "32-top jihadi leaders put on govt. watch list," Daily Times, 7 June 2002, http://www.dailytimes.com.pk
[19] Karl Vick and Kamran Khan, "Al Qaeda Tied to Attack in Pakistani Cities: Militants Joining Forces Against Western Targets," Washington Post, 30 May 2002, http://www.washingtonpost.com
[20] Dexter Filkins, "Kashmiri Militants Angry At Being Blocked From India," New York Times, 9 June 2002, http://www.nytimes.com
[21] Ibid.
[22] C. Raja Mohan, "Musharraf's pledge a 'step forward,' says Jaswant," Hindu, 9 June 2002, http://www.hinduonnet.com
[23] Ibid.
[24] "War threat minimal, says Musharraf," Dawn, 9 June 2002, http://www.dawn.com
[25] The Associated Press, "India Proposes Joint Patrol of Disputed Kashmir Border," New York Times, 5 June 2002, http://www.nytimes.com
[26] "Proposal be formally conveyed, Pakistan," Dawn, 6 June 2002, http://www.dawn.com
[27] Vladimir Radyuhin, "India rejects foreign participation in foreign patrol," Hindu, 7 June 2002, http://www.hinduonnet.com
[28] "World 'cannot tolerate' Pak. stance on nukes: Straw," The News International Pakistan, 7 June 2002, http://www.jang-group.com/thenews/




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