NEW DELHI, 9 June — War and peace have now become indistinguishable in the confrontation between India and Pakistan.
The more adventurous American teenagers who were fortunate enough to be born in the fifties rather than in the murderous, war-hungry forties used to amuse themselves by a game called “chicken”. Boys would dare each other by racing to the edge of a precipice in souped up cars, and braking just short of the precipice; the boy who stopped closest to the edge “won” the game, and the other was “chicken”.
Even a casual observer could see enough to be convinced that a game of nuclear chicken was being played on the subcontinent. The rest of the world was horrified. Indians and Pakistanis shrugged and carried on. They behaved as if nothing much would happen, and if it did what could they do about it anyway? If that’s the way the cookie crumbled, or indeed blew up, that’s the way it would.
We used to be famous for being indifferent to the fate of the rest of the world. Have we become indifferent to our own fate as well?
The one good thing to emerge from the latest crisis between India and Pakistan was to drive home the reality and meaning of nuclear power. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Gen. Pervez Musharraf are, in a sense, playing out the third act of a drama that began when Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto were contemporaries. Mrs. Gandhi changed the dynamics of the subcontinent with Pokhran in 1974. (The code phrase by which she was informed that the test had been successful was a classic: The Buddha has smiled.)
Bhutto responded immediately with a nuclear program that quickly became known as the “Islamic bomb” because, as he hinted pretty heavily himself, Pakistan would ensure that a Muslim nation too had a nuclear weapon. Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif were leaders of their respective nations during the second act when India and Pakistan shed their pretense and proclaimed themselves nuclear powers.
There was drama in India and histrionics in Pakistan, but there still remained a sense of the implicit rather than the explicit in our nuclear capability. The bomb was a deterrent rather than a first-use tactic, a weapon for that last resort that would never actually come, making this bomb a remote and even theoretical fact.
True, India and Pakistan had different doctrines. India has affirmed that it would never be the first to use a nuclear weapon, and that it would never use a nuclear weapon against a non-nuclear country. Pakistan had a different philosophy. As a smaller country, it argued, it had no option except to exercise the right to strike first; for it might not be in a position to strike second. But no one believed that any sane person would actually exercise such a terrible option.
The third act began on a quiet, almost false note, when Musharraf casually, but not accidentally, told an interviewer from the German magazine Der Spiegel that Pakistan had created a nuclear arsenal in order to use it. The comment was good for a bold paragraph or two in the Indian newspapers but the rest of the world took no notice, dismissing it as part of the posturing that was habitual in India-Pak relations. But the general was sending a specific message. Very soon, others around him began to echo the line, till it was clear that a pattern was being etched on the consciousness. Pakistan had initiated a game of nuclear brinkmanship on the subcontinent. Why?
Sept. 11 was the ultimate achievement of the suicide-missionary. If it terrified and then angered America into action, it also inspired hundreds of radical groups across the world into attempting their own versions of Sept. 11. According to statements made by Musharraf himself, Pakistan has become a haven for such groups, who have created a “state within a state”, thanks to the history of war on both the flanks of Pakistan.
The ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence wing, supported, financed, armed and trained such groups in the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan through the 1980s to huge international applause. Excited by the success of this strategy, Gen. Zia-ul Haq could hardly resist opening an undeclared front in Punjab, by supporting the movement for “Khalistan”.
The switch to Jammu and Kashmir was inevitable. There was further impetus from the fact that victory in the Afghan war released a large number of volunteers from that front for the insurrection against India.
It was a perfectly crafted opportunity for an undeclared war from which Islamabad could calibrate its distance. The often ham-handed, and counterproductive response of Delhi in the Valley played further into Islamabad’s hands.
And yet those hands were unable to loosen the grip of Delhi on the Kashmir Valley. This must have been frustrating. There seems to have been a surge of determination among the “jihadi” groups after Sept. 11, an effort to shake the will and confidence of India with a series of dramatic attacks that would have no less an impact on the region than the destruction of the World Trade Center had on America.
The assault on the Jammu and Kashmir legislature came within three weeks of Sept. 11. And think of the roar that would have echoed around the world if even one of the suicide missionaries had reached Central Hall, their target, on Dec. 13 and blown up India’s Parliament. The failure of that attack nearly led to war. Its success on Dec. 13 would certainly have started the war that is in no one’s interest.
No one sensible, that is.
The Anglo-American success in Afghanistan has been partial. American claims that Osama Bin Laden is dead seem hollow, or even wishful, in the absence of any evidence. Moreover, most of the top leadership of Al-Qaeda and the Taleban government is alive, and possibly well. Its address? Somewhere in Pakistan.
There is a secret war that is going on in the region, and it is a moot point whether the hard-liners hate Americans more than the Indians. The Pakistan government is a patchwork product of a sudden coup. It is a coalition of interests united in the desire to survive but disparate about what it wants to do with the power that survival offers.
The support for the “liberation” of Kashmir extends of course through all sections of Pakistan, but there are differences on the means that should be used to further such a cause. Musharraf walks with the wind. After his dramatically candid speech in January Musharraf quietly began to turn direction. He did not want his war against terrorism to become confused, or even synonymous, with India’s war against terrorism.
Perhaps on the advice, or even cold urging of some of his fellow generals, he began to draw once again the line between the enemies of America and the enemies of India based on Pakistan soil. He was willing to shadow box with the former. (Shadow boxing is the appropriate phrase; the general has not been able to hand over the alleged assassin of Daniel Pearl to the Americans).
Musharraf was determined to protect and encourage the enemies of India. There was also the lure of popularity (a serious temptation for any military ruler) in such a separation of objectives.
Those willing to use guns in Kashmir were released and permitted to function under different names. The “terror infiltration” resumed and was stepped up. But Musharraf was also aware of the danger of the Indian response, and the possibility of war. Delhi had not hidden its determination to use its armies and cross the border; there have been no secrets in this confrontation. He had only one real answer. Musharraf sought shelter under the nuclear threshold.
He may also have believed that it was possible to continue an insurrection under this threshold, and that India would never risk war if it realized that Pakistan would not hesitate to launch its nuclear missiles.
This was a miscalculation. It ignored a simple but basic fact about nuclear war. A nuclear war is not bilateral. It is not even regional. It is international. The havoc of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan will affect half the world’s population across dozens of nations; it will not destroy only Indians and Pakistanis.
The interests of America, Britain, China, Russia, Iran and the Arab world are as directly damaged as those of the subcontinent. Musharraf overplayed his hand. He may have thought that nuclear bombs would bring the world to Kashmir. Instead they brought the world to Islamabad.
These last weeks have suddenly made Indians and Pakistanis aware of the dangers that they face if this terrible game of nuclear chicken goes out of hand. So far the people have been helpless, almost hypnotized into a still silence by the prospect of doom. But once the tensions ease, as, God willing, they will, a slowly rising spiral of anger will begin to demand accountability from those who flirted with the nuclear button. The elections scheduled for October in Pakistan could still turn out to be interesting.
When you want to twist an arm it is useful to send someone the size of Richard Armitage. For once, the American intervention was welcomed for there are no other brokers, honest or dishonest, with the muscle to influence this dangerous subcontinent. But this is only the middle of the story.
The world is now engaged with the subcontinent. It would be foolish in the extreme if it walked away in the illusion that it had restored peace. For, as we noted, war and peace have become indistinguishable between India and Pakistan.
