Author: The Economist Global Agenda
Publication: The Economist
Date: May 16, 2002
URL: http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1130906
The latest terrorist outrage in
Kashmir has pushed India and Pakistan a little closer to the brink. Could
this spark the first war between nuclear powers?
"It is just this type of barbarism
that the international war on terrorism is determined to stop." So said
Christina Rocca, the top American diplomat for South Asia, of the killing
on May 14th of 34 people, most of them soldiers' wives and children, who
were travelling on a bus in Kaluchak in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.
It is also the sort of attack that India has given warning would provoke
retaliation against Pakistan, which could spark the first war between nuclear
powers.
Mrs Rocca was already shuttling
between the Indian and Pakistani capitals to head off such a war. India's
army has been mobilised along its border with Pakistan since December,
after a terrorist attack on its parliament. The military threat, coupled
with international pressure on Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf,
was supposed to curtail attacks on India originating from Pakistan. Mrs
Rocca's mission may be one of the last chances for this "coercive diplomacy"
to work.
It had seemed to be working, for
a while. General Musharraf banned several violent Islamist outfits, including
groups fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, arrested their leaders and froze
their accounts. In January he pledged to crack down on extremism and to
prevent terrorists from using Pakistan as a staging post for attacks on
India. The Indians never believed him and now, they say, evidence of his
perfidy is in. General Musharraf has released three out of every four people
he arrested. Terrorist camps have been re- established in the part of Kashmir
controlled by Pakistan, with some 3,000 inmates, say Indian officials:
their infiltration into Indian Kashmir has not slowed down since last year,
and is sure to speed up once snow melts from the mountain passes. India
claims to have learned that the head of Pakistan's military Inter Services
Intelligence agency recently told army commanders that militancy was the
only weapon left to Pakistan in dealing with India. And now terrorists
have staged the bloodiest attack since Kashmir's parliament was bombed
in October.
There are two ways to avoid retaliation:
General Musharraf could convince India that he is serious about reining
in the terrorists, or India could continue to answer terrorism with what
will come to look like empty threats. General Musharraf may lack either
the power or the inclination to do the first; the humiliation of the second
is becoming unbearable to India. Its government, looking feeble after mishandling
massacres of hundreds of Muslims in the western state of Gujarat, is under
increasing pressure to act. The prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, said
that India "will have to counter" the massacre.
Pakistan has long embraced the cause
of freeing Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state, from Indian rule
while claiming (unbelievably) that it gives only diplomatic and moral support
to anti-Indian militants. September 11th and its aftermath twisted that
alliance in ways not fully understood. General Musharraf made enemies among
jihadi groups by backing the American war against terrorism. He appointed
a new chief of the ISI intelligence agency, the main patron of anti- Indian
groups, in part to be able to control them. Pakistani analysts reckon attacks
such as this week's, possibly assisted by rogue ISI operatives, are directed
as much at General Musharraf's rule in Pakistan as they are at India's
rule in Kashmir.
Yet the general also has reasons
not to crack down too hard. One is to avoid making terrorists angrier than
they already are. Another is that India plans to hold "free and fair" elections
in Kashmir by the autumn and is trying to entice moderate separatists to
participate. If turnout is high and the elected government looks popular,
India will no doubt declare that Kashmiris have accepted their lot. Earlier
this month General Musharraf described attacks on Indian forces (but not
on civilians) as part of a "legitimate freedom struggle," a definition
that enrages India.
He fires from behind multiple shields.
Would India attack the Americans' chief ally in the war against al-Qaeda?
Pakistan has already complained that India's deployment is diverting its
army from that fight. If war starts, many Pakistanis think the United States
will step in to stop it. Would India really risk taking on a nuclear-armed
adversary? Pakistan has repeatedly stated its willingness to go nuclear
in response to a conventional attack. General Musharraf must have drawn
comfort from India's defence minister, George Fernandes, who told The New
York Times this week that India would not attack Pakistan until after the
Kashmir elections even if severely provoked.
But the price of Indian restraint
rises with each outrage; the cost of retribution, meanwhile, is starting
to look acceptable. Indian strategic thinkers have recently argued that
India can wage a "limited war" against Pakistan without risking a nuclear
exchange. This, they say, is because the adversaries understand each other:
India would not push Pakistan so hard that it had to resort to nuclear
weapons, and vice- versa. Besides, if Pakistan did deploy its nuclear missiles,
says K. Subrahmanyam, a leading strategist, the United States "would destroy
them." All this sounds to many like dangerously wishful thinking.
If it gives up on diplomacy, India's
likeliest course would be to mount "surgical" raids on terrorist camps
in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, which is not formally part of Pakistan.
"We know where the camps are," says an informed source. But the risk of
escalation is always present. V. R. Raghavan, a former director-general
of Indian military operations, argued in a recent paper that any conflict
between India and Pakistan could easily spiral out of control. India's
aggressive plans for fighting conventional wars are now matched against
Pakistan's aggressive doctrine for nuclear ones. An "escalation from a
conventional to a nuclear war, within one or two days of the outbreak of
the war, is not implausible," General Raghavan writes.
Indian leaders are aware of such
risks, and pray that Mrs Rocca's mission will provide some escape. They
are not hopeful. After years of terrorism, taking a gamble with Armageddon
is starting to look to some like the lesser evil.
