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30 May 2002
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Three years ago in Pakistan, the equally weak
government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had bankrupted the national
economy and was facing well-documented corruption charges. Mr. Sharif,
too, had much to gain from war fever - fed by the various Muslim
terrorist groups operating in Kashmir. The hawkish Pakistani general
then responsible for communicating with and training those terrorist
groups was one Pervez Musharraf. (By the way - just so we're clear on
who Mr. Musharraf, now Pakistan's president, really is - some of these
groups were almost certainly sent by Pakistan's intelligence service
to Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.) When Nawaz Sharif succumbed
to American pressure and promised to rein in the terrorists, General
Musharraf was furious. A few months later he overthrew Mr. Sharif in a
coup and seized power.
Will the outcome also be a replay of three years ago?
Will the conflict be contained again?
This time President Musharraf is the one being pressed
by the United States to stamp out Kashmiri terrorism. He has been
playing a double game, arresting hundreds of members of the groups he
once fostered but quietly freeing most of them soon afterward. Caught
between two necessities - placating his major international sponsor
and playing to the home audience - he may well in the end follow his
deepest political instincts: to support (overtly or covertly) the
Islamist radicals who have terrorized the once idyllic valley of
Kashmir for well over a decade.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee of India, with his
talk of a "decisive battle," clearly feels that direct
military action, resulting in the reconquest of some if not all of the
Kashmiri territory now under Pakistani control, is the only way of
preventing attacks like the atrocity this month in which women and
children were slaughtered at an Indian army base. Mr. Vajpayee knows
that Indian rule is unpopular in the valley, that the Indian army
looks to many Kashmiris like an army of occupation. But he will also
have calculated that in the opinion of the international community,
and also of many fearful, near-destitute Kashmiris, Pakistan's
protracted sponsorship of terrorism has damaged its claims to moral
legitimacy.
Would a war between India and Pakistan, if it came, go
nuclear?
Pakistan, with its suggestively timed missile tests,
its refusal to adopt a policy of not being the first to use nuclear
arms and its hawkish talk, is trying to give the impression that it
would have no compunction about using its nuclear arsenal. India's
military leadership has said that if attacked with nuclear bombs it
would respond with maximum force and that in such a conflict India
would sustain heavy damage but survive, whereas Pakistan would be
destroyed utterly.
Is it really likely, however, that Pakistan would, so
to speak, strap a nuclear weapon to its belly, walk into the crowded
bazaar that is India and turn itself into the biggest suicide bomber
in history?
Mr. Musharraf doesn't look like martyr material. Ah,
but if he were losing a conventional war? If India's overwhelming
numerical superiority on land, at sea and in the air won the day and
Pakistan
lost its prized Kashmiri land, would reason be swept aside? Worst of
all, if Pakistani fury at a military defeat by India were to result in
Mr. Musharraf's overthrow by Islamist hard-liners, Pakistan's nuclear
warheads could fall into the hands of people for whom martyrdom is a
higher goal than peace, people who value death more highly than life.
Pakistan is calling on the international community to
intervene, but this call must be heard with caution. For half a
century Pakistan has sought to internationalize the Kashmiri dispute
while India has consistently described that effort as interference in
its internal affairs. Both sides are locked into old language, old
strategies and an old game of chicken that's currently playing itself
out across the
Line of Control. Like two aged wrestlers fighting on a cliff, India
and Pakistan are locked together, rolling ever closer to the edge.
But their ancient hatred is no longer a matter only
for them. The risk of a nuclear battle, however improbable, makes
Kashmir everybody's problem. Right now it's the most dangerous place
in the world. These pathetic old fighters must be pulled apart, and
soon. Yes, that probably does mean intervention by the West, though
Russia seems eager to help as well, which is useful.
This should not, however, be the intervention that
Pakistan wants. The point is not to restrain Indian
"aggression," but to make the world safer for us all. The
situation can only be stabilized if India and Pakistan are both forced
to back away, preferably to outside of Kashmir's historic,
unpartitioned borders. This "hands off Kashmir" solution
will have to be externally imposed on the reluctant principals and
will require that a large peacekeeping force be sent to the region to
support Kashmir as an autonomous area. But who in the West wants that
- it's just the old colonialist-imperialist power trip, isn't it? And
who's supposed to pay for all this peacekeeping, anyway?
The answers to those questions are also questions:
What's the alternative? Do you have a better idea? Or shall we just
stand back and keep our postcolonial, nonimperialist fingers crossed?
Will it
take mushroom clouds over Delhi and Islamabad to make us give up our
ingrained prejudices and try something that might actually work? In
the immortal words of the Spice Girls, "Will this déjà vu never
end?"
Salman Rushdie is the author of "Fury: A
Novel" and the forthcoming essay collection "Step Across
This Line."
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