The Girl Next Door

rshridhar: I agree in principle what you said about attack on the parliament. However, there are other principles too that you are overlooking. Teaching a lesson to an illegitimate government must factor in the probability of success in this case. I do not think war will end once and for good, Pakistani military and ISI interferences in Kashmir. US went after Taliban after fully calculating the imminent demise of Taliban in short period. India does not have that kind of superiority over Pakistani forces to crush their power to infiltrate and interfere in KAshmir decisively.

India was always lazy and indecisive in dealing with Pakistani military sponsored terrorism in India. Musharraf and his coaterie have been thriving on Indian indecisiveness. Indian indecisiveness has infact hurt people of Pakistan actually worse than any attack on Parliament. It has sealed the parliament in Pakistan. You may be wondering how it is partially Indian fault that Musharraf and dictatorship is in power than democratically elected government? Or I may ask what did India do to support democracy in Pakistan? Clinton refused to even shake hand with this AH on camera and India took him to Taj Mahal. Since Pakistan has been interfereing in internal affairs of India, why did India not interfere in the internal affairs of Pakistan? Why do not they make a policy of not dealing with illegitimate rulers of Pakistan. The train and bus links must have stopped the day Musharraf came to power. India must have recalled ambassador two years ago. And now you are not distinguishing between people of Pakistan who have been suffering as much by these jehadis and phridom phyters and their sponsors - ISI and military.

Harpreet has every right to be concerned about his ethnicity as I do quite often too. Being in US or Britain, or even in India or Pakistan, it is better to be sane but ethnically conscious than being insane and nationalistic/ patriotic. I consider it insanity to justify Pakistani nationalism and patriotism based exclusively on religion and thumb down all the interpretive extensions down the throat. I would rather be parochial; Punjabi and concerned about the spilling of Punjabi blood when even a villager in the first grade in Pakistan can not study in his mother tongue. Ridicule their language, culture and everything they represent int he name of nation/ religion and ask them to shed blood for Kashmir. I would not like to give a single drop of my blood for Kashmir cause or for Musharraf, yet I will willingly give a pint for Punjabi causes or natural disaster. rshiridhar, the point is that Harpreet or I are not perfect but our opinions do not ask shedding blood in any name.

I hope that India keeps up the pressure without going to war and using US to force AH Musharraf to clamp down on jehadis. I agree with you that none of LeT or HUM or JeM is remotely freedom fighter in any sense. They need to be crushed once and for all. They never had any utility for the people of Pakistan and they never will. It main utility has been to bring Mushy and the gang to power and blackmailing civilian and democratic authorities. Just visit Jhang on any given day and you will find them in action - liberating Kashmir?

harpreet

your overwhelming love for fellow punjabis is very heart warming, luvie..save some for us regular insaan kae bachae also..iv been meaning to ask you, have u red `white teeth`?

Re:Reply #: 381

ylh

I am impressed by your posts. You are very close to sages and seers and fakirs when you say we live in a world of delusions.

Sridhar

Re:Reply #: 386

Harpreet,

NO country can tolerate attack on its parliament. India and USA are working in tanderm to take care of this issue. Slowly, the US media and politicians have been learning Pak`s duplicity. It is ridiculous for you to be sitting in UK and pass judgement on the events. Pak rulers need to be taught a lesson. Terrorism does not work. If this involves war, so be it.

Sridhar

Harpreet #386 It is indeed depressing why the two governments cant work together rather than working against each other. Tens of villages have been emptied on both sides of the border - the suffering has already started for those poor people. Let us pray that they stop short of war.

Sammerji#338;

[Harpreet: You are too generous here]

- Enough of the false modesty sir. I HAVE learnt so much from you!

On the eve of the a55holes who rule our countries taking us to the brink of war again, it is greatly reassuring to me to read your posts about something that matters more than the macho posturings of octagenarian scumbags who wish to spill Punjabi blood for the sake of ``Pakistan`` and ``India``.

I saw on the news today pictures of those braying monkeys on each side of the border at Wagah screaming ``Hindustan/Pakistan Zindabad`` and thought to myself ``Desis are the most sorry people alive``. There they were, Punjabis screaming destruction at each other. Pathetic. They welcome and scream joy at the prospect of killing their own ethnic cousins.

If watching Daljit or Monica on ITN/CNN gives us some respite from this nightmare, lets go. Its either that or the whiskey bottle.

yours depressingly

Harpreet

:)

Bodenheimer #382 Let me understand what you will accomplish even if you succeed in your wildest dreams of crushing Palestinians and Arabs around you: you will have more land, and therefore larger borders...BUT you will then be surrounded by that many more Arabs. So the best you can hope for is to have through the course you are taking is to live your lives, and for your children to live their lives, surrounded by people who hate them. I am sure that does not bother you, but that must bother sane Israelis (and there must be sane people in Israel as well as pyschopaths like you). Let us hope sanity returns among both the Israelis and the Arabs - you people are more alike than you realize.

dost-mittar #371 beg to differ on the color of my glasses. You think they are rose-colored, I think they are crystal clear and it is my distinguished friends on chowk whose glasses are in fact rendered opaque by the dust of current events. We are humans first and last, share essentially similar individual concerns and aspirations, and are split into national and religious groups only due to historical circumstances. A common culture is emerging, national boundries are being eroded by technological change and economic prosperity and global concerns, people are finding fulfillment in ways other than through glory on the battlefield against the neighboring tribe or country. This reality, not lines drawn on maps.

Rsaxena #360 The use of words pulled out of the toilet is not a substitute for logic. You are a clever man - go back and read your post and I am sure you will see the absurdity in what you say.

http://www3.sympatico.ca/gul.khan/main1.jpg

http://www3.sympatico.ca/gul.khan/main1.jpg

Join the portal to learn how to insult people. I hate it but can`t give up.

What can I say... we live in a strange world... in this world half naked saints defeat the greatest empire on earth by the force of satyagraha, where persons of the year are men who singlehandedly resuscitate the largest city in the world from devastation, and then are heralded as the greatest thing since Churchill.

We live in a world of fantasy and delusions.

PS: Like I said before I dont agree with everything Said, or Eqbal had to say, but they balanced out my increasingly brotherly feelings for Israel, for which I now feel ashamed.

Like I said before, I am a supporter of Israel as a state.. but with that said, nothing you have said so far has convinced me that I shouldn`t be proud that my parents, two decent hardworking Pakistanis, named me after Yasser Arafat.

India and Israel are heading in the right direction. It is about time that once again the civilised world should call bluff of Muslim world just as they did four hundred years ago and banished Muslim influence from Spain and much of Europe during time of crusaders.

We tame Arafat and India should tame Pakistan which desires to be the leader of Muslim wolrd inspite of defunct economy. We do not need the proof who the terrorists are since we know Arafat is. In the same way it wrong of Musharaf to say show me the proof when he is the biggest terrorists of all. Crush, crush and crush the rebellion for once and for all the times.

Pakistan, India and the United States

2230 GMT, 011227

Dec 27,2001

Summary

http://www.stratfor.com/home/0112272230.htm

With al Qaeda and Taliban elements fleeing Afghanistan, the United States will continue to grapple with strategic problems concerning its traditional ally, Pakistan. There are significant differences between what President Pervez Musharraf has said he will do to fight terrorism, what he intends to do and what he actually can accomplish. The threat of an imminent Indo-Pakistani war may be just the lever Washington needs to move Islamabad.

Analysis

The United States has been engaged in intense debate regarding the next steps it must take to eradicate al Qaeda. Two main strategies have emerged of late. One argues that there can be no solution to the problem of Islamic attacks on the United States until the regime of Saddam Hussein is eliminated. The other strategy argues that Iraq`s role is secondary, and that the United States` primary mission is to prevent al Qaeda from establishing a command center in some other isolated country, like Yemen or Somalia.

Obviously, the strategies are not incompatible. Equally obviously, at least from STRATFOR`S point of view, the debate misses the point entirely: the next country on the agenda is Pakistan.

When planning for the Afghan campaign began immediately after Sept. 11, it was clear -- at least from a naive standpoint -- that Pakistan, which has an extensive border with Afghanistan and a long-standing strategic relationship with the United States, would be the strategic key to the campaign. The planners` first impulse was to deploy U.S. forces in Pakistan and prosecute the campaign from there. This proved impossible. Instead, U.S. ground forces had to deploy in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, while air attacks were carried out from carriers in the Arabian Sea and from strategic bombers on Diego Garcia and elsewhere. Clearly, some forces were deployed in Pakistan, but only under tight secrecy.

The need for secrecy is the key to everything. Simply put, the Pakistani government was not in a position to permit a war against the Taliban regime to be waged from its soil. This was not simply because of substantial sympathy for the Taliban in Pakistan, although that existed. Nor is it simply because Pushtuns, the foundation of Taliban power, live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, although they do.

Rather, it was because the Taliban was ultimately as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it was Afghan. In a sense, the Taliban was a Pakistani construct, designed to conclude -- on terms acceptable to Pakistan -- the civil war that raged in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistan feared the ascendance of the Northern Alliance as well as other groups in Afghanistan, and saw in the Taliban a government that was congenial to Pakistan both strategically and ideologically. The ISI, Pakistan`s intelligence service, was in many ways the godfather of the Taliban government.

As the Taliban government provided al Qaeda with a secure operational base, the United States continued to parse the issue of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is inconceivable that the Taliban would have been able to develop its relationship with al Qaeda without the knowledge of Pakistan`s intelligence services and government, and it is difficult to imagine that they would not have given at least implicit approval. However, the United States was not prepared to frame the issue as an Afghan-Pakistani issue -- only as an Afghan problem fundamentally distinct from Pakistan.

This policy continued after Sept. 11 and throughout the campaign, despite the clear limits Pakistan placed on cooperation with the United States. Washington clearly and rationally wanted to contain the Afghan campaign. It placed sufficient pressure on President Pervez Musharraf to force him to remove senior officials who were too closely aligned with the Taliban, to permit at least some basing of U.S. forces in Pakistan and to publicly commit himself to use Pakistani forces along the frontier to prevent Taliban forces from crossing into Pakistan.

The United States recognized that much of this was cosmetic. Support for the Taliban ran deep in the government and deeper in the country. The U.S. forces based in Pakistan were hardly strategic. Finally, whatever he promised, there were significant differences between what Musharraf said, what he actually intended to do and what he ultimately was able to do.

The United States carefully refrained from pressing the issue, afraid that excessive pressure would topple Musharraf and throw Pakistan either into chaos or into a fundamentalist dictatorship. Or if excessive pressure threatened Musharraf`s survival, he might simply reverse course and turn against the United States. In any case, the United States adopted a minimax policy -- it demanded the most it could get within the limits of what Islamabad could deliver, and it lived with the three differences: what was said, what was actually intended, what could really be delivered.

The manner in which the Afghan war concluded has suddenly rendered this policy untenable. While the Taliban has abandoned the cities, it continues to exist, both in alliances with particular warlords and in its own right. Where it exists most intensely, in fact, is in Pakistan, among Taliban sympathizers as well as among hundreds or thousands of Taliban fighters that have crossed into Pakistan during the past month. A very few have been very publicly apprehended, but most have gone to ground -- some protected by Pakistani forces.

Far more important than the fate of the Taliban is the fate of al Qaeda`s senior commanders, including Osama bin Laden, and of its fighters. It is becoming increasingly obvious that neither the Taliban`s high command nor al Qaeda`s has been captured. The release of a new videotape that appears to have been made in the past few weeks, and perhaps as recently as last week, dealt a blow to speculation that bin Laden and the others were killed at Tora Bora. It was always problematic that bin Laden would have chosen to travel from Kandahar to Tora Bora in the chaos that followed his last known taping. This would be not only dangerous but pointless. It was far more likely that he went directly to Pakistan, where supporters hid him and may still be doing so.

Whether bin Laden is in Pakistan or has traveled elsewhere, it is clear that many of his forces as well as Taliban leaders went to Pakistan and that the vast majority of those remain. In other words, apart from native support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, elements from Afghanistan are now in Pakistan and operating under the protection of, if not the government, certainly elements of the government and powerful political forces.

If we are correct in this, then the problem the United States faces in destroying al Qaeda does not concern Somalia, Yemen or Iraq, but Pakistan. Ideally, the United States would like Musharraf to use his security and military forces to destroy al Qaeda`s forces and hand senior leaders over to the United States. Certainly, this is something that Musharraf has assured the United States he would do. However, it is not clear that he is in a position to deliver on his promise -- it is not clear his orders are being obeyed. Nor, frankly, is it clear that he wishes to see these orders carried out. Certainly, he wants to placate the United States, but there is a huge gap between saying he will act, acting, and acting effectively.

A case in point is the Dec. 13 attack on India`s parliament by gunmen, which the U.S. government says were Islamic militants based in Pakistan. There are two explanations for the attack. The first is that Musharaff knew about plans for the attack and sanctioned it. The second is that he neither knew of nor sanctioned the attack. In a real sense, it doesn`t matter which it was. Either explanation raises serious questions about the course of Afghanistan.

All this creates a strategic crisis for the United States. Its fundamental goal is to defend its own territory against al Qaeda attacks and the global destruction of al Qaeda. In our view, al Qaeda has taken refuge in Pakistan -- historically an ally of the United States, and a country that poses a military challenge on an order of magnitude beyond that posed by Afghanistan. Launching a military campaign in Pakistan is possible but requires much greater resources than in Afghanistan, as well as the destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability. Rather than use direct military action, the United States would prefer a more subtle lever.

The attack on India`s parliament provides precisely that lever. Obviously, the shootout was as intolerable for India as a similar attack on Congress would be for the United States. India must react. But even apart from that, India sees itself as having an unprecedented opportunity to deal not only with the Kashmir issue but with the entire issue of the nature and future of Pakistan.

Pakistan`s alliance with the United States has placed severe limits on how far India could go. However, a profound schism is developing between Washington and Islamabad as post-Sept. 11 events evolve. Clearly, both sides are doing everything to avert an open breach -- but equally clearly, if it becomes undeniable that Pakistan is harboring al Qaeda elements, a break becomes inevitable. At that moment, India would have the opening it has awaited for 50 years. The United States would be not be able to refrain from acting against Pakistan, nor could it act efficiently without Indian support and involvement. India was eager to help from the beginning; now the United States would have no choice but to accept that help.

The United States does not want an Indo-Pakistani war, but the threat of such a war is precisely what Washington needs to move Islamabad. For Pakistan, the threat of a war with India in which the United States either stood to one side or actively participated is the worst possible nightmare. By allowing the specter to rise, Washington has given Musharraf an opportunity to become more forthcoming. If he is in control but insincere, he is being shown the abyss and can change course. If he is sincere but not in control, he can show the abyss to Islamic fundamentalists in his government and bring them under control.

The problem is that many of the fundamentalists would actually welcome a war and even defeat by India. Their goal is to radicalize the Islamic world by demonstrating that Christians, Hindus and Jews have formed a vast alliance designed to crush Islam. A combined U.S.-Indian attack would be exactly what would be needed to demonstrate this to the world. The destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability -- whether by nuclear or conventional weapons -- would further illustrate the point. It is therefore no accident that Islamic fundamentalists struck India at what would normally be considered the worst possible moment. From their point of view, it was the best possible moment to act.

This indicated that Musharraf may not be able to gain control of the situation, even if he wanted to. Thus, he visited Beijing in late December. China has historically been an enemy of India and an ally of Pakistan. Beijing has been extremely cautious since Sept. 11, but it remembers both the EP-3 spy plane incident and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s redefinition of strategy toward the Pacific and against China prior to Sept. 11. Beijing is happy to see the United States diverted. It would not be happy to see India emerge without a threat on its western flank. Hence, Musharaff had a very cordial visit to Beijing.

At this point, the strategic imperative of defeating al Qaeda begins to intersect with Eurasian geopolitics. It is one thing to take Afghanistan apart, quite another to do the same with Pakistan. Afghanistan`s fate is of little significance to great powers. The fate of Pakistan matters to China, among others. At the same time, if al Qaeda is using Pakistan as a base of operations or even as a transit point and the Pakistani government can`t or won`t do anything decisive and effective about it, this strikes at a fundamental U.S. interest and cannot be tolerated.

The United States is, therefore, in the midst of a veiled crisis over Pakistan. It is an odd crisis in that Washington, fearing the consequences of a public confrontation, is trying very hard to maintain the fiction that Pakistan has been fully cooperating in the battle against al Qaeda, that it is acting effectively against the Taliban and al Qaeda and that its forces would certainly arrest senior al Qaeda leaders if they could catch them. At the same time, the United States is quietly showing Pakistan the abyss in the hopes that the plausible fiction of U.S.-Pakistani relations might thereby become reality.

The problem is that in Pakistan, there are those who prefer an open breach with the United States to accommodation. Even if we assume that Musharraf is not one of these elements, it is not clear that he can control them. If he can`t control them, the United States is faced with an extraordinary dilemma -- to go into Pakistan and get al Qaeda itself. It cannot do this without India, and India will not move unless Pakistan`s nuclear weapons are destroyed. It is not clear that U.S. precision-guided munitions are sufficient for a task that will tolerate no failure.

The rest follows logically.