Lighting The Nuclear Fire

````Neither the Pakistani President, Pervez Musharraf nor the Indian Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee ``appeared capable of visualising the scale of the disaster that would overwhelm their countries if nuclear weapons were used``(British Foreign Seretary, Jack Straw, quoted by London Times)

This is what happens when there is -- enough fissionable material -- but not enough Iodine -- in the subcontinental soil.

Zafar ibn Al talib (ra): 238. Ur over complexilizationing the issue. Okay look, assume i meet you one day and u go bragging about how pretty all the white gurls are. Eventually I will want to kill u. Then I will say ``SHUT THE HELL UP ZAFAR!`` And u will thus cry.

Do u think this command would be for you to always remain silent? Similarly, the opinions of buddha, muhammed et all must be looked at with an understanding of their times and places (cultures). U know that the whirling dances popular in the west were designed by rumi for ONE particular place and time.

It is due to a result of over thinking and thinking on the wrong sh1t that buddha said ``no opinion.`` This does not mean that one should stop thinking, it refers to IDLE thought. Further, it introduces purity in the form of what zen calls ``mind no mind.`` This occurs when ones actions are the result of not thinking, just doing. Similar to the sufi annilation. They become one with their actions (Like going on first instincts).

What is the duty? The duty is to control (a God is one who controls) ones circle, the place over which one has responsibility. Where ever u are, that is ur circle. If ur in a location where a fight is occuring and u dont want it to, then u must end it. This stage follows controlling oneself (an ongoing jihad) and preceeds controlling ones community.

This info is dependent somewhat on intellect, but not the ``western`` kind (rememeber I hate the white man). A purer kind guided by intuition in the disciple. When Lao Tzu said one should ``not do`` he kept in mind that everyone in his time was Doing. He just gave the other half of the yin yang. There is a tendancy among intellectuals to over complicate spirituality and make it appear paradoxical to their view of the U-n-I verse.

Till the next time U and I verse, shalom.

Regarding



`[Interesting read on the names of Pakistani missiles, but you omitted details on Ahmed Shah Abdali. Why is he a hallowed name in Pakistan`

There are two reasons that I can think of.

The first is the theory that to survive a traumatic event the victim identifies with the perpetuator. This is because their own identify is so crushed, that it give no help in salvation. There are documented cases where the victim has helped their persecutor, to terrorize others. There was a case in New York where a neo-nazi was discovered to be a son of Jewish parents He simply switched sides, because he so desperately wanted to be the torturer rather than the torturee.

The other reason is that, that region of the subcontinent, in its long history produced few leaders who were able to resist the onslaught of the invader. In fact the only ones that comes to mind are Maharaja Ranjit Singh and Hari Singh Nalwa. Unfortunately for Pakistanis they were not Muslims. So what can they do? So go and borough the heroes from their former overlords

Sadna, Drumz

NYTimes Week in Review

``Eyeball to Eyeball, And Blinking in Denial``

``...But here in India`s capital-a plausible bull`s eye-there has been no panic. ...At a recent seminar titled ``Preparing to Survive``, the subject was earthquakes and cyclones, not nuclear firestorms and radiating sickness. India`s ruling elite and many of its leading strategic thinkers are in nuclear denial...``

``...Asked at a public meeting in Islamabad last week if there could be a nuclear catastrophe. Gen. Aslam Beg. the former Pakistani army chief, said more people died in the Allied bombing of Dresden than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that millions have been killed by small arms fire.

`Look`, he said. `I don`t knowwhat you`re worried about. You can die crossing the street, hit by a car or you could die in a nuclear war. You`ve got to die someday anyway.``

Yesterday I heard an interview with Arun Gandhi who said that the ideals of non violence may have died with the ruling elites, but where still very much among the citizenry of India. He was concerned about a growing culture of violence that has developed in the last 50 years.

Sadna, I would ask you to reconsider what you term the ``childnessness`` of nuclear disarmament and non violent negotiation in the subcontinent. Clearly we cannot go on in this manner, nor is there any pragmatic excuse for the kinds of leadership we are witnessing currently.

``There is no doubt that the Pakistan army is man to man qualitatively a lot superior to the Indian army. But that was the case earlier also. Where we have always been deficient has been in the art and practice of politics and diplomacy. ``

This is from a Paki columnist. Where the hell do they dream this shite up??? If the Pakis are so much better then us man to man, they should be salivating at the chance to fight and teach us a lesson. Why the hell does Mush go around saying that Pakistan does not want war?

I am in full agreement with Fawad. Let us finish this once and for all. This is the ultimate clash of civilizations, and let the better one survive.

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http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson053102.asp

May 31, 2002 8:45 a.m.

Short-Term Pain & Long-Term Gain

Why the war on terror is not the Cold War

To rein in the fundamentalists, it was in our short-term interest to support Musharraf, but perhaps not so in the long-term welfare of America when thousands of our best troops may well be in the lethal vicinity of a theater-wide nuclear exchange. We liked Saudi stability when it came to anti-communism, uninterrupted oil shipments, and resistance to maniacs in Iraq and Iran — but ultimately that is a dead-end policy when 22 million are ruled by 7,000 cousins who frolic in, but too often slander, the United States. ``There are worse extremists than Arafat,`` we are lectured — so goes the realist argument to hand over millions to a kleptocracy we know rather than to a restless citizenry we fear.

America should instead adopt a consistent policy of favoring elected governments — all of them — and accept the sometimes immediate drawbacks on the assurance that in the long run free peoples, even without prior egalitarian traditions, will be less likely to murder Americans and others. In the case of 500 million Islamic citizens living under illegitimate regimes of various sorts, such a change in policy will be chaotic, audacious, and perhaps dangerous. But the status quo of propping up dictators who claim to be as eager in stopping terrorists as they were in corralling communists is not working because the dangers, the age we live in, and the extent of American power are not comparable to those of just 20 years ago.

In short, a new democratic disorder is far preferable to the old autocratic stability.

In Kashmir, déjà-vu is a way of life

Should the west interpose between India and Pakistan? Salman Rushdie says it must

Saturday June 1, 2002

The Guardian

The present Kashmir crisis feels like a déjà-vu replay of the last one. Three years ago, a weak Indian coalition government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party had just lost a confidence vote in parliament and was nervously awaiting a general election. At once it began to beat the war drums over Kashmir. Now another Indian coalition government, still led by the BJP and deeply tainted by BJP supporters` involvement in the massacre of innocents in Gujarat, may be about to lose another general election. So here it goes again, talking up a Kashmiri war and asking the nation to stand firm behind its leadership.

Three years ago, across the frontier in Pakistan, the equally weak government of prime minister Nawaz Sharif had bankrupted the economy and was facing well-documented corruption charges. Sharif, too, had much to gain from war-fever. The hawkish Pakistani general who presided over a military regime that liaised with and trained terrorist groups operating from the Pakistani side of the Kashmiri line of control was one Pervez Musharraf. (Some of these groups were almost certainly sent by Pakistan`s intelligence service to al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan.)

When Nawaz Sharif succumbed to US pressure and promised to rein in the terrorists, Musharraf was furious. It is said that Sharif`s rejection of Musharraf`s Kashmiri strategy was an important motivation in the subsequent coup in which the general overthrew the PM and seized power.

Now President Musharraf is being pressed by the United States to stamp out Kashmiri terrorism. In recent months, he has played a double game, arresting hundreds of members of the groups he once fostered, but quietly freeing most soon afterwards. Caught between two necessities, placating his major international sponsor and playing to the home audience, he may in the end follow his deepest political instincts, which are to support (overtly or covertly) the Islamist radicals who have terrorised the once idyllic valley of Kashmir for well over a decade.

India`s prime minister, AB Vajpayee, 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 presently under Pakistani control, is the only way of preventing such attacks as the recent atrocity in which women and children were slaughtered at an Indian army base.

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 go nuclear? Pakistan, with its suggestively timed missile tests, its refusal to adopt a no-first-use policy 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 N-bombs it will respond with maximum force, and that in such a conflict India would sustain heavy damage but survive, whereas Pakistan would be destroyed. Is it really likely, however, that Pakistan would 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?

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 Musharraf`s overthrow by Islamist hardliners, Pakistan`s nuclear warheads would 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 upon international community to intervene, but this call must be listened to with caution. For half a century, Pakistan has sought to inter nationalise the Kashmiri dispute, while India has described that effort as interference in its internal affairs. That old déjà-vu again. Both sides are locked into old language, old strategies. Even the game of chicken that`s currently playing itself out across the line of control is an old one. Like two aged wrestlers fighting on a cliff, India and Pakistan are locked together, rolling closer to the edge.

Their ancient hatred is no longer only a matter for them. The nuclear scenario, however improbable, makes Kashmir everybody`s problem. Right now, it`s the most dangerous place in the world. These pathetic old fighters must therefore be pulled apart, and soon. The international community must intervene; yes, that probably does mean the west, though Russia seems keen 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 stabilised if India and Pakistan are both forced to back away, preferably to Kashmir`s historic, unpartitioned borders. This ``hands off Kashmir`` solution will have to be externally imposed on the reluctant principals, and will require a large peacekeeping force to be sent to the region. But who wants that - it`s just the old colonialist-imperialist power-trip, isn`t it? And who`s supposed to pay for all this peacekeeping?

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 post-colonial, non-imperialist fingers crossed? Will it take mushroom clouds over Delhi and Islamabad to make us give up our prejudices and try something that might actually work? In the words of the Spice Girls, will this déjà-vu never end?

© Salman Rushdie



http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,725485,00.html

Eyeball to Eyeball, and Blinking in Denial

By CELIA W. DUGGER

EW DELHI — AS India and Pakistan, fledgling nuclear powers, edge closer to war, the rest of the world looks on aghast at a possible nuclear exchange that could kill millions of people. British and American envoys are rushing to the region in last-ditch efforts to avert catastrophe. On Friday, the United States government urged tens of thousands of Americans living in India to leave.

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But here in India`s capital — a plausible bull`s-eye — there has been no panic. The sweltering city moves to its usual somnolent summer rhythm. At a recent seminar titled ``Preparing to Survive,`` the subject was earthquakes and cyclones, not nuclear firestorms and radiation sickness.

And that is in large measure because India`s ruling elite and many of its leading strategic thinkers are in nuclear denial.

Though Pakistan`s leaders have spoken openly over the years and in recent days and weeks about the possibility of using the country`s nuclear weapons, India has seen this ``loose talk,`` as a spokeswoman for India called it Thursday, as evidence of Pakistan`s bluffing and blackmail.

K. Santhanam, a physicist who helped organize India`s 1998 nuclear tests and now heads the government-financed Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, said the risk of nuclear war is ``overdramatized.``

``The probability of occurrence is very low, extremely low, vanishingly low,`` he said.

Pakistan`s leaders and thinkers, too, are living their own form of nuclear denial — that of the smaller, militarily weaker nation. They believe Pakistan`s conventional military prowess, combined with its credible nuclear threat, will deter the region`s dominant power, India, from daring to attack Pakistan. They also expect that it will force the United States to pressure India to give ground on Kashmir, the land India and Pakistan have fought over for a half century.

``There will be no war, conventional or nuclear,`` Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, retired chief of Pakistan`s armed forces, declared. ``This military buildup is to pressurize Pakistan to stop the liberation movement in Kashmir.``

India`s and Pakistan`s mirrored denials of the nuclear dangers are part of the treacherous dynamic that could lead to war, military analysts and South Asia experts say. As they intensify their rhetorical belligerence and military preparations, each expects the other to back down. But they may just fall into the nuclear abyss.

``There`s a complacency that the weapons won`t be used which I find baffling,`` said a senior Western diplomat here. ``It`s like the early days of the cold war. People here haven`t understood what these weapons can do. I don`t think most people here have ever heard of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.``

While many Indians and Pakistanis say there will be no nuclear war, they often paradoxically acknowledge the possibility in the next breath, exhibiting also the unspoken assumption that these two hugely populous nations — India has a billion people and Pakistan 150 million — would survive.

Mr. Santhanam, the Indian physicist, said his hunch is that a war would remain conventional, but he also said, ``If we`re hit, we`ll know how to handle it. If there`s a nuclear attack, India`s policy is severe retaliation.``

Asked at a public meeting in Islamabad last week if there could be a nuclear catastrophe, General Beg, the former Pakistani army chief, said more people died in the Allied bombing of Dresden than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that millions have been killed by small arms fire.

``Look,`` he said, ``I don`t know what you`re worried about. You can die crossing the street, hit by a car, or you could die in a nuclear war. You`ve got to die someday anyway.``

After the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, which surprised and frightened the United States and the Soviet Union at how quickly they could unintentionally slide toward a nuclear exchange, the superpowers shifted to engaging each other indirectly through proxy wars in the third world rather than in direct conflicts. They also began an arms control process to regulate nuclear competition.

In contrast, India and Pakistan have hundreds of thousands of troops poised for war along their border who have been engaged in fierce artillery duels for two weeks. And their senior leaders are not talking. India has withdrawn its ambassador to Pakistan and expelled Pakistan`s envoy to Delhi.

A part of this may be due to the sheer power of disbelief that military planning could go so awry that nuclear arms would come into play. Strategists and Indian officials, including Defense Minister George Fernandes, have argued that India can wage a limited conventional war. They say Pakistan would not hit India with nuclear weapons and risk devastation in reprisal. They say they know Pakistan`s trip wires and have no desire to conquer or vanquish Pakistan.

BUT what if a provoked India aggressively counterattacked across the border and Pakistan responded more effectively than anticipated? If that opened the way toward a general war, at what point would Pakistan`s military rulers feel so endangered they would consider firing a nuclear weapon? Pakistan`s leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, recently told Der Speigel that if Pakistan`s survival as a nation were threatened, ``then it would be a case of: in extreme emergency, even the atomic bomb.``

Miscalculation is, after all, at the heart of virtually all the nightmare visions of how any nuclear exchange would start. India`s external affairs minister, Jaswant Singh, said last week that India and Pakistan were of the same womb — suggesting they therefore understood each other. But their history is littered with deadly misunderstandings, scholars say. Often, Pakistan underestimates India`s military determination and democratic resilience, while India underestimates the depth of Pakistan`s suspicion that India is out to vivisect it.

Their misjudgments could be catastrophic. General Musharraf openly threatened Wednesday to take the war into ``the enemy`s territory`` if India stepped even an inch across the line of control that divides Kashmir between them.

This is complicated by the fact that these countries, unlike the United States or the Soviet Union, have no experience of the horrors of modern total war, waged against whole cities with the very intention of leveling them. Americans, while their own cities were left untouched during World War II, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviets saw vast parts of their homeland devastated.

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What the Indians and Pakistanis do have is a legacy of deep, intimate mistrust. They are neighbors born in a moment of cataclysmic religious violence. They have a blood feud that features deep personal bitterness between the most senior leaders of the two countries. And they have large cities so close to each other that a nuclear missile could hit its target in minutes.

Pakistan`s president, General Musharraf, was born here in India`s capital. But his Muslim family fled to Pakistan, the newly created Islamic nation hacked from the British Indian empire in 1947 at the same hour as India. His parents later told their children that they had escaped on the last train to leave India safely — and that Hindus and Sikhs had massacred the Muslims on the trains that came after. As a boy, the general was taught to deeply mistrust the Hindus who are predominant in India, his brother Naved said.

India`s leaders also mistrust General Musharraf, whom they believe betrayed India by plotting to sneak army regulars into the Kargil region of Indian Kashmir in 1999. His troops took mountain peaks overlooking a crucial Indian supply route even as India`s prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, was on a peace mission to Pakistan.

Many believed Pakistan was emboldened to act so recklessly because the army assumed its nuclear arsenal would deter an Indian counterattack. At the time, India heeded American pleas that, to avoid the possibility of an escalating war, it not cross into Pakistan-administered Kashmir. But after Kargil, frustrated Indian officials talked more about the feasibility of a limited war that involved striking into Pakistani territory.

During the Kargil war, which ended with Pakistan`s ignominious withdrawal, American intelligence officials concluded that Pakistan had taken steps to prepare its nuclear weapons for possible use, according to an essay by Bruce Riedel, a special assistant to President Bill Clinton, published by the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania.

The current crisis is another incarnation of the struggle for Kashmir that began in 1947. Pakistan has long backed Islamic extremists who have committed atrocities against civilians as they battle Indian rule. Now, inspired in part by President Bush`s post-Sept. 11 policy of zero tolerance for terrorists, India has warned that it will take military action unless Pakistan stops sheltering and arming them.

Human rights monitors say Indian forces have committed gross human rights violations in battling the insurgency, which General Musharraf never fails to describe as an indigenous freedom struggle. LAST week, in a speech, he effectively cast the battle as a Hindu-Muslim conflict, an inflammatory step in the nuclear context. ``If war is imposed,`` he vowed, ``a Muslim is not afraid and does not retreat, but with the cry of Allah o-Akbar he jumps into the war to fight.``

As alarmed American officials watch the crisis unfold, they worry that India and Pakistan could become a model and inspiration for the likes of Iraq and North Korea if they should ever use their nuclear weapons against each other. ``Once you use it,`` one official said, ``that almost mystical taboo is removed.``

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/weekinreview/02DUGG.html?pagewanted=2

japantoday commentary

Bin Laden`s ultimate twin towers Pakistan and Saudi Arabia

Iqbal Latif

Pakistan`s anti-terrorist posture is once again under scrutiny as India-Pakistani tensions over Kashmir, which is a potential nuclear flash point, flare up.

The recent Indian assertions, that President Musharraf is not a genuine ally in the global war on terrorism, is a blatant endeavor to undo the perseverance and resolve shown by the Pakistani president since Sept 11 in the changed international milieu.

The Indian move is an incredibly irresponsible self-centered action, which does not take into account the global ramifications of a destabilized Pakistan. A coup or change of government in Pakistan may bring about a new round of enduring national unpredictability and propel fringe fanatics closer to the corridors of power.

The charges that Musharraf has not done enough and has failed to clamp down on infiltration, across the disputed territory of Kashmir, trivializes the significant struggle which Pakistan underwent in order to contribute to the reining of the tentacles of Global Terrorists Inc under Osama bin Laden.

The bigger picture of continuing war against global terror cannot be overlooked. That war has far bigger horizon beyond present bilateral problem of Kashmir, it has collateral impact on global economy and future of the sheikhdoms in the Middle East and oil are all linked to the continuing war against global terror.

Indian suggestions highlighted in a Vajpayee letter to U.S. President George Bush, which Chidanand Rajghatta reported from Washington, stated that India has no faith in Musharraf.

According to the Times correspondent in Washington, India has signaled to the United States and much of the world that it has completely lost faith in Musharraf and cannot do business with him. In a self-serving verdict the Times of India correspondent believes that ``Musharraf is also rapidly losing Washington`s trust, except perhaps his last bastion, the State Department.``

The Indian view, communicated both directly and indirectly, means a return to normalcy in the region may now depend on Musharraf`s exit or what Indian officials say is ``the unlikely event of him having a complete change of heart and forsaking terrorism as an instrument of state policy.``

India`s myopic view forgets that an effort of making an ``Arafat`` out of Musharraf is actually strengthening the hands of the Islamic global militants represented by al Qaeda. Musharraf rather than Bush is probably more likely to head the list of the most wanted men by al Qaeda.

When it mattered the most after Sept 11, Pakistan under Musharraf took the right decisions; which none of the strategists in the area ever thought that Pakistan was capable of. No one ever dreamt that moderation in the Pakistan army would be an overnight change of heart by the commander in chief.

Not that he did any favors to anyone, he owed it to humanity and mankind at large, however in a complete 180 degree turn which shocked Indian strategists who had always believed that the fruitless quest of fighting vain battles for Islam would once again steer Pakistan into taking a wrong decision and continue supporting the Taliban. In a succession of quick decisions he cleaned the slate, wiped out Taliban sympathizers like Mehmood, the dismissed chief of the ISI, and started anew.

The Sept 11 attacks were two-pronged, one to hit America within the safe confines of its homeland, which was a kind of a cold-blooded message with the stated objective of cowing the U.S. into appeasement. That first assumption was a deadly error by al Qaeda. They misread American history and could not evaluate the natural American response.

The second objective was to get Americans out of the Islamic world and leave the crescent of instability from Morocco to Pakistan in the hands of Islamic militants. As some believe the attacks were really not about the poverty or lack democracy within the Islamic countries, if this was the case, the hijackers should have been impoverished Afghans or Africans rather than rich Saudis.

The top leaders of al Qaeda include a trust-fund baby, hailing from one of the richest families in the Saudi kingdom, and another is a surgeon from a prominent Egyptian family. Clearly the attackers were not motivated by economic discontent, so what drove them? Religion, of course — although not everyone is ready to fully admit the role of Islam in September`s attacks.

The struggle led by bin Laden was not only to destroy the WTC but to create enough terror so as to move on and bring the ruled and the rulers of the Muslim world into a direct confrontation. Bin Laden and his cohorts, who undeniably represent the medieval era, are pitted against those who are slightly moderate and govern Muslim countries today.

Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the ousted Taliban leader, used Afghanistan as a base for their strategy, the ultimate aim of which was to launch a Sunni revolution across the Muslim world in a hope to bring down moderate regimes such as Pakistan in its first stage.

Bin Laden, a veteran of Afghan wars, found in the Taliban enough of the tribalism and backwardness that could help him reincarnate the 1,400-year-old epoch once again.

``Talibanization`` is the Sunni answer to the Shia revolution of Iran. Bin Laden wanted to become the Ayatollah Khomeini of the Sunni world. Talibanization under him would have definitely moved south into the hinterland of Pakistan as a counter to the Sunni global revolution had the response to the Sept 11 attacks not have taken out the roots of this global intifida.

Denying sanctuaries and breeding grounds to the global Islamic bandits under bin Laden is the biggest achievement of the U.S.-led campaign against the Taliban. This campaign has been successful as a result of a total cooperation from the moderate regime of Musharraf.

The task would have been much more complicated had anyone else would have been at the helm of the affairs. His personal risk and his correct decision to save the region from medieval reincarnation have saved the Islamic world from a major turmoil. Today the global militants are far weaker and Musharraf`s contribution are undeniable reality.

The militancy in Kashmir in terms of its scope and impact on Islamic world has some limitations on the global level but Islamic militants believe it has all the making of a firebrand Sunni revolution that could find a lot of sympathy in the Arab streets. Once Pakistan strategic assets are under their control, the next step would be to bring Saudi Arabia within the fold and restore the caliphate from Morocco to Indonesia.

By this view, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were just a preamble to win the hearts and minds of the worldwide community of Muslim believers. Bin Laden hoped that the attacks against the United States would spark uprisings by Muslims against their own American-backed regimes.

As Sandy Berger stated very correctly, ``Bin Laden`s ultimate twin towers are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.`` The mixture of oil and strategic assets under one caliphate spread out from Morocco to Indonesia would be a dreadful consequence. This theoretical but very possible scenario was averted by swift U.S. action and total cooperation by the Pakistani president and the nation as a whole.

Mmeanwhile, India, if nothing else, should be grateful to Musharraf for leading Pakistan out of a self-destructive cycle.

India for its own gains in Kashmir is undermining the coalition efforts to stamp out the global war against terrorism. Pakistan, out of default, is a key member due to the nature of the terror network objective and is a target of the militants as well, since they wish to control this pivotal member.

By forcing a confrontation with India they can sell Musharraf short as the man who brought down the Taliban but was unable to repel Indian aggression due to the lack of American support. They will make Musharraf an example within the Islamic world that will term him as the ``New Shah,`` a friend of America who was betrayed.

The last thing the U.S. wants is this new categorization. America needs trusted allies in the region and the actions of India are not very helpful. India, considering the recent events in Gujarat and Bihar and with a restive Islamic population within its border, should know that it cannot afford a destabilized and radicalized Pakistan.

A stable Pakistan helps a secular India grow stronger and provides calmness on its northern frontier and helps it to concentrate to alleviate the condition of its people. It`s a win-all situation for India and Pakistan.

At this stage of the war against Global Terror Inc, India`s decision to weaken Pakistan and pose a threat to its very existence is not very helpful. India is a victim of terror and so is Pakistan. The militants presently engaged with Indian armed forces are the same people who recently bombed the French engineers in Karachi, who were working on a very important Pakistani defense project. Hundreds of Pakistani doctors have been killed by these very militants who find anyone who opposes them worthy of elimination.

They are friends of no one, and are not the least bothered about Kashmir. It is the perpetual struggle of jihad and domination of Islam that drives them. The very objective of these militants is to create instability and they will thrive in this environment.

India should have a bigger picture in mind. The present mischief across the Line of Control is not a big enough reason to derail the global war against terrorism and push Pakistani moderates into ignominy. (Media Monitors Network)

http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=comment&id=194&refresh

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re: Zafar Al-Talib`s `A hit! A palpable hit`:

It would be more of a hit if our esteemed Chowk staffers were struck by it..or more importantly those of us don`t know what a summary or a link means, and don`t use their khhopriyan to express their own thoughts!

Bijli ji: Methinks the bijli is off, and you`re not home..

What India needs is a missile(or few) named Urdu/Persian/Arabic names of the elements in the style of Prithvi/Agni/Akash. That will learn `em :) Suggestions ?

DRUMZ #291
``The difference is that you people dont have any either, u just have the ILLUSION of having responsibilities. None of you run your countries, so how can u be responsible for defending them? To even attempt to is idle and foolish.``

You are not being very objective. You think its an illusion, I may not. Why should your sense of what is illusion be accepted by me?

``This is impossible and not worth talking about IF one`s thoughts are not pure. You people are so beyond having pure thoughts that we wouldnt even dream of discussing pure actions.``

How can you be the judge? Think about it, perhaps you/anyone else are the ones not being pureminded by refusing to see deeper into the issues as they are and raising alarm when others attempt to.

Its not pureminded to insist on sitting on a railway track while refusing to allow people to discuss whether trains exist.

``You must not be feeling this intensity. This complete lack of foresight will simply result in an ego contest and the death of millions.``

Huh? First you say I have an illusion that I have responsibilities. Next I am killing millions of people by voicing an opinion.

``Almost ALL ur posts are against pakistan and defending India.``

Again you could be the one being subjective. For example, on this board I spoke against the Pakistani ruling class, you may think thats synonymous with speaking against Pakistan but others might not.

``Peace?``

Peace. The divide is too wide to bridge, as usual :) Maybe in the next birth..

http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501020603-250061,00.html

On the Brink

In Kashmir, the conflict never stops—because so many gain so much by it

BY ALEX PERRY SRINAGAR

AMAN SHARMA/AP

Indian Army soldiers run during an army exercise near the international border between India and Pakistan



Special Report: Back on the Brink



Sometimes it seems nobody wants peace in Kashmir. When two masked gunmen dressed in Indian police uniforms gunned down Abdul Gani Lone at a rally in the leafy summer capital of Srinagar last week, the list of suspects was notable for including almost everyone. Some naturally pointed the finger at India and its secret service: for decades Lone had staunchly opposed Indian rule in Kashmir. But the 70-year-old former lawyer had modified his stance in the past two years, and that had survivors, including Lone`s son Sajjad, pinning the assassination on Pakistan, its powerful intelligence agency the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and Kashmir`s Islamic guerrillas. Sajjad, who succeeds his father in Kashmir`s most powerful separatist alliance, even vocally wondered whether his father`s allies were involved: men who were standing alongside him minutes before he was shot. Lone had been evolving into that Kashmiri rarity: a man pushing for peace. Nearly everyone agrees that`s why he died.

And with his death, the clouds of war grew immediately darker. Last week in India and Pakistan—and most concentratedly in Kashmir—the talk was not of whether there will be conflict, but when and what form it will take. Since 1947 the South Asian neighbors have squabbled over the lush Himalayan foothills; and since 1989 more than 35,000 people have lost their lives in a separatist rebellion, partly fueled by Pakistan. Lone`s death followed a militant attack at an army camp in Jammu the week before that left 31 dead, and India declared it had lost patience with Pakistan`s ``cross-border terrorism.`` Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee told some of the 750,000 Indian troops massed with heavy artillery and short-range ballistic missiles all along the western front to prepare for a ``decisive battle.`` He used the same alarming phrase a day later before the civilian press. Vajpayee ordered thousands more jawans, or soldiers, to the 3,000-kilometer-long border with Pakistan and moved five warships to the Arabian Sea. Pakistan responded by pulling 4,000 men out of peacekeeping duties in Sierra Leone and stationing them along its eastern frontier. It is considering withdrawing thousands more of its soldiers from the coalition hunt for al-Qaeda fugitives on the Afghanistan border. On Saturday, it performed a provocative test of a medium-range Ghauri missile. With mutual nuclear annihilation as the ultimate escalation, the subcontinent once again regained its status, in Bill Clinton`s phrase, as ``the most dangerous place on earth.``

Kashmir is the locus of that terrible peril because, for most of the players, continuing conflict works. It works for the militants, who have found an escape from grinding poverty in the gun and the cash and prestige it attracts. That`s true of both the indigenous Kashmiri militants and the ``guest mujahedin`` who come in from Pakistan, veterans of ISI-run training camps in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and former Taliban-ruled territory in Afghanistan, who subscribe to the same ideal of waging a purifying jihad.

Trouble in Kashmir also works for Pakistan. While President Pervez Musharraf publicly denounces militant incursions from his side of the border, it would be political suicide for him to denounce their aims. Nor does the Pakistani President`s rhetoric blind anyone to the memory that in 1999 he commanded the operation to seize strategic passes in the mountains of Kargil on the Indian side of the Line of Control (LOC). Moreover Musharraf`s announcements of a crackdown on the militants ring more than a touch hollow. While five insurgent groups have been banned and bank accounts have been frozen, some of the arrested leaders have been freed, the bank accounts are reported to have been emptied before they were closed and the incursions and attacks inside Indian territory continue, including a December attack on Parliament in New Delhi in which 14 people died.

Lately, all-out war has also become increasingly attractive to India. Vajpayee`s limping, pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is only too aware of the restorative powers of a good fight. War talk and fulminations against Muslim militancy have successfully rid India`s newspapers of reports of the excesses of the BJP`s hard-line supporters in Gujarat, where more than 1,000 Muslims have been killed in a 10-week religious pogrom. Conflict and crisis also allow India to ignore the average Kashmiri`s main complaints: the nagging injustice of Indian rule, rigged elections, rampant official corruption, police torture and murders by soldiers. And with the U.S. enthusiastically prosecuting its war on terror in Afghanistan, New Delhi feels the time is right for its own crackdown. In Kashmir, it is: even Kashmiri militants, who desire independence from India, agree that their guest mujahedin are as nasty as they are unwelcome. ``They are trying to Talibanize Kashmir,`` says activist Mohammed Kaleem. ``Their only objective is to destroy India.`` Mehbooba Mufti, vice president of the pro-India People`s Democratic Party, says the jihadis are giving Vajpayee`s government exactly the justification it needs: ``They always want to keep the Kashmir pot boiling.``

So far, India seems to have calculated correctly. While expressing concern at the prospect of war, U.S. President George W. Bush has said he understands India`s anger and frustration. European Union external affairs commissioner Chris Patten, who visited New Delhi and Islamabad last week, described India`s patience as ``stretched almost beyond breaking point`` and the situation as on a ``knife edge.`` Bush has stopped short of publicly admonishing Pakistan, Washington`s key ally in the war on terror, but he`s dispatching burly Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage to Islamabad next week, and his mission will be to deliver a heavy, private bruising. ``If anyone can threaten to crack Musharraf in half, it`s Armitage,`` says one State Department source. (Armitage can bench-press 160 kilos) For his part, Vajpayee has been hinting that New Delhi`s military strategy has received covert approval, saying last week ``world opinion is on our side but they are not saying so openly.``

Exactly what New Delhi is planning remains a mystery. ``Wait and watch,`` was Vajpayee`s heavy warning last week in Srinagar. Both sides have taken care not to publically flaunt their nuclear capabilities: Islamabad swiftly denounced one hard-line minister who did. Vajpayee told local newspaper editors in Jammu that as a first step New Delhi was considering abandoning a treaty that ensures the free flow of three rivers including the Indus, which originate in Indian-administered Kashmir and run through the mountains to irrigate Pakistan`s northeastern bread basket. A second option is surgical strikes by the air force and commando teams on jihadi training camps in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. The third is a pounding of Pakistani posts along the LOC in Kashmir followed by a limited invasion to push it back a few kilometers and allow India to take and block passes used by militants crossing into its territory.

Pakistan says it is preparing for the last two scenarios. ``The actions that the Indians have taken tell us that they have the capability to launch air strikes on the so-called camps, besides having the capacity to start a fierce ground offensive,`` says one Pakistani general. ``We have set our defenses accordingly and we are prepared for a limited war in and around Kashmir.`` For now, Pakistan says it is attempting to placate its neighbor by targeting Islamic militants on its soil. Late last week, diplomats were indicating that India was considering giving Pakistan one last chance. But like India, Pakistan too has a limit to its patience. ``No matter what Musharraf does, it will never be enough for India,`` says one Western diplomat. Adds a senior Pakistani military source: ``We may be tempted to finally say enough is enough.`` As Abdul Gani Lone discovered last week, peace is seldom popular in Kashmir.