The Perfect Murder Stop Border-Crossing

By: Dr. Ijaz Ahsan

http://www.paktoday.com/cross31.htm

For the last many years India has been asking us to stop cross-border terrorism, in other words to stop Mujahideen from crossing over into Indian-held Kashmir. Our answer has been two-fold. Firstly that the Kashmir struggle is indigenous and there are no border crossings going on. Secondly, that in any case this is not terrorism but a freedom struggle. After Sep 11 the world community is unanimous on one point. If men go from one country to fight in another, they regard is as terrorism. They are not willing to accept our notion of a pan-Islamic Jehad.

The choice before us is clear. Either we stop border crossings or we fight India, who would have the blessings of the international coalition including Russia, China, America, Britain, France, etc. Let us see what we can do about fighting India. In making up our mind we should keep the past history of our initiatives on Kashmir in mind. In 1965 we attacked Kashmir. However, when India attacked Pakistan, we had to shift our troops from Kashmir to save Lahore and Sialkot. None of the Indian cities, neither Ferozepur nor Amritsar, faced any danger? In 1971 India dismembered our country into two and we could not mount even a token offensive from West Pakistan. In 1999 we repeated the idiotic folly of 1965. We grabbed the lifeline of India`s northern army at Kargil. When India threatened to attack Pakistan, our prime minister had to rush to Washington to prevent Indian attack. If after Vajpayee`s bus diplomacy to Lahore we had not attacked Kargil, events would have followed a different course and some agreement would in all probability have been reached.

Now the position is this: if we do not stop border crossings, India will impose a war on us and the international coalition will support it. What will we do then? India is taking a very long time, not weeks but months, over its military preparations. This can be due to one of two reasons: Firstly it is possible India wants the world community to get used to the idea of war, so that when India actually starts the war the international reaction is muted. Alternatively, India could be gradually increasing the tension in the hope that the international community pressurises Pakistan to be flexible in its Kashmir policy and earns for India the maximum benefits. If we have the wherewithal, we should attack Kashmir, conquer it and give it to the Kashmiris. This is what the Indians did in East Pakistan. They were able to do it because they were stronger than us. They did not waste 50 long years asking for UN resolutions on East Pakistan.

If we do this, India cannot blame us; Kashmir is disputed territory, Bangladesh was not even disputed. If we cannot conquer Kashmir we should tread the ground carefully, araam nal baihna chahi da ay. We should learn from the Arabs. They give all moral support to the Palestinians. However, no Egyptian or Syrian goes to Palestine to fight. Pakistan has suffered a great deal of deprivation in its efforts to bring the Kashmir issue to a solution acceptable to the Kashmiris, but without success.

For the last fifty years we have spent half our GDP on defence. For this we have had to borrow billions of dollars. This has led to the remaining half of our GDP being spent on debt-servicing, leaving nothing for hospitals, roads, school, sanitation. Kashmir is the only, or main reason for our enmity with India, which forces us to spend everything on the armed forces. The result, after fifty years, is that for the sake of Kashmir half our population lives below the poverty line, which means in absolute destitution.

All this is more than sufficient cost that we have borne in order to help our Kashmiri brethren. If we have still failed to get them their freedom, and our own survival is threatened in a possibly nuclear war, we should feel we have done enough for Kashmir, though regrettably without being able to help them as much as we would have wished. We should henceforth give them all possible moral support, but should ensure there be no more border crossings, so the resulting severe antagonism between India and Pakistan threatening to destroy both, can recede.

A considerable number of our citizens and many among the army personnel are unhappy over the U-turn in our policy on Afghanistan and now Kashmir, after the Sep 11. They should realise the complete coordination between America-India from Agra to Alaska on defence matters, and the considerable pressure from them on Pakistan to restrict its physical support to the Kashmiris. In the form of the AWACS and the later radars, America has provided India so much assistance that the balance of power in the region, which was already in India`s favour, has been upset further. For Pakistan to counter an Indian-American defence shield will be extremely difficult. Therefore we should face the facts of life while formulating our policies.

If we decide that we cannot attack Kashmir and conquer it, and wish to talk peace, Pakistan should offer joint patrolling of the LoC by Indian and Pakistani soldiers. If such a scheme is implemented, it will be clear to everyone that no border crossings are taking place. The Pakistan government should immediately make this offer, and arrange for the offer to be widely publicised. This will convince the international community, if not the Indians, that we are sincere in our efforts to prove that no one is crossing the border. This will deal with India`s most important demand, namely that we put a stop to border crossings.

http://www.paktoday.com/cross31.htm

Lighting The Nuclear Fire No more cross border terrorism for few days

Kashmir infiltrations halted, say terrorists :

MUZAFFARABAD, Jun 02: Terrorists have virtually halted infiltrations into Indian Kashmir under instructions from Pakistan, in a bid to avert war with India, militant sources said today. Sources among the Kashmiri separatist groups in Pakistan said they had gotten the message. ``We have been asked to stop sending militants across the Line of Control,`` a militant source told Reuters privately. ``They have been asked, so infiltration has virtually stopped,`` another source close to the militants said. ``The instruction was issued around a week ago or so.`` ``There is also a restriction on terrorist groups using any communication means to contact their guys in Kashmir,`` the source said.

Sources said Musharraf had called a halt to see if diplomatic channels have more success in convincing India to come to the negotiating table to resolve the Kashmir dispute. But if India does not respond adequately, analysts say Pakistan could start to encouraging cross border terrorism and the militants once again. Others fear that attacks by militants who are outside Pakistan`s control could also turn the heat back up.

The Perfect Murder No more cross border terrorism for few days

Kashmir infiltrations halted, say terrorists :

MUZAFFARABAD, Jun 02: Terrorists have virtually halted infiltrations into Indian Kashmir under instructions from Pakistan, in a bid to avert war with India, militant sources said today. Sources among the Kashmiri separatist groups in Pakistan said they had gotten the message. ``We have been asked to stop sending militants across the Line of Control,`` a militant source told Reuters privately. ``They have been asked, so infiltration has virtually stopped,`` another source close to the militants said. ``The instruction was issued around a week ago or so.`` ``There is also a restriction on terrorist groups using any communication means to contact their guys in Kashmir,`` the source said.

Sources said Musharraf had called a halt to see if diplomatic channels have more success in convincing India to come to the negotiating table to resolve the Kashmir dispute. But if India does not respond adequately, analysts say Pakistan could start to encouraging cross border terrorism and the militants once again. Others fear that attacks by militants who are outside Pakistan`s control could also turn the heat back up.

The Perfect Murder 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.

The Perfect Murder 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

The Perfect Murder 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

Lighting The Nuclear Fire 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.

Lighting The Nuclear Fire 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

Lighting The Nuclear Fire 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.

Advertisement





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

Lighting The Nuclear Fire 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

Of Violent Birth and Peaceful Death 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.

Advertisement





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

Of Violent Birth and Peaceful Death 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

Of Violent Birth and Peaceful Death 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

The Perfect Murder On the Brink

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

BY ALEX PERRY SRINAGAR

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.

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

The Perfect Murder Pakistani President at the Fulcrum of Crisis

By DEXTER FILKINS

SLAMABAD, Pakistan, May 31 — With South Asia teetering on the edge of war, President Bush has imposed on Pakistan the burden of dragging it back into balance.

But the question making its way through the Pakistani capital here is whether the country`s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has as much power as President Bush implies. At the same time, many in India are wondering whether General Musharraf, who is known as a hawk, really wants to rein in Pakistan.

Earlier this week, in unusually strong language, Mr. Bush called on the Pakistani president to prevent Muslim guerrillas from crossing into the Indian state of Kashmir, where thousands of Indians have been killed in a 13-year-old insurgency.

Just how much the Pakistan government helps the Muslim guerrillas is at the heart of the current standoff along the border, where a million Indian and Pakistani troops are facing off in a confrontation made all the more dangerous by the nuclear weapons each side possesses.

In his remarks this week, Mr. Bush suggested endorsement of the long-held Indian view of the Kashmir conflict: that the insurgency in India`s only Muslim-majority state is not a homegrown uprising against Indian rule, but a guerrilla war orchestrated and controlled by the Pakistani government. Defusing the crisis, Mr. Bush suggested, is as simple as sealing the Pakistani border; he implied that General Musharraf could accomplish that with an order to his lieutenants.

For Pakistanis, the reality of Kashmir is more complicated, bound up in the passions of faith and nation that transcend their views on other issues. Kashmir has been a flashpoint since 1947, when India and Pakistan rose from the remains of the British Empire, divided largely along religious lines. Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state with a Hindu prince, split between the two new nations, and successive Pakistani governments have persisted in trying to wrest the Indian part of Kashmir from the largely Hindu country. India, a secular democracy with myriad faiths, has fiercely resisted, skeptical of the idea that religion is the principal arbiter of national identity.

With such passion invested in the struggle, few Pakistanis today think that General Musharraf has enough power to hold back the militants crossing into Indian Kashmir, or that it would make much difference in the guerrilla war even if he did.

Indeed, Pakistanis expressed irritation today at Mr. Bush`s remarks, saying they exposed a fundamental misunderstanding of the Kashmir conflict and of the Pakistani government`s role in it. To most Pakistanis, the conflict is a struggle with local roots, with the largely Muslim population writhing beneath the oppressive rule of a Hindu-dominated nation. Although it has long been an open secret that Pakistani governments have provided training and support for Muslim militants who cross the frontier into Indian Kashmir, few Pakistanis believe that their support is decisive.

``The struggle is totally indigenous,`` said Maj. Gen. Nasirullah Babar, interior minister under Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister. ``The Indians have thousands of troops there, and still they cannot suppress it.``

Like other Pakistanis, General Babar said Mr. Bush`s recent remarks might embolden the Indian government, which has been contemplating a military strike into Pakistan to snuff out what it says are terrorist camps for militants heading into Indian Kashmir.

Like many current and former Pakistani officials, General Babar denied that the Pakistani government was helping to operate such camps, despite the widely held view of Western diplomats that it does. Indeed, after a terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in December, General Musharraf pledged to cut off the infiltration routes of the insurgents and crack down on militant groups inside Pakistan.

By many accounts, American and Indian, General Musharraf`s attempts to rein in the militants have been either futile or cosmetic. The infiltration persists, and most of the 2,000 or so militants detained late last year and early this year are now back on the streets.

``If these camps were reactivated, it is not conceivable that this could happen without President Musharraf`s knowledge,`` said Najam Sethi, editor of The Friday Times, an English-language newspaper in Lahore, Pakistan.

Just why General Musharraf might have thought that he could continue to press the Kashmir struggle in the face of public American opposition is unclear. According to a Pakistani source, he believed that in exchange for helping the United States destroy the Taliban and Al Qaeda, he would be allowed to assist the insurgency in Kashmir unfettered.

Though known to be a moderate Muslim, the general is also known to harbor hawkish views toward his neighbor. A native of India, he left his home in New Delhi during the trauma of partition. A half-century later, as head of the Pakistani Army, he directed the incursion into the Kargil region on the Indian side of Kashmir in 1999, which nearly brought the two countries to war.

But a widely expressed fear here is that the general, who has vowed to turn his country away from militant Islam, may be unable to persuade members of his own army and intelligence services to turn off the insurgency, regardless of the urgings of Mr. Bush. Such an inability could doom chances of a rapprochement with India, which has made shutting down the militant camps the condition for withdrawing its troops from the Pakistani border.

``I personally don`t feel that Musharraf can control these groups,`` said Tariq Rahman, a professor at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. ``There are groups that want to embarrass him; they have their own version of Islamization.``

``That is one possibility,`` Professor Rahman added. ``The other is that the operation has been in motion for such a lot of time, that junior officers and middle-ranking officers are not enthusiastic about shutting it down.``

If Professor Rahman is right, the Pakistani government and the White House may find it more difficult to put the current crisis to rest. As Western officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, prepare to visit the region, they may find that the question of the Pakistani-based militants proves the stickiest of all.

Additionally, with the crisis entering its seventh month, General Musharraf may decide that the situation is too dangerous to jettison the militants, whom he might need if war broke out.

``There are 50,000 of these guys; they are Pakistan`s fifth column,`` said Mr. Sethi, the newspaper editor. ``With India breathing down his neck, there is no way Musharraf is going to dismantle them now.``

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/01/international/asia/01ASSE.html

The Perfect Murder Lone`s last words

Abdul Gani Lone was the peaceful face of the Kashmiri freedom movement. For his efforts, he was shot repeatedly last week by two unidentified men in Indian-controlled Srinigar, and died reciting Koranic verses. At a time when India and Pakistan are being ripped apart by cross-border terrorism and violence, a buildup of almost one million troops along the Indian-Pakistan border and disputes over nuclear arms and the Kashmir region, Mr. Lone had been a voice of hope for Kashmiris — as well as for moderate Pakistanis and Indians. He called for militants in Kashmir to stop violence, for diverse religious groups to unite regardless of political objectives and for the international community to not forget about the plight of his people. Two wars have been fought over the region claimed by both India and Pakistan, and yet the Kashmiris would like to shape their own destiny. He asked India and Pakistan to let that happen, and he died in the process.

Shortly before he was killed, Mr. Lone met on May 2 with editors and reporters of The Washington Times. He wanted to remind the international community of the urgency of the Kashmiri conflict. ``Allow us to go to Pakistan and let us tell our boys`` to give up their guns, Mr. Lone said was his plea to the Indian government. Yet he would not make it to Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. He was killed on May 21, just one day after calling again for a stop to the violence in Kashmir at a meeting with journalists, scholars and members of the All Parties Hurriyet Conference, the multiparty Kashmiri separatist alliance which he led.

Secretary of State Colin Powell called the assassination ``a direct attack on hopes for a fair political process in Kashmir,`` and Washington is calling on both India and Pakistan to stand down. Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf highlighted the ``martyrdom`` in his address to the nation on May 27. Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who was in the Kashmir this week, said Mr. Lone was killed because he was working for peace.

Yet while hailing Mr. Lone as a peacemaker, India and Pakistan have turned to non-peaceful means to solve their disputes. Each has blamed the other for his death, and the day after Mr. Lone was killed, Mr. Vajpayee told his troops stationed on the Pakistani border that the time had come for a successful fight. On May 25, Pakistan began to test the medium-range surface-to-surface Ghauri missile and continued tests through May 28. India has responded by shelling Pakistan and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Yet despite all the killing, there was at least one quiet place in Kashmir on May 23, when 100,000 Kashmiris gathered for the funeral for Mr. Lone in Srinagar.

``We will continue to try to convince the local population that militancy accomplishes nothing,`` Mr. Lone said at the end of his meeting with The Times. He did all he could. Now it is up to India, Pakistan and the grieving people of Kashmir to do the same.

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20020530-30425306.htm