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COVER STORY: INDIA'S RESPONSE
Will India Benefit?
India has borne
the brunt of the attacks by terrorists or "jehadis" — as
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf calls them — since the early
1990s. Backed by Islamabad and trained in camps run by radical Islamic
elements on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, these terrorists have been
responsible for the loss of at least 70,000 lives in Jammu and Kashmir
alone. Delhi was also the target of a planned terrorist operation when
Indian Airlines flight IC-814 from Kathmandu to Delhi was hijacked and
taken to Kandahar in December 1999. It was the first indication of the
locus of terrorism shifting from the Middle East to South Asia. The fountainhead
was the Taliban-run Afghanistan and its supporters such as bin Laden apart
from Pakistan's Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Islam and its Inter-Services Intelligence.
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FOR
A RANSOM: The 1999 Kandahar hijack of the IA plane (above) showed
the locus of terrorism has shifted to South Asia; the Agra talks broke
off over differences on cross-border terrorism |
Yet till now India had found it difficult to
convince the US even to put a ban on terrorist groups such as the Pakistan-supported
Lashkar-e-Toiba which have been responsible for unleashing the wave of
violence in Kashmir. Washington always looked on jehadi terrorism in Kashmir
as part of a societal malady peculiar to the subcontinent. As an official
says, "The Kashmir issue preceded the rise of terrorism in the Valley."
The US regarded earlier terrorist strikes against its own facilities as
a fallout of its policies against them.
This assessment did not change even though the
US cruise missile attack on Afghanistan in August 1998 managed to hit
a camp training pan-Islamic jehadis for terrorism in Kashmir. Nor did
the US move with any great speed on a UN treaty to counter worldwide terrorism.
But with Bush making it his mission to break the back of terrorism after
the September 11 strikes, there will be a major shift in terms of resources,
strategies and the swiftness with which the US will move on the issue.
So will the US haul Pakistan over the coals
now? And will India see some respite in Kashmir? Yes and no. The Indian
Army believes that violence in the Valley will go down within a month.
That's because it suits Pakistan to lie low for a while. But if the Ministry
of External Affairs hopes that the US will abandon Pakistan, they may
be belied. The US will turn on the heat, but unless there is solid proof
of the Pakistan Government's involvement and continuing complicity, the
flame will be used to singe but not engulf President Musharraf. Part of
the reason is that America does not want to see a nuclear Pakistan go
fundamentalist and prove an even greater threat.
The US has demanded that Pakistan distance itself
from the Taliban regime. Musharraf now finds himself walking on very thin
line. He cannot afford to cut off support to either the Taliban or the
jehadis in Kashmir. But he could also face the wrath of the US if he is
seen not to be sincere in helping them bring the culprits to book for
the dastardly acts. Pakistan though still has friends in the current US
administration. Many of them served George W. Bush's father when he was
president and Ronald Reagan and value Pakistan's help in driving out the
Soviets from Afghanistan.
September 11 may have radically altered all
that but the US will not want to cause too much destabilisation and end
up battling more. It also needs as many Muslim nations as it can have
on its side so that the coming war will not end up as a clash of civilisations
as Harvard historian Samuel Huntington had predicted. Nor does the US
want to make bin Laden a martyr, which could foster, as one official says,
"clones of bin Laden continuing from where he left off".
Though India has offered all help, the US, while
appreciative of the gesture, will use it judiciously. Much as India would
want the coming war on terrorism to get at the Kashmir jehadis as well,
America may not want to get embroiled in such a complicated and complex
issue. So it may decide against using Indian territory as a staging ground
or for logistic support for military action. Also, as a US official asks:
"What's left for us anyway to bomb in Afghanistan?" Years of
civil war have left the nation in ruins and there are very few high value
targets that the US can strike. Merely bombing terrorists camps will not
help either. For these could easily be moved to other centres or countries
and continue to cause havoc. What the US may do is to involve India, Russia
and some Central Asian republics in rebuilding the Northern Alliance against
the Taliban regime into a formidable force that would overrun the country
and destroy bin Laden's base in the country. That way it can also ensure
a more stable Afghanistan.
All these developments do seem like a win-win
situation for India. But the final gains may not live up to the country's
current expectations.
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