The Price of Failure in Kashmir

Following Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf's speech on May 27th and the Indian government's official response the following day, it is clear that while war clouds have temporarily receded they have most certainly not been lifted.

India will wait to see "results," i.e. what steps the Pakistan government will take to end the ability of terrorists to strike from across the border into Indian territory, including Jammu and Kashmir.

One must distinguish here between two claims being made by the Indian government. Any attribution that the Musharraf government is directly behind the Dec. 13 attack on Parliament and now the May 14 attack in Kaluchak, Jammu, is not substantiated by evidence and is, politically speaking, utterly implausible. The Musharraf government is not so foolish or naïve as to impose even further pressure on itself in circumstances when his own regime is fighting for internal survival, or to want to shift attention away from the state-sponsored anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat and the world's criticism of the Indian government on that score. The claim that Musharraf has done far from enough to curb fundamentalist groups determined to carry out terrorist actions in India, and has often shut his eyes to their activities, is by contrast, quite justified.

This Indian government, however, has refused to make this distinction -- effectively holding Musharraf culpable for any failure to end cross-border terrorist attacks. In this respect it is, like Israel, using the same dishonest, spurious, and ethically and legally untenable argument of making no distinction between actual terrorist perpetrators and the country that harbors them, a rationale that the Bush administration used to justify its assault on Afghanistan. No doubt, this makes it that much more difficult for Washington to draw this distinction to Indian attention, although it is clearly determined to prevent a war from breaking out between India and Pakistan, even as it pursues separate alliances with both countries.

In fact, if there has been no Indian military attack by its official armed forces across the border into Pakistan this time, it is because Washington said no, and India has heeded. But for how long?

Herein lies the problem. Washington will put pressure on Musharraf to do more against the fundamentalist groups using Pakistan, and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, as a base to organize operations in India. But because Musharraf is not in full control, there is simply no guarantee that another terrorist attack will not take place, anymore than one can guarantee even after the U.S. war on Afghanistan that there will never be another terrorist attack on the U.S. Indeed, Islamic fundamentalist groups who are out to destabilize the Musharraf government, strike at the U.S. presence in Pakistan, and to keep the Kashmir issue boiling, would like nothing better than to provoke a war between India and Pakistan, which they believe can help them on all three counts.

Such has been the character of Indian brinkmanship after May 14, that the likelihood of a limited military strike by India the next time around (U.S. presence or disapproval notwithstanding) is almost certain. The alternative would be a most humiliating climb down given the pitch, tone, and frequency of Indian official statements -- "there is a limit to our patience," an "undeclared war has been going on for two decades," and so forth. In short, today, the hardliners within the BJP-led government have succeeded in severing the lines of possible retreat from what is in political terms nothing less than an ultimatum to Pakistan.

There are more than a few sober heads within the Indian security establishment who are disturbed by such inflexibility and its political-military implications. The probability of military actions that will lead to war between India and Pakistan, initiated by the former, becomes far greater than it has been so far. Such an outbreak of armed hostilities has the potential to escalate to the nuclear level, even as one hopes it doesn't ever reach that stage. Yet the willingness of hardliners within and around the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (and its cohort organizations promoting Hindu nationalism) to risk such possible consequences must be recognized. Why is this so?