[Velveeta]

Insult and injury in Islamabad

How A Q Khan’s nuke confessional has reversed the mood in the US — and given India a rare opportunity

SHEKHAR GUPTA

It is easy to see General Musharraf ko gussa kyon aata hai. How else can you feel when your nation’s greatest hero and role model is caught smuggling mass death to rogue states, making piles of money and investing it, among other things, in a hotel in Timbuktu and then, touchingly, names it after his wife? And how does General Musharraf express his anger? By threatening yet another missile test, a Shaheen with 2,000-km range.

Now we do not know what else this missile would do to enhance his security, redeem his nation — and his army’s — honour, or scare us Indians any more than the missiles that we know to be in his arsenal already do. A 2,000-km missile will perhaps take him to Chennai or thereabouts. But a valid question you may ask is, why should he even be bothering to reach that far when he can hit Delhi, Mumbai and even Bangalore at will anyway? Unless, either he has a problem with Jayalalithaa, or he wants to collect more frequent-flier miles? Or, are we missing the point? That the general is now seriously working at increasing the range of his missiles to reach the one city that should be the most serious target of his ire, namely, Washington, DC. He needs 12,000 km — 2,000 is at least a step forward. More seriously, don’t forget how close it takes him to Tel Aviv. (snipped...long article, but a good read)

http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=40571

Nothingman: How does India fit in to the picture?

SP2BF: In the last sentence of the first paragraph, the word "Shaheen"....am I recalling correctly that Shaheen means Falcon?

[milkncookies]

The 15 April 1999 test marked the debut of the "Shaheen" [a royal white falcon] nomenclature in Pakistan's missile inventory, as well as the genesis of some confusion concerning Pakistan's missile imports from China. The claimed 750 km range of the Shaheen is roughly double the standard range of the Hatf-3/M-11, and is consistent with the range of the much large Chinese M-9.

Hatf-3 / Shaheen-I / M-11

[StillProud2BeFree]

Shaheen means delicious in Arabic.

You're thinking about Saqr which means Falcon.

Another similar word, shaheed, means martyr.

[Domestic Church]

"Shaheen means Falcon"

My head is starting to spin. So in addition to the jihadi falcon operation having possible chem/bio overtones we now get to add nuke?!

No amount of chocolate can ease this.

Time to go find a haystack,lol.

[NothingMan]

"Nothingman: How does India fit in to the picture?"

Velveeta,

That (like Cuba) is getting out of the realm of what I feel that I really know much about. I don't follow India too closely. But they fit into the larger picture in that they are trying to reduce tensions and renew dialogue with Pakistan, and that has the crazies in Pakistan spitting nails. (They are afraid Musharaff will compromise on Kashmir, the disputed territory that they have fought three wars over in the past half century.) Rumsfeld had to personally engage in shuttle diplomacy in 2002 to keep nuclear war from breaking out. So they have come a long way . . .

They impact the situation in that the folks trying to kill Musharaff (and destabilize Pakistan) see India as the enemy, and Musharaff was already riding the tiger before this whole Khan thing broke (two assassination attempts in December). His back is really against the wall now. If he goes down, his replacement will probably be weak, the extremists will assert themselves and exert greater influence on the new government, and will seek to provoke new crises with India (as when Pakistani-backed terrorists bombed the Indian parliament a few months after 9/11).

This is why things are destabilizing. Musharaff is trying to clean house and for the Islamists this means war. For all we know, Bin Laden, Zawahiri, et al are not in Iran or Wazirstan Province, but as were KSM and Bin al-Shibh, are holed up in Karachi or Rawalpindi, perhaps under the protection of elements of ISI. If they aren't, it is a reasonable supposition that other senior AQ leaders are.

The assassination attempts against Musharaff were extremely professional. It wasn't a shoe bomber or a guy with nails in a vest. That indicates internal high-level complicity, and that is disturbing in a nation with a decent sized nuclear arsenal which helped create AQ.

China has had border frictions with India (not serious like 1962, but the frictions are there) and China is a strategic ally of Pakistan. It is uncertain under what circumstances China might intervene if nuclear war were to break out on the subcontinent and Pakistan were to begin to lose. (Somewhat akin to the question under what extreme circumstances might China intervene in a Second Korean War as they did in December 1950)