Posted on 05/14/2002 2:25:54 PM PDT by swarthyguy
The horrendous fidayeen attack on an army camp near Jammu on Tuesday in which 34 persons, including 25 armymen and their family members, lost their lives comes at a time when US assistant secretary of state Christina Rocca is in Delhi to counsel restraint to India in the face of continuing cross-border terrorism.
The latest American argument is that General Musharraf is as helpless in stopping terrorist infiltration into India as he is in stopping the passage of al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership into Pakistan. It’s just that while Washington has asserted its right to move into Pakistan to pursue the Al-Qaida and Taliban cadres, it is firmly opposed to New Delhi taking military action within Pakistani territory.
This position, apart from its moral untenability, does not adequately address the concern that a democratically accountable Indian regime cannot indefinitely resist the growing domestic pressure to act against Pakistan-based terrorist outfits. The credibility of Washington’s role as a peacemaker is compromised further by the fact that it has had nothing concrete to offer in terms of stopping the terrorist infiltration.
The early morning attack in Jammu is an unmistakable pointer in that direction. It is therefore up to the Indian government to act in a way that ensures that the cost of such terrorism is made prohibitively high for the jehadi groups.
Many in this country believe that notwithstanding Ms Rocca’s visit, diplomacy is no longer the answer to the problem of cross-border terrorism. In their view, New Delhi has little option but to launch what a former chief of army staff described — less than 24 hours before the latest outrage in Jammu — as a “limited war”.
Such retaliatory strikes, it is believed, will not risk escalation since their aim would be solely to inflict punishment and not gain territory. Discounting Western apprehensions that there is no such thing as a limited war between two nuclear powers with a long history of animosity, they contend that the presence of US troops in Pakistan guarantees that the latter will not make use of its nuclear weapons.
After all, the Americans cannot dismiss lightly the threat that some of these weapons might be targeted at their own carriers and forces stationed in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Whatever the truth of such a thesis, there is no denying the support it has acquired among an influential section of Indian opinion increasingly frustrated by the Bush administration’s inability to get the general to act on his anti-jehadi promise.
Indeed, the view from New Delhi is that Washington has given Islamabad an unacceptably long rope, whether on the issue of condoning the movement of al-Qaeda and Taliban into Pakistan or on the failure to crack down on jehadis despite the recent massacres in the general’s own backyard. Finally, it’s not just the Indians who are complaining about the lack of serious action on the ground.
Americans too have been at the receiving end of the Pakistani army’s foot-dragging and lack of cooperation in dealing with Al-Qaida and Taliban elements. Clearly, Washington cannot bank on continued public and media support at home for its mollycoddling of the general. Meanwhile, unless the US government proves its bona fides that the war against terrorism does not treat Indian lives as expendable, New Delhi has a pressing obligation to protect its own, with or without American help.
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