The Duel (33 page)

If this is the prelude to something bigger, such as a partial U.S. occupation of the North-West Frontier Province, it could trigger a severe crisis in the army, already under strain carrying out CENTCOM instructions on the Pakistan-Afghan border. The fallout could have unpredictable consequences.

A
S FAR AS
nuclear weapons are concerned, the double standards of the West are not helpful and are viewed with contempt in most parts of the world. Nonetheless it’s a fact that neither India nor Pakistan benefits from this weaponry, which has become a new form of sacred property. The figures speak for themselves. Following the nuclear tests of 1998 the Indian government announced an allocation of $9.9 billion for defense spending in 1999, an increase of 14 percent over the previous year. Pakistan, in turn, raised its budget by 8.5 percent to $3.3 billion. South Asia today is one of the world’s most heavily militarized regions. The Indian and Pakistani armies are two of the world’s ten largest war machines. There is a combined 6:1 ratio of soldiers to doctors. The social costs of arms spending are horrendous.

It would be to the great advantage of both countries if the billions spent on nuclear weapons were used to build schools, universities, and
hospitals and to provide clean water in the villages. Rationality, alas, is the first victim when these two countries quarrel. During the military skirmishes in the snow deserts of Kargil, nuclear threats were exchanged by both states on thirteen separate occasions within three months. This was followed by new terrorist attacks in India. Pakistan denied any responsibility, but New Delhi was unconvinced.

On December 13, 2001, five suicide terrorists armed with automatic rifles, grenades, and explosives killed nine people and wounded two dozen others before being killed themselves in a forty-five-minute battle with security forces outside the Indian parliamentary building. Mercifully parliament wasn’t in session that day. Had Indian politicians been killed in the attack, another war between the two states would have been a near certainty.

The Indian home minister, L. K. Advani, a leader of the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was then in power, pointed the finger at two well-known Islamist terror groups—Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba—created and backed by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. He described what had taken place as the “most alarming act of terrorism in the history of two decades of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in India.... The terrorists and their mentors . . . [wanted] to wipe out the entire political leadership of India.” This was clearly an invitation to a military response, and it led to an intense and sharp debate within the Indian elite as to whether they should hit back with a surgical strike on training camps in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. In the end, thankfully, they decided not to do so.

The groups that attacked the Indian parliament were not only targeting India. Their aim was evidently to provoke a conflict between the two countries. They despised Musharraf for betraying the cause and siding with Washington after 9/11. Their hatred for “Hindu” India was nothing new and had been enhanced by BJP rule in that country. The tragedy is that they came so close to inciting a war. Senior Indian strategists argued that if the United States could bomb a country and change its government while searching for terrorists who ordered the hits on the Pentagon, why could India not do the same? The logic was impeccable, but the outcome could have been a catastrophe of massive proportions. Pakistan’s rulers responded with a nuclear threat: if their
country’s sovereignty was threatened, they would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons. An ugly chill gripped the atmosphere.

Washington sought to reassure India. Simultaneously, it pressured Islamabad to shift rapidly into reverse gear. On January 12, 2002, Musharraf made a landmark speech. He offered India a no-war pact, denuclearization of South Asia, closure of the jihadi training camps in Pakistan, and a total transformation of Indo-Pak relations. While hardline fundamentalist newspapers attacked him, the country remained calm. Not a bird twittered, not a dog barked. So much for the view that ordinary Pakistanis are obsessed with the “Islamic bomb.” Pakistan’s nuclear capacity had often been used by the jihadi groups as a guarantee of their untouchability. No longer. A positive response from India was vital and could have altered the entire political landscape to the benefit of both countries. But India refused to budge. Its spokesmen continued to mouth platitudes but insisted on “minimum nuclear deterrence” and refused the offer of a no-war pact.

By rejecting Pakistan’s denuclearization offer, the Indian government exposed the hollowness of its professed commitment to nuclear disarmament. The folly was compounded by the test-firing of a new Agni missile on the eve of the Republic Day celebrations on January 26, 2002. Apart from being an irresponsible and provocative gesture, the test was a reaffirmation of New Delhi’s resolve to proceed with nuclear armaments.

The advocates of a short sharp war against Pakistan are largely confined to the well-off, urban middle classes in India. The poor, in the main, do not favor conflict. They know the dangers it would create inside India with its 200 million Muslims. They know that wars don’t come cheap and that they would bear the brunt of the suffering. Three hundred million Indians already live below the poverty line.

Even among the gung ho middle classes the desire for a war would fade were they faced with conscription and required to fight themselves. Unlike bin Laden’s followers, these are armchair fundamentalists.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani and Indian armies are on full alert and confront each other across a mine-strewn border. The mines are especially concentrated in cultivated farmlands near the international border and the Line of Control in Kashmir. The local villagers will suffer
the consequences for years to come. Already there have been numerous civilian casualties.

New Delhi sees itself as a potential world power. It craves a seat on the UN Security Council. It argues that if small European countries such as Britain and France can possess nuclear weapons, then why not India? The simplest response would be to extend nuclear disarmament and for Europe to initiate the process. The West seems unlikely to oblige. The U.S. military budget remains inflated and accounts for one-half of the world’s expenditure on armaments. The old enemy no longer exists, but the Cold War scenarios remain in place. U.S. military planners continue to target Russia and China. The latest wave of NATO expansion that both preceded and followed the war in Yugoslavia hardened Russian opposition to nuclear disarmament. When NATO patrols the Black Sea, what price the “Partnership for Peace”?

Herein lies the crux of the problem. Unless the West begins nuclear disarmament, it has no moral or material basis on which to demand that others do the same. Only a twisted logic accepts that London and Paris can have the bomb, but New Delhi and Islamabad cannot. India and Pakistan are only too aware that nuclear rain and radiation are no respecters of frontiers. It is unlikely that they would resort to first use of these weapons, but that is not sufficient reassurance for the citizens of either country.

While Pakistan’s principal preoccupation remains India, its senior partners in Washington have been trying hard to shift Islamabad’s focus to the western frontier. This has briefly been discussed in an earlier chapter, but the impact of U.S.-occupied Afghanistan on Pakistan is such that it necessitates a more detailed mapping of the new turbulence afflicting the region.

T
HE
B
USH
-C
HENEY ERA IS DRAWING TO A CLOSE, BUT THEIR
replacements, despite the debacle in Iraq, are unlikely to settle the American giant back to a digestive sleep. The leitmotif of Cheney’s foreign policy was “either you’re for us or for terrorism against us.” The application of this line meant isolating, intimidating, or invading individual states that did not accept shelter under the U.S. umbrella.

In 2004, as the chaos in Iraq deepened, the war in Afghanistan became the “good war” by comparison. It had been legitimized by the UN—even if the resolution was not passed until after the bombs had finished falling—and backed by NATO. If tactical differences had sharpened over Iraq, they could be resolved in Afghanistan. First Zapatero in Spain, then Prodi in Italy, and most recently Rudd in Australia compensated for pulling troops out from Iraq by dispatching them to Kabul.
*
France and Germany could extol their peacekeeping or civilizing roles there. For the Scandinavians it became a feel-good war.

Meanwhile, the number of Afghani civilians killed has exceeded nearly a hundredfold the 2,746 who died in Manhattan. Unemployment is around 60 percent, and maternal, infant, and child mortality levels are now the highest in the world. Opium production has soared, and the “Neo-Taliban” is growing stronger year by year. A CIA assessment of late 2006 painted a somber picture of Karzai and his regime as hopelessly corrupt and incapable of defending Afghanistan against the Taliban.
*
Increasingly Western commentators have evoked the specter of failure—usually to spur
encore un effort
. But all those who supported the folly must share the misfortune.

T
WO PRINCIPAL ARGUMENTS
, often overlapping, are put forward as to “what went wrong” in Afghanistan. For liberal interventionists, the answer can be summarized in two words: “not enough.”
^†
The invasion organized by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld was done “on the cheap.” The “light footprint” demanded by the Pentagon meant that too few troops were on the ground in 2001–2. Financial commitment to “nation-building” was insufficient. Though it may now be too late, the answer is to pour in more troops, more money—“multiple billions” over “many years,” according to the U.S. ambassador in Kabul.
^‡
The second answer to what has gone wrong—advanced by Karzai, the White House, but also the Western media generally—can be summed up in one word: Pakistan. Neither of these arguments holds water.

As suicide bombings increased in Baghdad, Afghanistan became— for American Democrats keen to prove their “security” credentials— the “real front” of the war on terror, supported by every U.S. presidential candidate in the run-up to the 2008 elections, with Senator Barack Obama pressuring the White House to violate Pakistani sovereignty
whenever necessary. On March 15, 2007, for instance, Obama told NBC, “If you look at what’s happening in Afghanistan now, you are seeing the Taliban resurgent, you are seeing Al Qaeda strengthen itself. We have not followed through on the good starts we made in Afghanistan, partly because we took so many resources out and put them in Iraq. I think it is very important for us to begin a planned redeployment from Iraq, including targeting Afghanistan.” A few months later on August 1, with the Stars and Stripes providing a suitable backdrop, he addressed the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and made it clear that if necessary he would authorize U.S. troops to enter Pakistan on search-and-destroy missions: “Let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered three thousand Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an Al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

His embittered rival, Senator Hillary Clinton, was not going to let him get away with this too easily. One of her staunchest supporters, Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, rebuked Obama the same day (as did the White House) and said, “It is dangerous and irresponsible to leave even the impression that the United States would needlessly and publicly provoke a nuclear power.” A week later, during a Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton rapped her rival on the knuckles while raising the specter of a jihadi finger on Pakistan’s nuclear trigger:

Well, I do not believe people running for president should engage in hypotheticals, and it may well be that the strategy we have to pursue on the basis of actionable intelligence—but remember, we’ve had some real difficult experience with actionable intelligence. . . . But I think it is a very big mistake to telegraph that and to destabilize the Musharraf regime, which is fighting for its life against Islamic extremists, who are in bed with Al Qaeda and Taliban. And remember, Pakistan has nuclear weapons. The last thing we want is to have Al Qaeda–like followers in charge of Pakistan and having access to nuclear weapons. So, you can think big, but remember,
you shouldn’t always say everything you think if you’re running for president because it can have consequences across the world, and we don’t need that right now.

With varying degrees of firmness, the occupation of Afghanistan is also supported by China, Iran, and Russia, though in the case of the latter, there was always a strong element of schadenfreude. Soviet veterans of the Afghan war were amazed to see their mistakes now being repeated by the United States, despite attempts to portray this as the ultimate humanitarian conflict. This did not prevent Russian veterans, especially helicopter pilots, from offering themselves as mercenaries in Afghanistan. Over two dozen are currently engaged in action over a terrain they know well.

Soon after its launching, the NATO war on Afghanistan was referred to—including by Cherie Blair and Laura Bush—as a “war to liberate the women of Afghanistan.” Had this been true, it would have been a path-breaking conflict: the first imperial war in human history to liberate women. But it wasn’t true. This became obvious even before the harsh realities of the location had dispelled the haze of spin, intended in any case for the children-citizens at home to make them feel good about bombing another foreign land (though this did not convince Jenna Bush, who confided to Daniel Pearl’s widow that she was opposed to the bombing of Afghanistan). And the latest reports from Afghan women’s organizations paint a grim picture of the condition of women in NATO-occupied Afghanistan. They fared much better during the Russian period.