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| June 21, 2002 | atimes.com | ||
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COMMENTARY Similarity breeds contempt: India and Pakistan By Ehsan Ahrari India and Pakistan have been separate states for more than 50 years. But the fact that they are the same people divided by a border created in 1947 is continuously underscored when one examines the modalities of a number of policies that they have adopted throughout their existence as independent nations. These include their views of the superpower competition during the Cold War years, their decisions to become nuclear powers, their views of the United States' global war on terrorism, and, most important of all, implications of the war on terror for their respective positions on the obdurate Kashmir conflict. The strategic relations between the two South Asian neighbors have been anything but neighborly for most of their existence. During and after the Cold War years, but especially in the post-September 11 era, they conducted their antagonistic mutual relations on the basis of a zero-sum game, whereby they regarded gains made by one side vis-a-vis the United States as losses for the other. The two South Asian nations fully comprehended what made the United States tick during the Cold War years. Then, the containment of global communism through alliance formation drove the engines of US foreign policy. Pakistan jumped on the US bandwagon by becoming a member of two such alliances in Asia - the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO). India opted for the Nonalignment Movement, and used it to disparage those military alliances, and Pakistan's membership in them. Even though India remained supposedly a nonaligned state, it also signed a treaty of friendship with the former Soviet Union, apparently not at all concerned about the contradictions between its continued self-proclaimed status as a nonaligned country and its alliance with one of the major parties to the Cold War-related mega-conflict. The two South Asian rivals were carrying out their own version of a regional Cold War. Pakistan viewed its alliance with the United States as a source of military assistance and even protection from any aggressive measures from India. Those aggressive tendencies from both sides raised their ugly head in the 1965 war involving Kashmir. As that war started, the United States - the supposed ally of Pakistan - immediately imposed a blockade of weapons supplies to Pakistan, while the Soviet Union continued to supply all sorts of weapons platforms to India under very generous financial agreements. Pakistan never recovered from the disparity in conventional military strength that those policies of both superpowers created in the subcontinent. There prevails a view in the subcontinent that one of the variables that motivated Pakistan toward military action at that time was the information it received about the Soviet Union's then impending decision to become a major weapons supplier for India. The aggressive tendencies on the subcontinent became larger than life with the passage of time. When India signed that friendship treaty with the Soviet Union, it hoped to use it as a restraint against the United States and China, both of whom were viewed as friends of Pakistan. Indian premier Indira Gandhi might have been stunned at the so-called American "tilt" toward Pakistan when president Richard Nixon sent the USS Enterprise to the waters of the Bay of Bengal as a show of support for Pakistan during the East Pakistan crisis in 1971 that led to the formation of Bangladesh. A former Indian military officer narrated to me how scared the Indian top leadership became at the sight of that show of force. Within only three years of that incident, in 1974, India conducted its so-called "peaceful" nuclear explosion. If one becomes skeptical of the linkages among that so-called US tilt of 1971, an earlier humiliating defeat of India at the hands of the Chinese in 1962, and that nuclear explosion, then one has to recall the statement of an Indian general in the aftermath of the Gulf War of 1991. The greatest lesson India learned, he is reported to have said, is "don't mess with the United States unless you possess nuclear weapons". On the US side, that statement has been recounted on a number of occasions, especially since India's nuclear tests of May 1998. Pakistan behaved in exactly the same way. Its defeat in and the consequent loss of East Pakistan - which India euphemistically refers to as the "liberation" of Bangladesh - was the defining moment for its decision to acquire nuclear weapons of its own. Thus, India's "tit" of becoming a declared nuclear power in 1998 got a "tat" from Pakistan's own declaration along the same lines. But when the mandarins of India's foreign policy offered a "no first use" fig leaf, their Pakistani counterparts disparagingly rejected it. The two sides - the two people of the same origin - fully knew the ridiculous nature of India's offer of no first use to a country that had just acquired "strategic parity" with its neighbor. The most noteworthy irony was, of all the people in the world, the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was then at the helm in India. One also wonders whether by declaring itself a nuclear power in 1998 India trumped the "nuclear weapons states", or whether Pakistan trumped them all. After becoming a declared nuclear power, Pakistan seems to have been following the perspective of former French president Charles de Gaulle on nuclear weapons. When critics berated its independent nuclear force, Force de Frappe, by saying that France would never be able to match the awesome nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers, de Gaulle in 1964 is reported to have stated, "It is obvious that the megatonnes which we could employ do not match the numbers which America and Russia could unleash. But once a certain nuclear capacity is reached and in regard to our direct defense, the size of the respective arsenals does not have an absolute value." He went on to observe, "... since a man and a country can only die once, deterrence exists once one has the means to inflict mortal damage on a possible aggressor, the determination to use them and the confidence in one's ultimate decision". Even though the actual size of Pakistan's nuclear force is not publicly known, its leaders seem to have opted for smaller numbers of highly mobile land-based ballistic missiles. Given the current depressed nature of Pakistan's economy, that small force might be a reasonable deterrence option for now. India, on the other hand, through its "draft" nuclear doctrine issued in 1999, proclaimed its intentions of developing a nuclear "triad". However, under the extant state of its research and development, that notion of a nuclear triad has to wait for at least a decade, if not more, before it becomes a reality. By announcing its intentions of having a nuclear triad, India had two external audiences in mind, the international community and China. To the former, India was signaling that it was ready to join the exclusive clubs of the United Nations Security Council's permanent five and the nuclear-weapons states. The same five countries - the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France - are members of both those clubs. To China, India signaled that the strategic competition between them was to acquire an entirely different framework and hue, whereby India would no longer be wary of China's strategic superiority in the nuclear realm. But on this very point, the China-Pakistan nexus remains a major source of diversion and concern to leaders in New Delhi. Pakistan knows full well that, unlike India, it does not have realistic chances of becoming a great power. But it can stay in the competition by siding with China. That very reality is a major source of satisfaction for a relatively weaker Pakistan, and a constant irritation for India. India has the immutable advantage of size over Pakistan; its economy seems to have acquired a steady rate of at least 5 percent annual growth. If this growth pattern is not halted by the still strong socialistic predilections of its senior leadership, which tends to get spasmodically nostalgic about the Fabian socialism that was the sine qua non of India's economic policies in previous decades, India might be well on its way of achieving the status of a great power that it deserves. India also has a very large pool of indigenous scientific knowledge, which is a vital requirement for any country to become a power of great substance. In fact, in this realm, India is considerably ahead of even China. But Pakistan must also know that it has the potential of catching up with India in all variables, except for its size. But come to think of it, size is not a vital condition for a country to become a great power. France and the UK, certainly, fill that bill, despite the disparity between their size and the size of the other three permanent five members. The greatest challenge is whether Pakistan can indeed convert its potentials into realities and become another rising power of South Asia. The best example of how Pakistan and India use similarly competitive tactics to outbid each other is regarding transnational terrorism. When the United States was gearing up to carry out its military operations against the Taliban/al-Qaeda nexus in Afghanistan, India immediately attempted to seize the opportunity and offered its territory to carry out those operations. India also envisaged its own participation in those operations, especially against what it described as terrorist camps in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. It will be recalled that around the same time - that is, between October and December 2001 - there were public discussions inside the US on how safe the nuclear weapons in Pakistan really were, and whether al-Qaeda elements could gain access to them, or whether they might even use these weapons against the US. Thus, there has been wild speculation that the US Special Forces were practicing with Israeli forces at snatching Pakistan's nuclear weapons. One can only speculate about what measures Pakistan took to safeguard its nuclear weapons from becoming part of legends of swashbuckling raids of the US-Israeli (or just the United States') Special Forces that posterity would see in future Hollywood movies. The issue of significance here is that in the pre-Operation Enduring Freedom (the official name of the US military operation against Afghanistan) days, there was little doubt that India was champing at the bit to make a Nepal or even a Bangladesh out of Pakistan through a US-approved military operation. Pakistan correctly read India's maneuvers and masterfully pulled a coup of its own by readily agreeing to join the United States in Operation Enduring Freedom. It is well nigh impossible for outsiders to comprehend the significance of that decision for Pakistan, for it is still suffering the deleterious consequences stemming from it. But perhaps the decision not to join the US would have been more detrimental, for the Bush administration would have readily lumped it in that infamous and highly contentious list of "rogue" or even "axis of evil" states. The decision to join America's war on terror might have created opportunities for Pakistan that, if they were properly exploited, would enable it to become a significant regional actor. Finally, the way India and Pakistan exploited the war on terror regarding the Kashmir conflict also speaks volumes about the similar origin of their native talents. India knows that the opportunities stemming from the war are unique such that, if properly used, they might enable it to realize the cherished objective of converting the present Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir into its permanent international border. Pakistan is fully aware of India's motives, and has done a very effective job of keeping the Kashmir dispute in the international limelight. Because the US has become involved in the Kashmir dispute in a significant way since the Kargil round of military clashes of 1999 between them, Pakistan wishes to see Washington become a party to the Indian-Pakistan negotiations for a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir conflict, a la America's participation in the Palestine-Israeli peace process. India, on the contrary, does not want to see Washington acquire such a role for it is not interested in offering any territorial concessions to Pakistan in that dispute. The Kashmir dispute might be the only international flash point in which one party has been totally intransigent about resolving it through territorial adjustments. But Pakistan has shown an equal amount of intransigence in remaining focused on resolving it. From the perspective of Pakistan, a promising development is that a number of US officials have made statements that the Kashmir dispute needs active negotiations and some sort of political solution. It will be interesting to see whether the United States' increased role in the "crisis management" aspect of the Kashmir conflict is also extended to its formal involvement in the "conflict resolution" aspects of it. The ultimate question regarding the similarity of the Indian and Pakistani frames of reference is whether it enables them to resolve the Kashmir dispute peacefully, or whether, if left to their own predilections, they destroy each other through a nuclear exchange. Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee stated on Monday that his country was "prepared for an atomic war ... but", he continued, "we were confident that our neighbor would not commit such an act of madness". Fortunately, the United States correctly read that eeriness emanating from the similarity of their orientations, and remained heavily engaged in order to avert a potential nuclear exchange. But how many more times can the United States or any other great power succeed in keeping them from blowing each other up? Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, writes about international affairs from Norfolk, Virginia. (©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [email protected] for information on our sales and syndication policies.) |
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