Sometime in the distant past, there were a great many stories in the MSM about a well planned, carefully orchestrated attack upon multiple, vulnerable civilian targets in Mumbai by a group of highly trained Islamic terrorists. They singled out Americans, Brits, and especially, Jews, murdered almost 200 people and paralyzed India's financial center for several days. Since then, stories related to the Mumbai attacks have fallen off the MSM radar, however, India and Pakistan have been engaged in a complicated diplomatic pas de deux, with occasional assistance from the United States, since the attacks, and the situation bears watching and not a little concern.
Yesterday, Ed Morrissey summarized the current state of affairs on the sub-continent:
More than a month after the Mumbai terrorist attacks that killed 170 people, India remains convinced that Pakistan’s official organs had involvement in the attacks. Yesterday, India’s Foreign Secretary accused Islamabad of having some knowledge of the attack beforehand after transmitting a large amoung of evidence uncovered by Indian investigators, including a confession from the surviving conspirator...
For our part, we’d actually prefer to see tensions decrease. We don’t want to dismember Pakistan, but we do want them fighting Islamist terrorists and not Indians. The higher the stakes get between New Delhi and Islamabad, the more Pakistan will send its troops eastward rather than westward, and the freer the hand of the terrorists will be to fight in Afghanistan. Not only does that make it more difficult for NATO to succeed in its mission, it interferes with NATO’s lines of communication in Pakistan.
Will they go to war? It’s slowly moving to that kind of conclusion, and it may become Barack Obama’s biggest foreign-policy crisis on Day One.
Because of the disproportionate place the Middle East plays in the American, and the world's, imagination, the Indian-Pakistani confrontation typically is shortchanged of the attention it deserves. The Gazan battle will eventually conclude and be seen as yet another stage in the drawn out "negotiations" between Israel and the West (ie, the Jews and, despite the discomfort of so many on the left, the Christian world for which the Jews are in the vanguard) and the Arab world. (See Tom Friedman today for some perspective on the larger issues appended to Gaza.) Meanwhile, the battle between the Muslim world and the Hindu world is liable to heat up in dangerous ways in the not too distant future.
Fabius Maximus linked to disturbing story, Mumbai Aftermath Building war hysteria to cover up failure on home front:
Kayani [Ashfaq Parvez Kayan, a Pakistani General and the current Chief of Army Staff of the Pakistan Army-SW] wanted an Indian mobilisation. He should not get it. War is not the option, at least for the present. And it is surprising that Senator John McCain sought to generate the sort of hysteria that the Pakistan army was seeking by claiming that the Manmohan Singh government was very close to such a course, when no such impression was conveyed to him. On the contrary, India needs to give upto 36 months (or 24, depending on the frequency and scale of future attacks) to Washington in that ally’s efforts to steer the Pakistan military away from its policy of helping jehadis attack India. Should the US fail to achieve such a result during this timeframe, India should launch a war against the Pakistan army. This can be initially confined to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in the first instance, and against military targets only, including of course terrorist infrastructure. Should Pakistan respond by retaliating against India beyond military targets in Kashmir, our counter-attack should be expanded to cover the whole country, again initially with only military targets being selected. Should the Pakistan military at any stage respond with an attack on civilian areas, an all-out offensive should be launched, designed to ensure the shutting down of rail, road, sea and air traffic in Pakistan, to demonstrate the costs of nurturing terrorists. In the unlikely event that a nuclear device will be deployed against an Indian target, the top 10 cities in Pakistan should be automatically and repeatedly bombed with nuclear weapons. Massive nuclear retaliation is the only sane response to such an escalation of aggression by the generals in Pakistan. While India needs to hold its military fire now, the entire country must begin preparations immediately for war with Pakistan within 36 months, should US effiorts fail.
Should Washington fail to defang the jehadi beast that it still believes to be its ally rather than the single biggest present threat to international security, there would be no other option other than war for India, if the country is to avoid the deadly bleed caused by jehadist violence that has been the country’s fate since the 1980s, and which has accelerated since Sonia Maino took over its fortunes (in some senses, literally) in 2004. The public in India needs to be prepared for the prospect of a war that could see the end of Pakistan, possibly at the cost of significant destruction in India. However painful this may be, it is nevertheless preferable to suffering jehadi terror indefinitely, and this time, the war needs to end only with the dismantling of the terror camps (in the scenario where the Pakistan army responds rationally to the limited Indian offensive and conducts only a limited response) or the destruction of Pakistan as a viable country (in the event that a nuclear device get used by Pakistan). This has to be the final India-Pakistan war.
The author of the article is Madhav Das Nalapat, Director of the Department of Geopolitics at the Manipal University, and whether or not his facts are correct (see FM's disclaimer and comments) his anger and threat are likely to be nearly universal among the Indian people. It may take a great deal of provocation to enrage Hindus, whose beliefs are pacifistic, but history tells us that once they become provoked, they are fierce warriors.
After 9/11 America went to war in Afghanistan for many reasons, not least that once American blood had been shed in an unprovoked attack, the desire for revenge, even when sublimated, rationalized, and well hidden, required an outlet. Politicians and bureaucrats are better than most at externalization. They are especially talented in shunting responsibility for untoward outcomes onto others. The 9/11 commission spent much more time exploring ways for the political class to collectively CYA than in trying to actually determine where our intelligence failed. Indian politicians and bureaucrats are no different from American's in this regard. Having an actual, realistic object upon which to focus one's anger and desire for revenge obviates the need for a constructed scapegoat and makes the externalization both more effective and almost impossible to counter. This is what makes Indian anger and a potential nuclear confrontation in the subcontinent so difficult to avoid. As Napalsat suggests, it could take as long as 24-36 months, depending on future developments in the Muslim war against the Hindus, for events to progress.
The current versions of fundamentalist Islam are overtly anti-life. The famous mot that the Muslims love death while we love life, has a great deal of truth to it. The death cults of Sunni Islam, Wahhabi and Deobandi especially, and the Shia death cult of Khomeini, are driven by the combination of their failed cultures, their ideology, and their resultant nihilism to desire an Apocalypse. The behavior of Hamas is instructive. Pakistan is torn between life and death, with those who favor life lacking the commitment necessary to destroy those who love death. We cannot discount the Muslim death wish gaining ascendancy in any Indian-Pakistani confrontation.
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