From Taipei Times :The US is piggy in the middle between Pakistan and India
taipeitimes.com
" Perhaps the world should be more worried about Muslim-Hindu violence than it is Muslim-Christian violence, especially since there are nuclear weapons involved"
By Jonathan Power
After the publication this week of two important reports -- one by the ambassadors of the EU to India and the other by Human Rights Watch-confirming that what took place in the Indian state of Gujarat was nothing less than a state government-planned massacre, when Hindu mobs ran amok through Muslim neighborhoods, we should start to worry less about a supposed Muslim-Christian clash of civilizations and worry more about the actual Muslim-Hindu divide of civilizations, especially so when the two sides have nuclear wea-pons pointing at each other.
Why any Indian government should now expect to solve the Kashmir problem in its favor is beyond comprehension. If 180 million Muslims can no longer feel safe and secure inside India, des-pite the Herculean efforts of the country's founding fathers to make the world's largest secular democracy function without religious rancor, there is no chance that the Muslim dominated state of Kashmir will ever feel comfortable inside the Indian union. Yet Mus-lim agitation in Pakistan over Kashmir has jangled on Indian nationalistic nerves for so long it was only a matter of time before Indian angst spilled out in this appalling way. Not for nothing did the Hindu mobs taunt their victims in Gujarat with cries of "dirty Pakis."
Until very recently both the US and the EU have preferred to stay on the sidelines of Hindu-Muslim disputes. But so deep have they been drawn into the affairs of the sub-continent by the Afghan war they no longer can sidestep the issue. On the one hand, the US has embraced Pakistan with such fervor that not much these days gets decided in Pakistan without US input.
On the other, the US, understandably, has taken advantage of India's euphoria in seeing Paki-stan's ally, the Taliban, get its comeuppance. India has rushed to do what it never has done before, welcome a foreign power with open arms to use its airbases, military facilities and anything else that the US needs to wage its war on terrorism.
The US, to put it bluntly, has become pig in the middle. On the Pakistani side, President Pervez Musharraf has been courting Washington's favor as a useful prop to his own regime. With US largesse pouring into what was before Sept. 11th a near bankrupt country, he has been able to face the electorate this week in his bid to be an elected dictator without fear of significant opposition.
Yet he(Musharraf) has paid an enormous price for running with the US. Pakistan's northern ally in the war of attrition with India is now out of the picture. The anti-Western militants who moved in and out of service to the Taliban and al-Qaeda to help in harassing India from Pakistani Kashmir have had their wings clipped. Thus the undermining of India's grip on Kashmir is for now effectively stalled. Not least, the US has put under their custodial protection Pakistan's stock of nuclear weapons. Everyone now knows should either the Pakistan government move to deploy them for action against India or should militants make a move to topple Musharraf and grab them, the US special forces would move in to secure them before you could say Kashmir.
On the Indian side matters are no less serious if perhaps a little more complex, partly because if Pakistan was bankrupt enough and small enough to be pushed around, India is too large, too economically independent and too democratic to be dealt with in quite so blunt a manner.
On the one hand, Washington has realized that the US and India are victims of the same forces and that its own earlier mistakes have contributed mightily to the situation. Washington has accepted that it was the US and Saudi funnelling of arms to the anti-Soviet guerrillas in Afghanistan through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency that led to the Afghani war veterans coming to haunt first the security of India and then later that of the US itself. Thus the US and India are truly brothers in arms. Moreover, the US does not have to watch its back in India as it does in Pakistan. On the other hand the US can only see disaster ahead if Hindu-Muslim violence gets out of hand as it did in Gujarat and if the central government seeks to excuse it and tolerates senior members of its political camp perpetuating it. One suspects that Washington is no longer going to allow India such an easy ride on Kashmir, however much India wants to dress the dispute up as a war on terrorism.
Fifty-three years ago the UN mediated an agreement to a four-part sequence -- a ceasefire in Kashmir, followed by the withdrawal of Pakistan's forces from all occupied territories, the thinning of India's military presence and a plebiscite to ascertain to which country the people of Kashmir wished to belong. Only the first two and a half steps were taken.
These steps look uncannily right for today's situation. Pakistan has already been forced to do some of its somersaults. India will have to do its in due course.
Never since the parting of the ways between India and Pakistan has the opportunity for a peaceful settlement looked more necessary -- or more propitious." |
