| Submit your comments on this article |
| India-Pakistan |
| The me-too syndrome |
| 2008-10-11 |
| By F.S. Aijazuddin SPLIT from the same geographical ovum 61 years ago, Pakistan has lived apart from India like a severed physical twin. It has always been aware of a previous presence. Every thought, every act, every policy move has been a reaction to something India said or did or threatened to do. Earlier, it used to be manifest in the theatre of conventional arms. Today, it can be seen at the test site of nuclear capability. In the previous bipolar world, it was easy to choose your friends. Your enemy’s enemy was your friend. India and China fought a war, therefore we courted China as a friend. India flirted with the Communist bloc, therefore the United States became our friend. Common enmities were justification enough for creating or joining an alliance. Now that the United States has emerged as the singular victor from the Cold War, international politics has become a free-for-all. Your enemy’s enemy is no longer your friend; your friend’s friend could well be your next enemy. Opportunist countries like ours just do not know who to trust any more. For years, our sun in more ways than one rose dependably from the West. We assumed it would never set, which is why the US-India nuclear deal is regarded here with such foreboding. It is as ominous as a solar eclipse. We ought to have discerned the portents. We had been given enough warning by more than one US president. When John F. Kennedy forgave Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru his flirtation with the Non-Aligned Movement (and by association communist China), we should have realised that the $160m of US military aid, given to India between 1962 and 1966 after the Sino-Indian war, was not simply belated largesse but conscience money for not rescuing the Indians earlier from themselves. When President Bill Clinton during his visit to India in 2000 described it as a “natural partner”, he was not advocating organic diplomacy. When, six years later, President George W. Bush deepened Clinton’s tracks with the statement that “Pakistan and India are different countries with different needs and different histories”, we should have recognised that we too were being relegated to history. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced this year that her government had de-hyphenated India from Pakistan, we should have interpreted her words for what they were — a candid acknowledgement that India did not stand on the other side of Pakistan so far as the United States was concerned. Diplomatically, India and Pakistan stood equidistant from the US; strategically, the Indian peninsula shared common borders and common interests with mainland America. For Pakistan, de-hyphenation from India is a second vivisection, this time from a Ravana of its own military fears and anxieties. Pakistan still continues to be one of the highest recipients of US aid, but that is absorbed primarily by the armed forces under one imaginative heading or another. As one analyst put it, Islamabad’s view is that “the ‘de-hyphenated’ policy… has virtually come to mean that Washington is focusing on the Pakistani military role as an efficient, well-trained and well-equipped border militia in the tribal tracts with Afghanistan.” And what does de-hyphenation mean to India? Freedom from a shared past, and a second boost to strive for a separate future. It means being allowed by its international elders (who in its heart it knows not to be its betters) to be treated as an adult, a ‘responsible steward’ capable of steering its own ship of state. It means having the United States on its side — at the United Nations, at the IAEA, at the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group, and at the order book end for nuclear equipment, fuel and supplies. Such rewards do not come on demand; they have to be earned. However facile India’s contention may appear to some that it needs nuclear technology to meet its energy deficit (Mrs Gandhi’s ‘peaceful nuclear’ has now become Mr Manmohan Singh’s ‘civilian nuclear’), this argument has been accepted at face value by everyone that matters. India wants to generate 25,000MW from nuclear sources, and its demands are met. Pakistan proposes under its Medium-Term Development Framework Plan to enhance its energy supplies from nuclear sources from a present paltry 400MW to an ambitious 8,800MW by the year 2030. Its pipe dream remains in the pipeline. India has electrified 95 per cent of its villages; Pakistan is still struggling to connect villages to the national grid. India plans one additional power plant every month (China by comparison commissions one plant every week); over the past eight years, Pakistan has added only 2,100MW to its power capacity. India meets over 50 per cent of its energy requirements from indigenous coal; Pakistan’s coal deposits like its heroes lie buried below ground. India’s trade with the US is almost $40bn with a potential of $100bn; Pakistan imports $2bn worth of goods from the US. India sees its US nuclear deal as a cashier’s grille where anyone who is willing to supply it nuclear reactors and fuel can apply. The US views the treaty as a token, permitting it to stand at the head of the queue. The Indo-US deal is India’s reward for behaving with brahmacharyan celibacy, by not succumbing to the temptation of nuclear proliferation. Pakistan’s nuclear programme has been compromised by its own Dr Frankenstein who was exposed peddling its secrets to the wrong customers. Before we make demands of the United States to treat us at par with India, we might do well to reconsider also the limited efficacy of our own nuclear deterrence. Are we still sovereign even in that? If Mr K. Subrahmanyam (former Indian secretary for defence production) is to be believed, apparently not. He has cautioned: “Pakistan should also take into account that it is under constant surveillance by the US super-secret ECHELON system and it cannot rule out a pre-emptive strike by the US if it were to think of a nuclear strike on India.” Had that been written some years ago, it would have appeared far-fetched. Today, with the Americans pounding Fata, it carries in its syllables the chill of the possible. |
| Posted by:john frum |
| #2 I hate to be scatological, but India is the body and Pak is the turd. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2008-10-11 22:37 |
| #1 before you make you impotent demands to be treated on a par with India, you should remember: a) All that military aid has been poured into a corrupt ISI/military which supports terrorists which attack American interests b) your leading pols are corrupt when they aren't insane islamic fanaticists c) you routinely arm, train, and support attacks on your neighbors, even whil.e your loser ineffectual military allows rebel armies to occupy and control large areas of your precious "soverignty" In short, you are like the "friend" who is always short of money, can't hold a job, votes against your interests, has whacked out and unpredictable behavious, perpetually attempts to break and enter, then move-in in his neighbor's house..but demands you respect him...and support him Pakistanis can go fuck themselves. If you had no nukes, you'd be a fourth-world shithole nobody cared about beyond your counterfeiting skillz. The nukes move you into third-world shithole status, and "target" |
| Posted by: Frank G 2008-10-11 15:15 |