Behind the Chairman’s Door

Yesterday’s New York Times carried an Op-Ed from Pankaj Mishra, the author of “Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond,” which takes a few shots at Pakistan in the process of defending Kashmir and India’s right to it.

MIDWAY through last week’s murderous rampage in Mumbai, one of the suspected gunmen at the besieged Jewish center called a popular Indian TV channel. Speaking in Urdu (the primary language of Pakistan and many Indian Muslims), he ranted against the recent visit of an Israeli general to the Indian-ruled section of the Kashmir Valley. Referring to the Pakistan-backed insurgency in the valley, and the Indian military response to it, he asked, “Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir?”

In a separate phone call, another gunman invoked the oppression of Muslims by Hindu nationalists and the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. Such calls were the only occasions on which the militants, whom initial reports have tied to the Pakistani jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, offered a likely motive for their indiscriminate slaughter. Their rhetoric seems all too familiar. Nevertheless, it shows how older political conflicts in South Asia have been rendered more noxious by the fallout from the “war on terror” and the rise of international jihadism.

Terrorists calling a media channel? Seems odd looking at the story that has been presented in the Indian media that they intended to cause as much damage and death as possible.

Pakistan, a nation-state founded on Islam, has long claimed Muslim-majority Kashmir, and has fought three wars with India over it since 1947. In the early 1990s, as an anti-India insurgency in Kashmir intensified, groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba became the Pakistani government’s proxies in its war of attrition with its neighbor.

Pakistan’s new civilian government is too weak to control either the extremist groups within the country or the various rogue elements within its military and intelligence. The American military was reported to have started bombing supposed terrorist hideouts inside Pakistan’s borders even as General Musharraf stumbled to the exit. As its increasingly desperate pleas to the Bush administration to stop the attacks go unheeded, Pakistan’s government appears pathetically helpless to its own citizens.

That could just as easily read “Indian government,” as they have not been able to control the hundreds of insurgencies inside of Indian. And the Indian government has long claimed that Kashmir is their birth right, so let’s not point fingers.

But hey, don’t ask the Pakistanis, ask the Kashmiri’s that are protesting for their independence. And how the Indian government, using the Indian Army, kept democratic forces in jail and under house arrest to assure that the Kashmiris’ didn’t get their right to vote.

Sounds to me a lot like the Gaza Strip and Israel!

The sense of humiliation and impotence that this loss of sovereignty creates in Pakistan, a country with a strong tradition of populist nationalism, cannot be underestimated.

Meanwhile, India’s influence in Afghanistan has grown as it pours reconstruction money into the country, as have its military ties with Israel. Add to this the Bush administration’s decision to reward India with an extraordinarily generous nuclear deal and to more or less ignore Kashmir, where in August Indian security forces brutally suppressed the biggest nonviolent demonstrations in the valley’s history, and recent attacks against the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, and now in Mumbai begin to appear to be connected by more than chronology.

In a country with a handful of Indians, there are numerous consulates setup on the Afghanistan - Pakistan border. What are all those consulates for, other than RAW operations in FATA, the NWFP and Balochistan?

Meanwhile, Indian intelligence experts and others suspect that jihadists and disaffected members of Pakistan’s armed forces and intelligence agencies have forged closer links and, as the string of recent bomb attacks on Indian cities reveals, are rapidly making new allies among the 13 percent of Indians who are Muslim.

Indian Intelligence Experts is an oxymoron. Otherwise. Mumbai could not have been attacked.

The new president’s moral and intellectual authority will be vital in negotiations with India, which, like China regarding Tibet, adamantly rejects third-party mediation in Kashmir. Mr. Obama could point out the obvious to Indian leaders: they have paid a huge price for their intransigence over Kashmir, with an estimated 80,000 dead in the valley in the last two decades and a resultant rise in terrorist attacks across India.

Indeed, the outrage in Mumbai is the latest and clearest sign that the price of India’s uncompromising stance on Kashmir has become too high, imperiling its economy as well as its security. Indian anger over the fumbling response to the brazen attacks disguises the panicky realization that there can be no effective defense against terrorists in a country with a long coastline and densely populated cities. The best India can hope for is to improve what Ratan Tata - the country’s leading industrialist and the owner of last week’s main terrorist target, Mumbai’s Taj hotel - calls “crisis management.”

Then I guess that the US might as well give up on protecting its borders and citizens, because when India is unable to protect India, then how can America protect America?

As the economy falters (Mumbai’s stock market has lost nearly 60 percent of its value this year), India can barely cope with homegrown violent movements like the Maoist insurgency in its central states, which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described as the biggest internal security threat to India since independence.

Wait, he didn’t say Pakistan or the terrorist groups that “operate” inside Pakistan? India’s homegrown terrorists are the biggest threat to India.

Pointing to the Bush administration’s vigorous response to 9/11, Indian commentators lament that India is a “soft state,” unable to defend itself from internal and external enemies. But India cannot turn into a “hard” state without swiftly undermining its secular, multicultural democracy.

The government has already experimented with draconian laws like the Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act of 2002, which among other measures allowed the police to hold suspects without charge for six months. It was repealed in 2004 after many abuses against Muslims were revealed. While these attacks may lead to calls for more tough measures, Indians cannot lose sight of the peril that 150 million Muslims would lose their faith in India’s political and legal system. And it is obviously dangerous to threaten Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state, with war.

As president, Mr. Obama could conceivably persuade India and Pakistan to see the virtue of a political solution to Kashmir. But he would first have to set an example by rejecting the false assumptions of a global war on terrorism based primarily on military force - assumptions that the elites of powerful countries with restive minorities like India, China and Russia have eagerly embraced since 9/11.

“The people of India deeply love you,” Prime Minister Singh said to President Bush in September while thanking him for the nuclear deal. Yet it is President-elect Obama who has the opportunity to create deeper and more enduring alliances for the United States in South Asia - and he should start with Kashmir.

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