Brinkmanship Boomerang

It would be a supreme pity if, only months before President Clinton's visit to India, New Delhi allows its chronic suspicion of American motives to waste the best chance it has to end its 50-year dispute with Pakistan. In a recent article in The Hindu, C. Rajamohan, the paper's highly respected diplomatic editor, has summed up the differences which have cropped up as follows: "The US and the rest of the West are convinced that worse will follow in Pakistan if Gen Pervez Musharraf fails to control the situation (in Pakistan). So, they aren't averse to dropping a lifeline to the Musharraf regime. India, having faced the worst that Islamabad had to offer over the last decade (in terms of unremitting export of terrorism), appears stoic about a failing state. It believes that any Western support for Pakistan will only embolden the military rulers to continue the export of terrorism to India."

If this is a correct assessment of India's position, then South Block is being foolishly complacent. It has not seen the worst that Pakistan can do to India. That will surface when the Pakistani state fails. A failed state is one in which authority and legitimacy are no longer exercised by any identifiable person or institution and the monopoly of coercive power the state normally enjoys has been shattered. When that happens, society disintegrates into warring ethnic and class groups. It's followed by the disintegration of the market and the economy. As the distribution system breaks down, production grinds to a halt and shortages and black markets appear. Then follows a no-holds-barred contest among warring groups to appropriate whatever little is still available.

In this, as in all communal riots, it is the weak, the decent and the law-abiding of every community who are the victims. Eventually, the only way to buy safety-to earn the right to carry a gun in self-defence-is to join the marauders. Thus, like a tornado sucking up dust, a failed state generates its own destructive energy until it destroys all semblance of civilised life; or until one warlord, stronger and more sagacious than the others, eliminates his rivals, liquidates their armies and crowns himself sovereign. Then the state-building process starts all over again.

Pakistan is already some way down this road. Its cities are infested with Islamic and drug-trafficking militias. The state is gravely weakened and its authority eroded by a protracted battle between the votaries of the National Security State, the Democratic State and the Islamic State. Of the three, it's the last that is on the ascendancy. The country is awash with arms. Sectarian strife among Muslim sects is taking a mounting toll.

Were the state to fail, Pakistan would be overwhelmed by sectarian violence. Islam, jihad and Kashmir would become the battle-cries in the contest for power that would ensue. Militant attacks on India would multiply and not remain confined to Kashmir. Bids to recruit Indian Muslims into Lashkar-e-Toiba and other outfits would be redoubled, and large parts, perhaps the majority, of the army would be sucked into the extremist cauldron. Among them might be some with a finger on the nuclear trigger and a fanatical desire to take India to the purgatory with them.

Pakistanis have caught a glimpse of what a failed state means. That accounts for the universal relief at the army takeover. For any state is better than none, and only the military has the power, if not necessarily the will, to curb extremism. The US, which has had its share of Taliban and Pakistan-backed terrorism, has understood this. That's why the Clinton administration swallowed its repugnance to coups d'etat and threw Pakistan a lifeline. But the support it's offering is largely negative, and conditional. Thus, while Clinton has waived all sanctions against India for another year, he has kept all but two on Pakistan. The US is also insisting that Nawaz Sharif and his government be given a fair trial and that the regime announce a timetable for return to democracy. But the fact remains that it may relax these strictures too, for faced with the choice of whether or not to let Pakistan fail, it's difficult for any US administration not to lengthen the rope further.

Indian hawks will look for signs of further leniency and lose no time in accusing Washington of applying double standard. But South Block would do well not to let the clamour spook it into a negative stance in the next round of Strobe Talbot-Jaswant Singh talks. Washington's stake in stability gives Pakistan some power to blackmail it. But after the Taliban refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden and Musharraf's unwillingness to set a timetable for return to democracy, that power is very limited.

Thus, instead of opposing all efforts to bail out Pakistan, India needs to back the US, provided Washington de-links its efforts to stabilise Pakistan from Kashmir. Pakistan is bound to claim that its stability will be enhanced if India settles the Kashmir dispute quickly. It's also almost sure to ask for the supply of replacement weapons, ammunition and spares to repel Indian aggression. India needs to impress upon the US that Kashmir has been Pakistan's undoing. Anything that keeps its hopes of acquiring it alive will only perpetuate its swollen defence budget and drag it to ruin.

The time is ripe for India to tell the US unequivocally, if privately, that it's willing to settle the Kashmir dispute on the basis of the Line of Control. Most Pakistani politicians know that this is the only solution and there's a groundswell of support for it in the West. Even Musharraf, whose veiled reference to a probe on Sharif's alleged links with India threaten to turn Kashmir into an altogether new type of domestic issue in Pakistan, let out broad hints last week that "if this is the attitude we see from across the border (of addressing Kashmir first), then I can assure I'll be going far ahead of them (the Indians) in this area".