The Inevitability Of War

It’s not often that one has the satisfaction, however dismal, of making a prophecy that comes true. The developing confrontation with Pakistan is one such. A week before the July 4 Clinton-Sharif accord on withdrawal from Kargil, I had written an article in The Hindu warning the government against allowing the Pakistani army to make an agreed withdrawal from Kargil. This, I had warned, would make it possible for the Pakistani military establishment to claim that it had never been defeated and that the civilian establishment under Sharif had betrayed it and the country. That is exactly what happened. Since Pakistanis preferred to believe this fiction it led over the next three months to a progressive delegitimisation of Sharif’s government and with it of democracy.

Musharraf and the army brass saw that and saw their chance. The resulting tension between the army and civil authority led directly to October’s military coup. The coup was greeted by most Pakistanis with relief not because a military government is intrinsically popular but because they hoped it would bring the erosion of the Pakistani state to an end. But the relief is proving short-lived, for the military faces the same intractable problems that have bedeviled and eventually brought down each and every government since Benazir Bhutto’s first regime - an empty treasury, a mountainous domestic debt, an unsustainable foreign debt, a proliferation of private armies and growing Islamic extremism, both funded to a large measure by a brisk trade in narcotics.

Musharraf’s government has no answers for these problems. It cannot curb the rise of Islamic extremism at home so long as it invokes Islam to lay claim to Kashmir and encourages a jehad to ‘liberate’ it. It cannot reduce the trade in narcotics without first destroying these private armies. It cannot reduce its expenditure on the armed forces so long as it faces the possibility of a conventional Indian attack on guerrilla bases in Pakistan. But it cannot stop coveting Kashmir so long as the army is the sole base of state power, for that would rob the latter of its raison d’Žtre. Yet it cannot help but add to its national debt and interest burden till it cuts its defence expenditure.

Musharraf thinks he can square this circle by squeezing more money out of the rich and the corrupt. But this is making him an enemy a minute. The steep increase in petroleum product prices in November cost him a lot of the support he had from the struggling middle class.

The National Accountability Bureau has both frightened and alienated the political class and the industrialists. His decision to put a military overseer in each district to monitor administration is bound to alienate the bureaucracy and his attempt to limit the powers of the judiciary has put him on a collision course with it. The media, which welcomed him cautiously, is beginning to speak out once more.

To enforce his writ he thus has to crack the whip. But more curbs on freedom will not only heighten alienation at home but also alienate the donor countries of the West and Japan, on whose debt rescheduling Pakistan now survives. Musharraf can therefore neither go forward nor back. Sooner or later the Punjabi core of the army brass will begin to wonder whether he is an asset or a liability. His only way of keeping himself from becoming expendable will then be to increase his aggressiveness on Kashmir.

This is happening. In December, he hardened Pakistan’s stance towards India, insisting that Kashmir be tackled first. He also stated he’d boost the support Pakistan was giving to the jehadis in Kashmir. In January, in an interview to The Hindu, he trashed the Simla agreement and the Lahore declaration and on his way back from Beijing, in an interview to a Hong Kong newspaper, asserted for the second time in a month that Pakistan wouldn’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons first against India.

This then is the head of a government on whom India is stepping up pressure by adopting a "proactive offensive strategy". Musharraf can’t back down and survive. Sadly, nor can India. The carte blanche that Pakistan has given Islamist guerrillas to operate with its help in Kashmir has increased the mortality rate among the security forces six-fold since August. The point is rapidly being reached where the cost of taking the fight to Pakistan will be lower than fighting the guerrillas in Kashmir. So the scene is set inexorably for a further escalation of conflict.

The threat this poses to both countries doesn’t need to be spelt out. For Pakistan’s nationalists, the future has never looked so dark. The original ideology that propelled them to create a new nation is in tatters. Their state is visibly failing. They’re in a dangerously unpredictable mood. To make matters worse, they are mostly concentrated in the armed forces and, in Pakistan, they and they alone control the nuclear trigger. For four decades, Pakistan has based its relations with India and the US on brinkmanship. The possibility that despite India’s far larger stockpile of fissile material, and presumably of nuclear warheads, they will be tempted to gamble everything on one last desperate throw of the nuclear dice can’t thus be discounted. Musharraf’s, and earlier Sharif’s, threat that it will use nuclear weapons on a first-use basis must not therefore be discounted.

For the reasons given above, India is being left with no option but to take the risk. But the international community is not compelled to do so. It needs to remember that were there to be nuclear war on the subcontinent, the rest of the world will suffer grievously too. The only way to minimise the risk is to use its economic clout to make Pakistan stop sending jehadis across the LoC and return to the Simla agreement. Constantly rescheduling their debts and reading them political homilies on the need to stop abetting terrorism will not suffice.