It is almost Pavlovian in its predictability: India and Pakistan are escalating the bad blood between them, with aggressive elements from both sides growling to make the rest of the world cringe. Besieged by criticism, the Indian prime minister has conferred with his army and intelligence heads. On the Pakistani side, the PPP government wants to tread cautiously and is not resorting to verbal tit-for-tat, knowing full well Pakistan’s own vulnerabilities, but the opposition is aggressive, appealing to nationalism, but not without a modicum of self-interest in the ongoing domestic political contest.
The world is afraid that India and Pakistan could take out their armies against each other and then helplessly watch the confrontation escalate into a nuclear standoff. This has happened before and the world had to come in and break the clinch. Why should the two go back to that, expecting that the big powers will step in and prevent the confrontation from becoming a nuclear holocaust? Pakistan is reacting to the Indian side’s allegations that the attackers had come from Pakistan. But much more than prima facie evidence is needed to connect all the dots. More significantly, the fact is that, even if they came from Pakistan, it proves nothing because Pakistan is fighting the same terrorists with a global outreach within its borders.
There are two ways of looking at the situation, political and military. If one asks a retired army general for comment he will explain the crisis in military terms, meaning that if conflict is imminent then preparedness for conflict is what is required. If one asks a politician for comment he will show concern about the kind of economic and human loss the conflict will inflict. The media on both sides has to play a role in mediating the political side of the crisis. If it showcases retired generals on this occasion, it will tilt the scale on the wrong side. If it hits the street with a one-sided question, the people are going to say unrealistic things like “we are ready to fight Pakistan, we must fight India”. No one in the world should “be ready” to fight a nuclear war.
Indians say they have cracked the email that claimed the Deccan Mujahideen had attacked Mumbai. It came, they say, from a computer from some place in Pakistan. Any Indian who knows what is happening inside Pakistan will say it means nothing. If someone can stage 9/11 from Pakistan without Pakistan knowing it, the Mumbai attack is no great departure. It is for this reason that the PPP government is so cautious in its reply to Indian accusations and is ignoring the political scale titling in favour of the highly incensed opposition. The opposition is demanding another political “consensus” to delink the Gilani government from the “majority principle” in parliament. The gelling idea is that the government should convene an all-parties conference (APC) on the matter so that politicians outside parliament could also give their input.
The input from Qazi Hussain Ahmad of Jama’at-e Islami is that Pakistan should withdraw its troops from the western border and amass them on the eastern border, after which the elements that the Pakistan army is fighting will immediately switch to fighting India (sic!). Yet the reasonable voice that says that the Mumbai attack is mounted by elements who want a conflict between India and Pakistan is being drowned amid angry statements. It could well be a plan to force the Pakistan army out of the Tribal Areas and thus provide relief to the militants who are seen by many to be under pressure these days. The dominant anti-American view probably favours Pakistan’s delinking from the war against terrorism that will follow an Indo-Pak standoff.
There is absolutely no need for any PPP-army tension at this stage. Some media comment has dwelt on the “misunderstanding” that occurred with regard to the “sending” of the ISI chief to India, but that confusion has been cleared and need not be raked up. The trio of president-prime minister-foreign minister is handling the situation with tact and should continue doing so. There is contradiction in the comment of those who criticise, on the basis of “national honour”, the staying on of Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi in India after the attack, and then want to present his presence in India as proof that Pakistan could not have planned and executed the attack. When 9/11 happened, the then Pakistani ISI chief was in Washington, proof that Pakistan was uninvolved.
Statements from Pakistan’s banned jihadi outfits that they are not involved are not going to help because no one in the world is going to believe them. The task before Islamabad and New Delhi is to smooth things out and begin talking and cooperating as soon as possible. This time around, if there is conflict, the economic damage from confrontation will be many times more than was sustained during the confrontation of 2001-02. Pakistan is already in the IMF’s oxygen tent; and India will take a serious blow to the foreign investments its economy is attracting these days. This can be avoided by bringing the situation quickly back to normal. g
The transmission crisis
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has decided to provide Pakistan $810 million to help it overcome line losses in its power distribution system, now approaching 40 per cent. The “improvement” of transmission lines will take place over the next decade, giving us some inkling of how complicated and socially unsettling the project is going to be. Every time Pakistan thinks of enhancing its production of electricity it comes up against its outdated wiring system. Here is where the Third World “infrastructure” crisis comes to the fore.
India too is confronted with it. It has the money but will it have the capacity? It has set aside $150 billion for generation, and firms in America are eying the sum greedily. It has also set aside $50 billion for transmission overhaul. That is where the crunch will come. Pakistan will have to grapple with the same complex change of landscape over the next ten years while its cities become increasingly violent and uncontrollable. India’s coal-based electricity is made in the east and it has to be transmitted across the country to the west. India could have solved the problem together with Pakistan. But violence has dogged the two gas pipeline projects that India and Pakistan had planned together, the Iranian and Turkmen pipelines. Once again it is essentially a transmission crisis. *