NEW DELHI’s war mongering is a cause for widespread concern. Threats of resort to ‘hot pursuit’ across the LoC and bomb “terrorist training camps” in Azad Kashmir preceded the December 13 attack on Indian parliament, as the Vajpayee government, in a show of belligerence, had already renounced the so-called ‘Agra spirit’.

‘We will have no truck with Islamabad’ was the message put across by the Indian government, as New Delhi refused point-blank to consider even a semblance of engagement with Pakistan, despite a renewal of invitation from Islamabad to Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh for talks.

What happened on December 13 was a horrific act of violence which was strongly condemned by Pakistan, and the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) of Kashmir. The act was also disowned by the two militant outfits, Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Mohammad, named by the Indians as the culprits, but to no avail since the Indian government had pre-conceived notions about whom to blame.

Some sections in Pakistan are prone to seeing the attack on the Indian parliament building as a stage-managed show designed to discredit Pakistan’s commitment to the coalition against international terrorism. More particularly, the intended message for the Americans was that Pakistan was trying to ‘run with the hare and hunt with the hounds’. If one were to dismiss the accusation as far-fetched, there are reasons to doubt the cock and bull story being offered as New Delhi’s official account of the plot.

To prove the point, Lashkar-i-Toiba had been indicted by Jaswant Singh before the Delhi police announced its findings, and none of the five attackers killed in the shootout has been identified though they have been called Pakistan citizens, while their alleged ‘accomplices’ who have been arrested and are being paraded before the media cameras are Kashmiris from the valley based in New Delhi.

Fabricating evidence is no big deal for Delhi police, more so if the cue comes from the top brass in the home ministry. Small wonder, the Indians have neither been willing to let the FBI look into the matter, nor agreeable to holding a joint investigation with Pakistan they want the world to take their word for the ISI’s hand in the Dec 13 terrorist attack. As if to complete the ritual, a minor official of the Pakistan high commission in New Delhi was abducted in broad day light, kept in illegal confinement for more than five hours, severely beaten up by the intelligence goons, and then charged with espionage.

The poor minion, accused of receiving sensitive information from an agent, was later asked to pack up and leave the country within seven days. Ironically, New Delhi’s jingoism failed to provoke Pakistan into any kind of retaliation. As Islamabad kept its cool, the Indian bid to mount tension remained a one-way traffic.

On the face of it, the Indians are resorting to brinkmanship by taking their policy of bullying and blackmail a little too far. ‘We have had enough of talking, now it is time for action; Indian ruling coalition’s number one hawk, Home Minister L.K. Advani, said a few days ago.

True to his tradition, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has been conveniently blowing hot and cold, although he has not been lagging behind his home minister in holding out threats and issuing warnings to Pakistan. What makes the Indian leadership go berserk? Is it the macho factor coming into play in the wake of the US military action in Afghanistan?

Some Indian hardliners have of late been calling Pakistan a ‘banana republic’. ‘Why can’t we act the way the Americans have in Afghans, or the Israelis in Palestine? the more flamboyant among them are asking their government.

Even the Congress party has succumbed to the temptation of playing to the gallery, as it does not want Advani and his cohorts alone to steal the jingoistic thunder.

Notwithstanding the urge to emulate the US example in Afghanistan, New Delhi can ill afford to ignore some ground realities. Pakistan is not a sitting duck, like Afghanistan was, or the Palestinians continue to be. The Indians may have superiority in conventional arms, but history has shown that an India-Pakistan conflict cannot be a one-sided affair. The most recent military showdown in the Kargil sector proved to be a nightmare for the Indian military establishment. It took the Indian army many months and heavy casualties to dislodge some five hundred fighters from the Kargil heights.

To precipitate a military showdown with Pakistan is a high-risk gamble, more so because of the nuclear dimension of such an adventure.

Unlike conventional warfare, it does not matter how many nuclear bombs a country has, as one bomb is good enough to spell disaster.

Hopefully, the Indian government is not as naive as, for instance, RSS supremo Bal Thackeray, or the saffron crowd around the BJP, to ignore the perils of confrontation between the two nuclear states of South Asia.

There is reason to believe that the Vajpayee government will stop short of jumping the red light, even though it has created a war hysteria in the country and therefore has a high stake in living up to the promise of fighting it out with the “terrorists and their mentors”. Needless to say, New Delhi is under immense pressure to match its rhetoric with concrete action.

Some of the measures taken by the Indian government to put across the message that it means business include the recall of its high commissioner from Islamabad, the termination from January 1 of the Samjhota Express and the bus service between Delhi and Lahore, and a ban on overflights of its territory by Pakistan airliners, apart from resumption of hostilities all along the border with Pakistan. As Islamabad has refused to join New Delhi in its game of brinkmanship, it remains to be seen how far the Indians would go in pursing a course of unilateral hostile actions. Islamabad’s exemplary restraint was best illustrated by its unwillingness to resort to ‘tit-for-tat’ diplomacy.

It is indeed unprecedented that India gets away with manhandling and later expelling a staffer of the Pakistan high commission in New Delhi without any retaliation from Islamabad. Some observers say Pakistan’s cool response has put the Indians in a rather awkward situation, at least from the perspective of international opinion.

Opinions differ on whether the Indian moves are a prelude to, or a substitute for, a military showdown. It is pertinent to recall that no such measures were taken during the Kargil conflict.

Neither the Indian high commissioner was recalled, nor the train service was terminated or the air space was shut out even though the war hysteria in India then was as high-pitched as it is now. It is not therefore surprising that some analysts see the Indian moves as a show of hostility without actually wanting to go to war with Pakistan.

The Indians would not have made so much noise unless they are trying to draw the World attention rather than planning to settle matters militarily.

The purpose of the on-going brinkmanship and war-like moves, according to one school of observers, is to browbeat Pakistan into falling in line with New Delhi’s perception of peace and settlement in resurgent Kashmir, while putting across the message to the Americans that they must intervene to salvage Indian prestige by helping them out in dealing with the Kashmir resistance.

That the Americans do not approve of any Indian military adventure across the LoC at this juncture is known to everyone.

They are involved in quiet diplomacy urging the Indians to show restraint, and are likely to play a high-profile mediatory role if the situation worsens. If the Indian leadership is bent upon bullying and browbeating Pakistan until it wrests a Kashmir ‘solution’ of its own choice, nothing could deter it from resorting to the war gamble. But from all accounts the odds are against New Delhi being allowed to embark on such an adventure in the present regional context when the US-led world coalition needs an undisturbed Pakistan to play its crucial role in combating the problem of terrorism.

WHILE I was cleaning up my desk in preparation for the New Year, I found some interesting things. Here they are.

Note to myself: “There have been several sightings of Vice President Cheney in the last three weeks. One had him hiding out in a cave in Boca Raton. Another is that he is staying with Elvis Presley in Memphis, and a third is that he is hunting caribou in Alaska.”

Thought for a column: “The reason you cannot see a doctor when you want to is because they are so busy on the phone. Almost all the advertising on television has to do with prescription drugs that cannot be bought over the counter. The pharmaceutical companies are pushing their miracle products, which will cure arthritis, cholesterol, insomnia, menopause and sexual dysfunction.

“Every commercial, after singing a remedy’s praises, by law has to say, ‘This drug may not be for you. Consult your physician before using.’

“What has happened is that so many people are now calling their doctors asking if a particular advertised pill is good for them, that the physician is constantly on the phone and no longer has time to see patients.

“What gets doctors mad is that they can’t charge for a phone consultation about television medical claims.”

“Must do a piece saying Enron is getting a bad rap. Although they are bankrupt, cost thousands of people their jobs, voted golden parachutes for the big guys, lobbied politicians with millions of dollars, kept two sets of books, sold oil and gas they didn’t have, had a revolving door to the White House, cost innocent investors their life savings, caused banks to lose their shirts, and are known in Houston as ‘white collar terrorists’ — this is no reason to trash them. After all, nobody’s perfect.”

In my pile of newspaper clippings is one that says, “Afghanistan’s main agricultural product is opium.” Next to it is a note I made: “Should the U.S. buy the entire crop for medical purposes? Or should the CIA persuade them to plant Christmas trees instead? Or, if worse comes to worst, let them export it under the Favoured Nations Treaty?”

Still open as a column idea: “Should the plumber who faithfully promised to fix my hot water heater on Thursday, and never showed up, be tried by a federal court or a military tribunal where they have nothing against the death penalty?” “Send Geraldo Rivera a fruit cake in Tora Bora for New Year’s.”

My final note to myself reads, “Write Diane Sawyer and tell her how sorry I am that Katie Couric will soon make more money than she does, and send a copy to Barbara Walters.” —Dawn/Tribune Media Services

“THE world is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through.” Thus said Mahmoud Darwish, writing in the aftermath of the PLO’s exit from Beirut in September 1982. “Where shall we go after the last frontiers, where should the birds fly after the last sky?”

Nineteen years later, what was happening then to the Palestinians in Lebanon is happening to them in Palestine. Since the al-Aqsa Intifada began last September, Palestinians have been sequestered by the Israeli army in no fewer than 220 discontinuous little ghettos, and subjected to intermittent curfews often lasting for weeks at a stretch. As I write, two hundred Palestinians are unable to receive kidney dialysis, because for “security reasons” the Israeli military won’t allow them to travel to medical centers. Gaza airport was the only direct port of entry into Palestinian territory, the only civilian airport in the world wantonly destroyed since World War Two.

During the night of December 5, the Israeli army entered the five-story offices of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in Ramallah, carried off the computers, as well as most of the files and reports, thereby effacing virtually the entire record of collective Palestinian life. In 1982, the same army under the same commander entered West Beirut and carted off documents and files from the Palestinian Research Center, before flattening its structure. A few days later came the massacres of Sabra and Shatila.

After eight years of barren peace discussions, 50% of Palestinians are unemployed and 70% live in poverty on less than 2 dollars a day. Every day brings with it unopposable land grabs and house demolitions. The Israelis even make a point of destroying trees and orchards on Palestinian land.

The crucial point in all this is that Israel has been in illegal military occupation since 1967; it is the longest such occupation in history and the only one anywhere in the world today: this is the original and continuing violence against which all the Palestinian acts of violence have been directed. As a result of the September 11 attacks, the word “terrorism” is being used to blot out legitimate acts of resistance against military occupation and any causal or even narrative connection between the dreadful killing of civilians (which I have always opposed) and the thirty plus years of collective punishment is proscribed. Every Western pundit or official who pontificates about Palestinian terrorism needs to ask how forgetting the fact of the occupation is supposed to stop terrorism. Arafat’s great mistake, a consequence of frustration and poor advice, was to try to make a deal with the occupation when he authorized “peace” discussions between scions of two prominent Palestinian families and Mossad in 1992 at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge.

These discussions only discussed Israeli security; nothing at all was said about Palestinian security, nothing at all, and the struggle of his people to achieve an independent state was left to one side. Indeed, Israeli security to the exclusion of anything else has become the recognized international priority which allows General Zinni and Javier Solana to preach to the PLO while remaining totally silent on the occupation. Yet Israel has scarcely gained more from these discussions than the Palestinians have.

The Israeli mistake has been to imagine that by conning Arafat and his coterie into interminable discussions and tiny concessions, it would get a general Palestinian quiescence. Every official Israeli policy thus far has made things worse rather than better for Israel. Ask yourself: is Israel more secure and more accepted now than it was 10 years ago?

The terrible and, in my opinion, stupid suicide raids against civilians in Haifa and Jerusalem should of course be condemned, but in order for these condemnations to make any sense, the raids must be considered in the context of Abu Hanoud’s assassination along with the killing of five children by an Israeli booby-trap in Gaza — to say nothing of the houses destroyed, the Palestinians killed throughout Gaza and the West Bank, the constant tank incursions, the endlessly grinding away of Palestinian aspirations, minute by minute, for the past 35 years.

In the end, desperation only produces poor results, none worse than the green light George W. and Colin Powell seem to have given Sharon when he was in Washington on December 2 (all too reminiscent of the green light Al Haig gave Sharon in May 1982). With their support went the usual ringing declarations turning the people under occupation and their hapless, inept leader into worldwide aggressors who had to “bring to justice” their own criminals even as Israeli soldiers were systematically destroying the entire Palestinian police structure which was supposed to do the arresting!

Arafat is hemmed in on all sides, an ironic of his bottomless wish to be all things Palestinian to everyone, enemies and friends alike. He is at once a tragically heroic and a bumbling one. No Palestinian today is going to disavow his leadership for the simple reason that despite all his wafflings and mistakes, he is being punished and humiliated because he is a Palestinian leader, and in that capacity, his mere existence offends purists (if that’s the right word) like Sharon and his American backers.

Except for the health and education ministries, both of which have done a decent job, Arafat’s Palestinian Authority has not been a brilliant success. Its corruption and brutality stem from Arafat’s apparently whimsical, but actually very meticulous, way of keeping everyone dependent on his largesse; he alone controls the budget, and he alone decides what goes on the front pages of the five daily newspapers.

He and Hamas have had a well-publicized entente of sorts since the latter’s June bombings: Hamas wouldn’t go after Israeli civilians if Arafat left the Islamic parties alone. Sharon killed off the entente with Abu Hanoud’s assassination: Hamas retaliated and there was nothing to stop Sharon squeezing the life out of Arafat, with American support. Having destroyed Arafat’s security network, his jails and offices, and having physically imprisoned him, Sharon made demands that he knows can’t be met (even though Arafat, with a few cards up his sleeve, has managed, astonishingly, to half comply).

Sharon stupidly believes that, having dispensed with Arafat, he can make a series of independent agreements with local warlords, and divide 40 % of the West Bank and most of Gaza into several non-contiguous cantons whose borders would be controlled by the Israeli army. How this is supposed to make Israel more secure eludes most people, but not, alas, the ones with the relevant power.

That still leaves out three players, or groups of players, two of whom in his racist way Sharon gives no weight to. First, the Palestinians themselves, many of whom are far too intransigent and politicized to accept anything less than unconditional Israeli withdrawal. Israel’s policies, like all such aggressions, produce the opposite effect to the one intended: to suppress is to provoke resistance. Were Arafat to disappear, Palestinian law provides for 60 days of rule by the speaker of the Assembly (an unimpressive and unpopular Arafat hanger-on called Abul’ ‘Ala, much admired by Israelis for his “flexibility”).

After that, a succession struggle would ensue between other Arafat cronies such as Abu Mazen and two or three of the leading (and capable) security chiefs — notably, Jibril Rajoub of the West Bank and Mohammed Dahlan in Gaza. None of these people has Arafat’s stature or anything resembling his (perhaps now lost) popularity. Temporary chaos is the likely result: we must face it, Arafat’s presence has been an organizing focus for Palestinian politics, in which millions of other Arabs and Muslims have a very large stake.

Arafat has always tolerated, indeed supported a plurality of organizations which he manipulates in various ways, balancing them against each other so that no one predominates except his Fatah. New groups are emerging, however; secular, hardworking, committed, dedicated to a democratic polity in an independent Palestine. Over these groups, the Palestinian Authority has no control at all. But it should also be said that no one in Palestine is willing to accede to the Israeli-US demand for an end to “terrorism,” although it will be difficult to draw a line in the public mind between suicidal adventurism and actual resistance to the occupation, as long as Israel continues its bombings and oppression of all Palestinians, young and old.

The second group are the leaders in the rest of the Arab world who have a vested interest in Arafat, despite their evident exasperation with him. He is cleverer and more persistent than they are, and he knows the hold he has on the popular mind in their countries, where he has cultivated two separate Arab constituencies, the Islamists and the secular nationalists.

Arabs and Muslims might well turn against their own rulers were Arafat seen as being choked to death by Israeli violence and Arab indifference. So he is necessary to the present landscape. His departure would only seem natural when a new collective leadership emerges among a younger generation of Palestinians. When and how that will happen is impossible to tell, but I’m quite certain that it will happen.

The third group of players includes the Europeans, the Americans and the rest, and frankly, I don’t think they know what they’re doing. Most of them would gladly be rid of Palestine as a problem and, in the spirit of Bush and Powell, would not be happy if the vision of a Palestinian state were somehow realized, as long as someone else did it. Besides, they would find functioning in Middle East difficult if they didn’t have Arafat to blame, snub, insult, prod, pressure, or give money to. —Edward W. Said, 2002