ISLAMABAD: As India and Pakistan continued shelling each other on Sunday, and world leaders pleaded with the two nuclear powers to halt their military buildup, both nations found themselves in unfamiliar positions on the world stage.
Pakistan, whose nuclear arsenal has long worried many nations, is suddenly being viewed favourably by much of the international community for its nascent efforts to quash home-grown terrorism.
India also a sometimes unstable nuclear power but additionally the world’s largest democracy and, after the Cold War ended, a close friend of the West is increasingly being seen as the provocateur in a potentially disastrous game of brinkmanship.
President Pervez Musharraf and Indian prime minister Atal Behar Vajpayee each held meetings on Sunday to shore up support from various political parties in case war breaks out. A day earlier, President Bush personally called both men for the first time since tensions began rising in mid-December to urge calm.
Each threatening move has appeared to come from India, however. At the same time, Musharraf has taken what many consider unexpectedly tough and politically precarious steps in an effort to rein in anti-India terrorism.
“The Pakistan government has done everything it can to demonstrate that it does not want war, that it wants a solution to this without coming to blows,” a US official in Pakistan said on Sunday. “The hope now is that India will understand Pakistan is doing the best it can do.”
“India’s having a hard time dealing with Pakistan’s new Kashmir policy, which relies more on diplomacy and politics than on the use of military force,” said Rifaat Hussain, head of the defence and strategic studies department at Quaid-i-Azam University here. India, he said, is “running against the grain of world opinion on this one.”
Still, US pressure on India to pull back from the brink of war with Pakistan only reinforces a widespread resentment in the country based on a sense that Washington is applying a double standard in the ‘war on terror.’
India’s government believes it has the same right to launch attacks on alleged terrorist bases in Azad Kashmir. Vajpayee has said repeatedly in televised addresses in the past few days that if war on terrorism is fair for the West, it is also fair for the East.
“The Indian public definitely is seeing an American double standard, because when Sept. 11 happened, nobody from India urged restraint on the part of the United States,” said Brahma Chellaney, a defence analyst at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.
For his part, Musharraf swiftly earned praise by publicly condemning the Parliament attack. Then, last week, he placed the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammad, one of the groups accused of being behind the parliament attack, under house arrest.
As of Sunday, he had also rounded up at least 50 other fighters, Pakistani military sources said.
Also following Washington’s lead, Musharraf has frozen the bank accounts of several militant Kashmiri groups. Musharraf has made these moves even though India has declined to turn over evidence that the Pakistani groups were indeed involved in the attack although even here few deny that Pakistan-based Kashmir fighters are the likely culprits.
Praise for Musharraf’s handling of the crisis has come from sources ranging from Bush to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the military publication Jane’s Defence Weekly. Public praise for Vajpayee has been hard to find outside his nation.
However, the risks of a dispute between India and Pakistan escalating to nuclear war, and the danger of Pakistan’s ally China getting involved in a more limited, conventional conflict, are so frightening that many analysts doubt New Delhi will launch attacks.
They see the massive deployment of India’s air, land and sea forces as political posturing intended, in large part, to draw more support from Washington at Pakistan’s expense.
Some diplomatic and military experts believe Vajpayee is in fact seizing the political day, taking advantage of a long-awaited chance to focus attention on and smash anti-India terror groups based in Pakistan once and for all, even if it costs him a bit of international support.
“This is their opportunity to act,” one former ranking Pakistani diplomat said. “They’ve been bogged down (with Kashmir-related violence) for years. They’ve been waiting for this chance.”
Next month, the Indian army plans to hold its biggest military manoeuvres in 15 years along the border with Pakistan, and troops are expected to practice reacting to a nuclear attack.
”This kind of buildup has its own momentum,” the former Pakistani diplomat warned. “Both sides have to be very careful because each day brings more aggression.” —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.