Posted on 05/30/2002 4:25:59 PM PDT by Pokey78
Jack Straw's departure from the Indian sub-continent - without securing concessions from either Pakistan or India - has left the situation where it stood on his arrival: the prospect of war and peace still hangs in the balance. India may launch punitive air attacks and commando raids against the camps of Kashmiri and Pakistani militants based in Azad or Pakistani Kashmir. Pakistan would retaliate against army bases in Indian Kashmir.
After weeks of fighting, with neither side being able to claim an advantage in the high mountainous terrain and as both become bogged down in raids and counter-raids across the disputed Line of Control, one side may attempt to break the logjam by crossing the international border and launching an invasion. Yesterday's cross-border shelling and the attack by Islamic militants on an Indian police station is another step towards war.
Or India may carry out a naval blockade of Pakistan's only artery to the outside world - the port of Karachi. India's huge advantage in troops and armour would quickly win it territory, which may force a desperate Pakistani military to use missile-launched tactical nuclear weapons on Indian forces.
The 55-year dispute over Kashmir, a legacy of the partition of British India in 1947, has led to two wars, many crises, military mobilisations, threats and counter-threats, which have lulled the international community into believing that this is an oft-repeated shadow dance. In fact, never has the situation been so fraught with danger as it is now.
The world is changed after September 11 and the international war against terrorism. India is furious that the world has ignored Pakistan-based Islamic extremists, who continued with their bloody terrorism in India and Kashmir even after September 11. India says it cannot join the world in fighting al-Qa'eda when the world ignores these attacks on its own soil. At the same time India believes that it can ignore the plight of the Kashmiri people, who have suffered 40,000 dead over the past 12 years of conflict. So India has used the global war on terrorism to push back dialogue with the Kashmiris.
Pakistan's military regime believed that it could comfortably carry out a U-turn on its support of the Taliban and join the US alliance to topple them, while the world and India would turn away from Islamabad's support for Kashmiri and Pakistani militants, who have turned the Kashmiris' genuine political struggle for self-determination into a jihad. The army's refusal to understand how much the world had changed after September 11 and its failure to offer anything other than militancy and terrorism in Kashmir gave India just the opportunity it sought to deal finally with Pakistan.
President Pervaiz Musharraf divides militants into three camps: al-Qa'eda and the Taliban; the sectarian extremists inside the country who have butchered thousands of innocent Pakistanis; and the "freedom fighters" of Kashmir. The world has now told him forcefully that there are no such distinctions. The Pakistani militant groups that fight in Kashmir also fought for the Taliban and al-Qa'eda in Afghanistan. The 29 Arab al-Qa'eda operatives arrested in Pakistani cities last month were being given sanctuary and safe houses by the largest Pakistani group fighting in Kashmir. All these groups are now closely interlinked, no matter how the Pakistani state tries to differentiate between them.
The Pakistan military's poor tactics have now turned the world against Pakistan. India has won the international community to its side and isolated Pakistan - but that has not made it amenable to de-escalating tensions, as there is a wider agenda. The hardline Hindu fundamentalist wing of the ruling BJP party has long argued that Pakistan has to be militarily beaten, so that it never again rises to question India's hegemony in South Asia. For them, the issue is not merely terrorism, but beating Pakistan into a final submission.
To his credit, the moderate Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has twice taken major initiatives to talk to Pakistan. His inability to succeed has led to a strengthening of the Hindu fundamentalist wing. The BJP's recent electoral defeats in regional elections and the killing of some 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat state by Hindu fundamentalists have further weakened Mr Vajpayee's influence on the New Delhi power-brokers.
Gen Musharraf is also on the ropes. Last month's rigged referendum making him president for the next five years, fears of a rigged general election in October and the army's unwillingness to share real power with civilians have turned all the major political parties against him and continued army rule. For the first time in Pakistan's history, and with the experience of three wars with India, people are not rallying around the army to defend the motherland, but are demanding Gen Musharraf's resignation. Many people in both countries believe that he and the BJP would prefer the diversion of a limited war to the continued weakening of their political positions at home.
Meanwhile, the trivialisation of nuclear war by both armies and their macho ideologies - jihad and martyrdom on the one side, Hindu fundamentalism on the other - coupled with the elite's refusal to educate their public about the horrors of nuclear conflict, only add to the dangers. Many Pakistanis think a nuclear bomb just makes a bigger bang than an ordinary one.
So all these factors have come together to produce a crisis which is unprecedented, even in the constantly crisis ridden sub-continent. The danger of war is greater than it has ever been.
No one side is seeing the logic of a climb-down. And so enormous is the lack of communication between the two sides that anything could spark a conflict - a missile test gone wrong, another terrorist attack or a macho junior officer on the Line of Control wanting to teach his opponent a lesson. The need for international intervention has never been greater, not just to prevent a war but to force the two sides finally to resolve the Kashmir dispute.
The US and the USSR had very opposing ideologies, the big difference that kept us from war (and we came close a few times) is the fact that we had oceans between us and both sides understand exactly what a nuclear war would entail - that is not the case here, and that scares the crap out of me. They start tossing nukes, US servicemen in Afghanistan/Pakistan will be harmed, not to mention the fallout and subsequent cleanup (which of course George will ride to the rescue, with our tax dollars).
LOL
1) Launch its nukes at India in a suicide attack (after all Pakistan has many radical zealots in its military, and as i posted in a previous article there are reports of some commanders being willing to see all of Pakistan destroyed just to get some Inidan cities. And again, suicide bombing is such a 'tender' Islamic trait).
2) Send at least one nuke through the ISI service into the hands of some freedom fighter group.....ooops, i meant terrorist group......, and the reason fro doing this is so that the 'murderous' west that allowed this 'atrocity' of nuclear warfare to be commited against the 'Godly' nation of Pakistan should also suffer.
The above are the Islamic form of Mutually Assured Destruction. Makes one wish for the US-Russia version huh!
Of course if the nukes look like they will affect China, they may decide to do something against either nation (remember, nukes do not care what your political or other ideologies are) as an act of self preservation.
The Chinese posture alot, but I am not sure that they want to cause any major ripples.
Dude, are we on the eve on destruction? It might be a good time to bring back Barry McGuire! He hasn't had a hit in 37 years and that Christian rock thing he's been doing is getting so old, man.
Together, they might lose 20 million, which is huge, but it wouldn't really put a major dent in the overall population. Economically, it would be devastating, although more so to Pakistan.
I'm not trying to downplay the danger or imply that it's acceptable. What I want to do is downplay any suggestion that either side could obliterate the other with nukes. It's not even close to being true.
A true Darwin award entry for some 5 million Chinese.
,,, it's been a while since I left the comfort of my armchair to do a quick stock take on each side's warheads. What sort of capabilities are at hand?
Actually, no. Against the old Soviet Union we were never sure if we had the upper hand. In this case vs. the Arab world...we do.
If they set off a nuclear weapon on our soil, I am confident that our military would make them all drown in lakes of fire.
I do not wish to contemplate that we wouldn't. Down that road lies madness.
Well, the "good" news is that the nuclear warheads fielded by both India and Pakistan are pretty much all in the 12-kiloton range... i.e., they are "only" Hiroshima-size atomic bombs; if used against cities (which they would be), figure each would cause 300,000 deaths -- 100k "instantly" and 200k from radiation (an estimate from the Japanese experience, which is probably comparable given Japan's high population density).
Ergo, I'm guessing that the total kill-potential of all nuclear warheads on the sub-continent is about 25 million... 7.5 million for Pakistan's arsenal of 25 atomics, and about 18 million for India's arsenal of 60 atomics. Well, we could probably quadruple that "base" number of blast and radiation deaths to account for the resulting chaos and starvation which could likely follow... call it 100 million dead (25 million Indians and 75 million Pakistanis) in the case of a full scale exchange.
Now, that is horrifying, no bones about it. However, the total nominal yield involved is "only" about 1 Megaton (85 atomics at 12kt each), or triple the size of China's 1966 nuke test. So there would be some Trans-Pacific fallout over the US, but something like 0.5% of what your link estimates (given it's assumption of a 200 megaton regional nuclear exchange).
Which means -- in my purely-amateur opinion -- that the take-away from all this is, the kill-potential of these dirty little atomics the Indos and the Paks have pointed at eachother is dreadful (anywhere from 25 to 100 million dead between the two), but the Trans-Pacific fallout danger to the US is... let's call it moderate to serious, not necessarily grave.
The grave danger to the US comes -- again in my opinion -- not from the danger of a straight-up war between India and Pakistan (even a big one), but from the unpredictable "nightmare" scenarios which could develop: if China moves into the game, or if the Pakis "misplace" some of their atomics into terrorist hands, etc...
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