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The
Clinton Visit to India and Pakistan [begins March
20] is Unlikely to Avert Nuclear War
By JONATHAN
POWER
March 15, 2000
LONDON- She came to the world's attention three years
ago with her prize-wining novel, "The God of Small
Things". Now the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy dares to
lecture the government of her country on nuclear weapons,
a rather lonely voice in a sub-continent consumed with an
almost fatal overdose of self-destroying hatred. "It is
such supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are
deadly only if used. The fact that they exist at all,
their very presence in our lives, will wreck more havoc
than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our
thinking. Control our behaviour. Administer our
societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like
meat hooks deep into the base of our brains. They are
purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer.
Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart
of whiteness."
We have already seen her forebodings come true. In
Pakistan, the world's first military coup in a nuclear
weapons state. In India, a budget in which defense
spending is increased by a phenomenal 28%. (It's far
easier to make a bomb than educate 400 million people,
continues Ms Roy.) Sabre rattling that makes Khrushchev's
shoe banging look tame- "We are being threatened with
nuclear weapons", says India's prime minister, Atal
Behari Vajpayee. "Do the Pakistanis understand what this
means? If they think we will wait for them to drop a bomb
and face destruction, they are mistaken". To which, adds
Lieutenant-General Kamal Matinuddin of Pakistan, a widely
read defense commentator, "if there's a war, we are
likely to respond earlier rather than later in the use of
nuclear weapons. With Pakistan's economy as it is, what
else can we do?"
And a quite ridiculous, irresponsible way of playing
with nuclear matches- the decision by Pakistan last
summer in which the soon-to-be military ruler, General
Pervez Musharraf played a major, if not dominant, role,
to infiltrate guerrillas into the Indian side of divided
and disputed Kashmir in a futile attempt to dislodge the
Indian army. Only some extraordinary naive, if not
perverse, misreading of nuclear deterrence theory as it
evolved during the Cold War could lead a country's
leadership to believe it could solve a long-standing duel
over territory in a positive and productive manner by
such a ploy.
"Though we are separate countries, we share skies, we
share winds, we share water. Any nuclear war will be a
war against ourselves," Ms Roy's soliloquy continues.But
even she underestimates the dangers. The Soviet Union and
the U.S., bitter though their Cold War feud became, never
lost a soldier to the other side in anger, had no
territorial dispute and, never in their centuries of
history had been to war with each other. Indeed, they
were allies who defeated Hitler. India and Pakistan are
at the opposite pole. In the short fifty three years of
their independent existence they have fought three full
scale wars. Hardly a day goes by without one of their
soldiers losing his life to the other side and their
continuing territorial dispute over the gloriously
beautiful Himalayan state of Kashmir is a well from which
the cup of bitterness is drawn every hour as the clock
strikes.
How and why President Bill Clinton thinks he can
contribute anything useful to this situation on his visit
next week is almost beyond words, simply
extraordinary.
American policy has connived since Nixon, with a brief
respite under Carter (his was the last visit by a U.S.
president, 22 years ago), to relegate India to some
remote corner of the geopolitical map. Nixon in the early
days of his opening-to-China policy made it unambiguously
clear that a reason for taking China so seriously was its
possession of the nuclear bomb. India regarded this as
the worst possible snub. Even under Carter the tendency
was to lecture and punish India for keeping its nuclear
option open. Yet at that time India had as prime minister
the near pacifist Moraji Desai. If the U.S. had used more
carrot and less stick it could have won from Desai a
formal renunciation of nuclear weapons.
Under Nixon, under Ford, under Carter and under Reagan
the U.S. steadily dug itself into the Pakistani pit.
Irritated by India's Fabian tendencies and closeness to
Moscow it appreciated Pakistan's close relationship with
anti-Soviet China. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
pushed Washington over the edge. It gave a license to the
Pakistani military and intelligence services to help the
Afghani resistance by any means necessary, however far
they went. That this led to the Taliban, the extremist
Islamist militia that now rules most of Afghanistan,
harbours Osama bin Laden, Washington's number one bete
noir, controls three quarters of all heroin reaching the
West and, to boot, has provided the Islamist fighters who
now set Pakistan's agenda over Kashmir, is barely
acknowledged. How could Washington, in the circumstances,
expect to have much influence over Pakistan's
bomb-building ambitions?
Belatedly, the U.S. has woken up to the allure of
democratic India. The big bang of its nuclear test
penetrated where all the good journalism, books and
diplomatic missives failed to reach. The U.S. now sees
that, if war does not intervene, the Indian tortoise is
likely to overtake the Chinese hare and become the
leading economic colossus of Asia. But war is likely to
intervene. Everyone has woken up too late. India should
have honoured prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's promise
shortly after independence was won from Britain to hold a
plebiscite in Kashmir and none of this would have come to
pass.
Whichever way you look, it is a story of missed
opportunities. "It could end in an afternoon", writes
Arundhati Roy. There's nothing much that Bill Clinton can
now do. Yes, he is right to try. We have to believe it's
never too late, even when we think it is.
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2000 By JONATHAN POWER
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