Whom
should we blame for a
nuclear war between India and
Pakistan?
By
Jonathan
Power
June 7, 2002
LONDON - If nuclear war does break out between India
and Pakistan they will only have themselves to blame.
Since the early 1970s they have been walking along the
unmarked path that leads to nuclear holocaust and enough
people both within and without have told them how to turn
back. Even today if President Pervez Musharraf and Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee were as serious as they say
they are about avoiding nuclear war they could sit down
for two hours and sort the whole thing out. It is not
that complicated.
The late Mahbub ul Haq, at one time Pakistan's
minister of finance and one of the most creative minds to
have come out of a land that has produced more than its
fair share of brilliant heads, suggested six years ago
the creation of a UN trusteeship to last 10 or 15 years
over both Indian-held and Pakistani-held Kashmir. "Why
not withdraw armed forces from inside Kashmir to near the
border belt, withdraw all administrative machinery, open
the border between the two parts of Kashmir and give the
Kashmiris themselves a chance for self-government and
peaceful development?"
Yet if Pakistan and India have only themselves to
blame for today's decisions or non-decisions, historians
will doubtless extend the culpability in many directions.
To the British first and foremost, who divided India and
left without resolving the issue of the Moslem state of
Kashmir inside a predominantly Hindu India. There was not
much point in spilling 250,000 lives in the pursuit of
partition if that problem couldn't have been solved at
the same time. To India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru, who repeatedly miscalculated by refusing to take
seriously Mohammed Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim
League. At one time Jinnah would have worked to keep
India whole as long as there was an important place for
Muslims and the League. And again to Nehru for promising
the Kashmiris a referendum on independence which 54 years
later India has still not delivered on.
In more recent times much responsibility needs to
heaped on the shoulders of that most pacific of all
American presidents, Jimmy Carter. At that time when
India's prime minister was the near pacifist Morarji
Desai it could have been possible to persuade India to
renounce its quest for nuclear weapons, if Washington had
used a little more carrot and a bit less stick, in its
attempt to pressure India to sign a safeguards agreement
on the use of spent nuclear fuel. The quid pro quo would
have even for America to step up the pace in negotiating
a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and to honour its promise
implicit in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to get
rid of its nuclear weapons at a faster pace. Such a
compromise would have served the world well; a
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty would not only have slowed
the American-Soviet arms race it would have made the
Indian and Pakistan nuclear bombs much more difficult to
develop.
Carter compounded his earlier errors by allowing
himself to be thrown off course by the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan. Carter put his telescope to his blind eye
and ignored what Pakistan's nuclear establishment was up
to in return for forging an anti-Soviet partnership to
arm the mujahidin. For years after, under Carter and then
under Ronald Reagan, the White House went through an
annual ritual of giving assurances that all was well in
Pakistan's nuclear laboratories. It was not only an
ill-conceived policy it was an unnecessary one.
But the blame goes further back than Carter, to
Richard Nixon. It was he and Henry Kissinger, with their
grand notions of realpolitik, who favoured the ploy of a
nuclear-armed China to play off against the Soviet Union.
Nixon made it abundantly clear that he gave so much time
and attention to China and so little to India because the
former was nuclear armed and the latter was not. Alas, it
took the big bang of India's first open nuclear bomb test
almost exactly four years ago to penetrate where all the
good journalism, books and wise diplomatic missives- that
have argued that it was democratic India that has the
best long run future of all the big Asian countries- had
failed to reach.
Blame China too. It was Chinese scientific and
material aid that made the Pakistani nuclear bomb
possible. China was more aware of India's future
potential than was America, yet like so many decisions
made by the big powers it was a policy that has totally
backfired, as India develops a stockpile of nuclear
missiles more aimed at China than at Pakistan.
The western powers - all of the big ones including
Russia - are now paying in anxiety for the many years of
living out a Faustian bargain between their foreign and
economic policies on the one hand and their nuclear
proliferation commitments on the other. For reasons of
financial self interest, many western countries until
relatively recently failed to police their high
technology exports rigorously enough. The ability to
build stocks of plutonium or enriched uranium and
construct a bomb slipped through to countries as diverse
as Israel, Iraq, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Argentina, and
South Africa (although the latter three of their own
volition decided to forgo their nuclear weapons).
If twelve million people have to die in the world's
first nuclear war there will be a lot of decision makers
still alive who should feel more than a twang of their
consciences. Why have our political leaders been so
myopic and careless of our future well-being?
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 By
JONATHAN POWER
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