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Turning a blind eye to the 1971 massacre in East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh, former U.S. President Richard Nixon and Kissinger used Pakistan President Yahya Khan as a conduit to thaw Sino-U.S. relations, which had been frozen for 20 years. It seems Republicans were never uncomfortable with dictators if they served U.S. interests, while Democrats winced at the idea.
Pakistan got the Americans to ignore human rights violations in 1971 by offering the China bait. The Cold War with the Soviet Union demanded that the United States play ping-pong to break the communism jinx at a time when the Chinese and the Soviets had different concepts of ideological purity. The real test for U.S. President-elect Barack Obama will be a sustainable foreign policy on Pakistan, soon after he takes the oath of office.
Pakistan now is a sham of a democracy with a president by default and a puppet prime minister running the beleaguered nation, with a foreign policy set by the military and Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence. To believe that the Mumbai terror attacks were planned by the Lashkar-e-Taiba militants and coordinated by the ISI unbeknownst to the civilian administration risks naivety.
Indiaʼs Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee was correct when he termed the attacks cold and calculated to create terror and an attempt to create divisions between the Hindus and Muslims in India.
The terrorists who called up an Indian TV channel during their operation said they belonged to the Deccan Mujahideen and were out to avenge atrocities on Indian Muslims. However, their accents could not hide their Pakistani, Punjabi and Urdu background and origin.
Deccan refers to a plateau that stretches across four south Indian states. One of them, Andhra Pradesh, whose capital is Hyderabad, has a sizable Muslim population. Some innocent Muslims there were wrongly rounded up during routine search operations related to an earlier bomb blast in the city. Compensation was later paid to them, but it seems that this – and the fact that nearly 40 people out of the 200 killed in the Mumbai terror attacks were innocent Muslims – never crossed the terrorists’ minds.
It is Indian secularism, set in stone, that has thwarted Pakistani designs to drive wedges between India’s Hindus and Muslims.
Pakistan tried to support the Deccan identity of the terrorists when confronted with the initial suspicions of a Pakistani link. Its high commissioner in London said in an interview with the BBC that the terrorists looked like dark-skinned South Indians and were not fair like Pakistanis.
It seems none of the sponsors of the terrorists had bargained on one of them being captured and giving away their background.
Pakistani media revealed the captured terrorist Amin Kasabʼs Pakistani background and links. Even former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was quoted by the media as asking why Kasab’s house was barricaded by the ISI and his parents whisked from the village soon after.
While rogue elements exist in Pakistan’s armed forces and the ISI, it is possible that they exist in the civilian administration too. While flip-flopping about the terrorists and coming up with brazen facts about their sponsors, Pakistan is once again proving that it can dupe the United States and hold it to ransom.
Soon after the Mumbai terror attacks, more than 100 vehicles carrying supplies for NATO forces in Afghanistan were burned by militants in Pakistan. Earlier, Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, had visited China and purchased defense equipment apparently aimed not at fighting terrorism on its western border but more at fighting India on its eastern front, using “non-state actors.”
For Obama, the safety of U.S. troops in Afghanistan – where a surge is expected in the year ahead – will be a top priority. Like in 1971, Pakistan once again has its ally China and the United States in a bind.
China is a powerful Asian tiger that can humble the United States and veto Pakistan’s branding as a terrorist state. Although the Indo-U.S. relationship has been bolstered as a counter weight to China, U.S. forces in Afghanistan are dependent on Pakistan and its military for support and survival. China abhors the new Indo-U.S. relationship and frequently pokes India on the northeastern border, which it considers illegitimate.
Pakistan is a wild card and could do further mischief as Indian elections approach in April. Doing nothing to retaliate against Pakistanʼs sponsoring of terrorism – despite its blatant denials – would be contrary to the agenda of every Indian political party that must soon face the electorate.
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(Susenjit Guha is a freelance writer living in Kolkata, India. He can be contacted at sguha60@yahoo.com. ©Copyright Susenjit Guha.)
