A well-timed pressure offensive

THOSE who believe that the current military build-up is designed to create the atmosphere that might help the ruling party in the February elections to key state assemblies are probably making light of a serious situation.

Of course, one of the possible fallouts from the build-up could be its impact on electoral behaviour, but that alone does not explain military convoys blocking traffic in all directions towards our extensive border with Pakistan. If that indeed were the purpose of the current exercise, then the authors of the strategy have rolled out the convoys, readied the missiles, relocated fighter jets at least a month too early. It is impossible to stand on the brink for two months without becoming unsteady on the feet. There is too much dynamism in the global situation, especially in our neighbourhood, for such laid-back plans to achieve slow fruition.

It is nobody’s case that being quick at the draw in the current situation is somehow a better strategy for so circumscribed a purpose as state assembly elections. The cliche has it that there is a lull before the storm. But in wars the sequence is reversed. A war is followed by a lull, not the best condition in which to mobilise votes on a platform of jingoism.

In other words, if UP and Punjab elections were the purpose then the present military build-up is far too early. It will have peaked before the day of reckoning. To shoot the bolt is too huge a gamble for so limited a purpose. That is why speculation on these lines tends to trivialise the national mood after the attack on Parliament on December 13. After all, the British have not forgotten the ‘Gunpowder plot’ of 1604 (‘‘remember, remember the 5th of November’’), when Guy Fawkes and his group had very nearly blown up the British Parliament.

This kind of pressure on Pakistan — to come clean on state sponsored terrorism — before December 13 would have invited global criticism. But no one can find fault this approach after December 13.

In the midst of the American campaign in Afghanistan most western interlocutors were advising New Delhi for restraint. General Musharraf had ‘‘bravely’’ reversed his country’s policy on Afghanistan in the interest of the global campaign against terrorism.

To place further pressure on him to switch his policy on crossborder terrorism would endanger him politically. This was the western refrain. The term ‘‘crossborder terrorism’’ was never employed by these interlocutors but New Delhi was urged to demonstrate a higher tolerance level for whatever it was that Pakistan was up to.

In the same breath, New Delhi was told that its concerns would be addressed in phase two of the war against terrorism. Clearly the West had not thought through the post-Afghan phases of the war against terrorism: Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and what have you. Different hawks in Washington were bringing their favoured target into focus.

Meanwhile there was that confusion on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Fingers of dead Al-Qaeda fighters in Tora Bora were being chopped for complicated DNA analysis to track down bin Laden.

The war in Afghanistan and therefore the Endgame is far from over — witness the bombing of 65 people in a convoy heading towards Kabul on December 21, a day before the swearing in of the interim administration in Kabul? Even though CNN’s Christiane Amanpour has pronounced it a ‘‘surprisingly swift’’ operation, the fact of the matter is that aerial action in Afghanistan has already exceeded the 78 days of airstrikes over Kosovo.

Then the US cannot take its eyes off the Great Game that has intensified in Central Asia in the wake of the Afghan developments. Which airfields are Russia losing and America gaining? What is the agenda at the meeting next month in Shanghai of the Shanghai Cooperation Council, comprising China, Russia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgizistan and recent entrant, Uzbekistan? Did General Musharraf work overtime during his recent Beijing visit to arrange an invitation for Pakistan as an observer?

The streams of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban elements that have slipped into Pakistan appear to have caused some rethink in western capitals. If the Al-Qaeda was unacceptable in Afghanistan, surely its potential to flare up even more dangerously in Pakistan cannot be underestimated. Hence the US clampdown on Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Jaish-e-Mohammed and a host of individuals.

The Indian pressure on Pakistan is therefore timely to keep western attention on the unspeakable dangers of allowing extremist residue to fester in Pakistan, to eliminate terrorism as a means of attaining a political objective and to pave the way for a peaceful settlement of all disputes between the two countries — Kashmir being the most important.

The purpose of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s impending visit will be not only to pull the two sides from the brink but to discuss a more meaningful future.

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