It’s a sensible strategy, and one with a precedent. The December 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war, as each nation mobilized one million men for nearly a year. As the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid notes in his recent book, Descent into Chaos, Pakistan was forced to move its troops away from the Afghan border to face the Indian army in the east. This allowed the Taliban and al-Qaeda escaping from Afghanistan to slip into Pakistan and establish a safe haven there.
Today, as in late 2001, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other radical Islamists on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier risk being squeezed between the Pakistani army—now acting with more resolve—and NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan. American unmanned Predator drones send Hellfire missiles into militants’ homes on the Pakistani side of the border, and Barack Obama’s pledge to send thousands of additional soldiers to Afghanistan will only increase the pressure. But were India and Pakistan to move to a war footing, this pressure would dissipate—Pakistani troops would withdraw, the Pakistani Taliban would take more territory, and al-Qaeda would likely be emboldened by its greater freedom.
It may still come to this. India’s moderate government, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Congress party, is weak and will face demands for revenge—both from the general public and the opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which may whip up anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistani rhetoric in an upcoming election. Already there has been heated public anger on both sides of the border.
And yet the governments of the two nuclear-armed nations, which have been creeping toward peace since 2004, have so far shown restraint. Pakistan has promised to co-operate with India in its investigation, and its Muzaffarabad raid suggests Islamabad is willing to back up its words with action. The Pakistani government fears an Indian military strike. It is also facing enormous pressure from the U.S., which has provided Pakistan with more than US$10 billion in military and economic assistance since 2001. But with suspected Islamist terrorists attacking civilian targets in Pakistan, even in the aftermath of the assault on Mumbai, it is becoming unavoidably apparent that the two countries share a common enemy. It’s too soon to know what all the ramifications of the assault on Mumbai will be. But if, as seems likely, the attacks were designed to push India and Pakistan toward a deeper conflict, it’s not unrealistic to hope that they will backfire.
With Adnan R. Khan
