ELECTION 99
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
ELECTIONS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

The Rediff Special/ Ashok Banker

Is This Your Rocket Launcher, Mr Clinton?

Recently, when the Lashkar-e-Toiba, a self-admitted hardline terrorist faction, organised a meeting of like-minded militant groups in Lahore, Indian diplomacy protested to the US. Even setting aside the decades of armed activism, terrorist acts and policy of ruthless Islamic jihad by these groups, how could you ignore the recent upsurge in their activities in J&K.

As Indian spokespersons put it to their US counterparts for the umpteenth time, these groups were virtually fighting a proxy war in J&K on behalf of Pakistan. This was why the casualties in terrorist attacks in the post-Kargil war period were already mounting past the casualty figure of the actual war itself!

And as if to underline their arrogance, just days before their meet in Lahore, the Lashkar-e-Toiba attacked the PRO office of the Indian army’s 15 Corps headquarters in Srinagar, killing the army’s chief PRO and making international headlines -- which was just their intention.

Yet, the Americans's only response to this was: "They are exercising their democratic rights!"

The US policy on Indian and Pakistan has always been skewed in Pakistan's favour. The reason for this is simple: Ever since the Cold War days of the 1950s, the US always perceived its greatest enemy to be the USSR. It took elaborate precautions against any possible Soviet aggression by becoming the world's supercop, financing regimes that resisted Communism, providing arms, training and funds to revolutionaries who sought to overthrow legitimate communist regimes, in short doing anything under the sun to ensure that the erstwhile Soviet Union never outgrew its bounds. Its fiasco in Vietnam taught America that a direct engagement was far too expensive. Better to pursue a policy of proxy support.

This it did with resounding success in Afghanistan, a nation that the USSR had effectively annexed by force. Supporting the mujahideen movement in the country, the USA pumped resources to enable the rebels to fight back and fight back hard. Allegedly, the CIA and some high-level military agencies set up training camps to indoctrinate the tribal rebels in the art of high-tech warfare. Estimates of the US funding of the mujahideen movement in the eighties are usually figured at around $ 2 billion a year.

This enormous financial and technological support created a Frankenstein’s monster. Today, long after the Soviets have been sent packing and the Soviet Union itself has long since collapsed and ceased to be a danger to anybody, the same mujahideen are being employed by their neighbour Pakistan to fight the ongoing proxy war within our borders. The original intruders who first captured the heights in Kargil and held them through the winter of 1998 were mainly Afghan mujahideen. It was only in April 1999, with the breaking of spring, that the un-uniformed Pakistan army regulars moved in. Even now, the daily spree of terrorist attacks on military positions in J&K are the handiwork of these same mujahideen.

Every day for the past decade, shockingly large quantities of arms, ammunition, and evidence of high-tech support are discovered in search-and-destroy operations in the besieged state. On an average day, it is not unusual to read in the daily army reports that among the arms recovered were Stinger Missiles, Kalishnikovs, grenades, mortars, and other heavy-duty weaponry. These are expensive weapons, and expert training in their use doesn't come cheap either. Military intelligence has learned that the most experienced mujahideen -- veterans of the rebellion -- are often paid as much as Rs 30,000 a month, a far cry from the pittance that most civilians-turned-militants were being paid during the days of the local insurgency in Kashmir.

So where do all these arms, training, and veterans come from to inflict wounds on our already bleeding borders? From those same US-funded and supported programmes, of course. Today, all those billions of dollars pumped into Afghanistan by the USA are being used against India. No wonder then that after a hiatus of almost thirty years, the Clinton administration became the first US government to actively involve itself in dialogues with India and Pakistan over the Kashmir problem. Not since Kennedy has any US president shown such a keen interest in resolving this issue.

Of course, the detonation of India's nuclear weapons and the similar nuclear response from Pakistan has been a major factor in this renewed US interest. But Pokhran-II, as the name suggests, was India’s second round of tests. Whatever the public claims may be, the US knows quite well that India possessed the ability to build a nuclear weapon for almost two decades. What they're really worried about now is not that a nuclear conflagration might explode in the region, but that their own past errors of commission and omission might come home to roost.

Already, the US has seen the bitter result of funding what can only be called terrorist regimes in Third World countries. The growth of Osama bin Laden is a perfect example: Where do such monsters come from if not from US foreign policy? Would the mujahideen have the resources, the men and the confidence to wage its proxy war on behalf of Pakistan in J&K if not for all that US support? The spate of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, the CIA head office at Langley, the bombing in Ohio, and other events were all part of the backlash created by previous US "interference" in other nations’ affairs. Today, more and more American bureaucrats and senators are increasingly protesting against any continuation of the supercop approach to foreign affairs management.

The defeat of Clinton's pet CTBT bill in his own senate underlined this fact. What right does the world’s most nuclear-prolific nation have to police other nations? India's demand for total nuclear disarmament is not a stalling tactic, as some critics have groused, but a legitimate demand. We'll do as you do, not as you say, is the message that Vajpayee has thrown back at the US. Hopefully, someone in Washington is getting the message.

A perfect example of the USA's double-standard is visible in its Cuba policy: After the US military's 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, the Americans wanted the entire world, starting with Mexico, to declare Cuba a security threat. In 1997, still seething over the matter, the Clinton government pushed through the Helms-Burton Act, which proposed sanctions against any corporate entity, in the US or outside, which did business with Cuba. This includes the stopping of all humanitarian aid such as the supply of food and medicines in a crisis!

In contrast, after the recent military coup in Pakistan, not only has the US not been half as stringent in imposing sanctions, it has been almost benevolently watchful in its attitude. While a democratically elected government is overthrown and with no sign of a return to democracy in the near future, the US buffs its nails and manages to look blissfully unconcerned. Even if the threatened sanctions against Pakistan are imposed, they don't entail anything even remotely similar to the harshness of the Helms-Burton Act. Business will continue, so will various aid packages, and even World Bank loans for certain categories.

The reason for this dichotomy in the US approach to Pakistan versus Cuba is simple: Cuba is within easy missile-launching distance of the US coast. Never mind that it poses no threat at all to the world's largest superpower. Its existence is enough to make America’s skin crawl. While Pakistan is much too far away to harm the US directly in any way. The fact that it can and is harming its neighbour India, using US-provided funding, weaponry and militant training doesn't seem to bother America. American blood and borders are inviolate: India's on the other hand, are cheap.

It is time to tell the US to get off its high-moral ground and atone for its own mistakes. Helping clean up the mess it has indirectly contributed to in Kashmir would be one way to start. It was the threat of imminent US back in 1953 that probably led Nehru and his government to back off from a direct confrontation with Pakistan over Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. If not for the fear of US military involvement, today Kashmir might well be united, Indian, and peaceful.

But most of all, it's time to demand that the US takes action to clear up its own backyard. The demand for the extradition of Osama bin Laden is a good start. But it came only after repeated clandestine attempts, allegedly by the CIA, to have the terrorist ganglord assassinated: It was these attempts that caused Laden’s supporters to retaliate by bombing the World Trade Centre and similar targets. The US has made a career out of interfering in other nations affairs and leaving messes that have impacted adversely on regional politics in Asia, South America, and even central Europe for decades afterwards. Today, the mujahideen are just as active in Kosovo and Chechnya as in Kashmir.

Take back your rocket launchers, Mr Clinton. Take back your CIA-trained terrorists,your dollar-funded mujahideen, your anti-communist hoodlums. Take all the billions of dollars worth of lethal weaponry being used in Kashmir today. Take it all, and shove it up your...um, arsenal.

The Rediff Specials

Tell us what you think of this feature