Anwar Ahmad

Last week, after Israeli forces had assassinated yet another Palestinian who "Israel believed" was "planning a new attack," prime minister Ariel Sharon said "This is not the first and not the last" killing because "that is how we will act." His spokesman, Raanan Gissin, warned that "we will exercise our right of self-defence, just as the US is doing in Afghanistan." Brushing aside US criticism of its assassinations policy by equating it with the American hunt for OBL "dead or alive," Sharon's advisor, Zalman Shoval, said "Actually we do the same thing they (the Americans) do and they do the same thing we do." Indeed!

It was argued last week that the UN Security Council's ambiguous resolutions on terrorism and the unilateral US-UK attack on Afghanistan had combined to set a dangerous precedent for Israel and India. In the context of Israel, as the Shoval hometruth underlines, it is more accurate to say that the unfolding US anti-terrorism "crusade" is but a glorified and globalised version of Israel's long-practiced policy of demonising and killing the enemy without letting its side of the story enter the public picture.

Hence, New York mayor Rudy Giuliani's stinging rebuke to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed for daring to tag with his 10 million dollar donation into the Twin Towers Fund a "highly irresponsible" and "dangerous" plea that the US adopt a "balanced stance" - not a pro-Arab stance - in Palestine. Whatever happens, the "cause" must not find linkage with "terrorism" because that might set the conditioned American mind thinking. That would be dangerous.

However, as the subsequent assassination of Israel's ultra-hawkish minister, Rehavam Zeevi has underscored, state-terrorism has not delivered peace or security to Israel. The wisdom of the US wielding a sledgehammer against a "viral flue" has also been questioned. Sadly, much more strife lies ahead before the two, and India, can face the self-evident reality. As the US Secretary of State Colin Powell landed in Pakistan, India capped its mounting post-September 11 sabre rattling by proclaiming its attack on 11 Pakistan army posts on the LoC.

Such attacks are, of course, common. What was new this time was India claiming credit for these, unlike the standard practice of blaming the other side. "This is a punitive action against Pakistan for arming and funding militants in Kashmir. This is to tell them that they cannot go on with this anymore," said an Indian army commander in occupied Kashmir.

Anymore? Why? What has changed suddenly? Indians have been stridently citing the US precedent to invoke self-defence in attacking Pakistan. Having acted the way they have, the UN and USA have both forfeited the legal-moral authority to admonish others for unilateral cross-border strikes against their "terrorists." It is now a free-for-all, and a very dangerous one in the nuclearised and sanity-free South Asia.

When President Bush advised Pakistan and India to "stand down during our activities in Afghanistan, for that matter for ever," he erred in treating them at par even though India had admitted its aggression. But given its doings in Afghanistan, the US could not chastise India and it cannot, for the moment, antagonise Pakistan. It has, thus, left its post-Afghanistan stance on Kashmir in a dangerous but deliberate ambivalence - a misreading of which could encourage Indian adventurism.

The current Indian bellicosity is not just customary pettiness and pique at America's reunion with Pakistan. The Pak-US relationship, India knows well, is unlikely to outlast the present crisis. In May this year, Richard Armitage, the US deputy secretary of state, had chosen his first Indian visit to include Pakistan in the "rogues' gallery" from whose "irresponsibility" the National Missile Defence would shield, among other US allies, India.

Islamabad had then hummed and hawed, without eliciting so much as a "clarification" from Washington. In July, Armitage baldly described 50-years of Pak-US relations as "false" - the first time such truth was officially spoken. "It's been a relationship that wasn't based on Pakistan. It was based against someone else - in the first instance India and their relationship with the Soviet Union, and later against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan." The sudden swing in Pak-US relations only proves Armitage's point.

Much has changed after September 11. But democracy, secularism and the market still make India and the US natural allies. This relationship will be honourable because Indian democracy and freedom-from-debt gives it the strength to deal with the US on an equal footing. That Secretary Powell stood with Pakistan's president and India's foreign minister in addressing the press is one reflection of US perception of the two countries.

Thus, even as the Indians fumed at Pakistan slipping out of the noose, their former prime minister I K Gujral was quick to point out that "it is an evolving situation." Indeed, the US would return to India with full fervour after it has used Pakistan. The Indian worry is that it may not jettison Pakistan. The animus in Pakistan at being arm-twisted into being "friends" again, the suspicion of being discarded again and the US confession that it had erred mightily by abandoning Afghanistan and Pakistan after the Soviet withdrawal have elicited US assurances of an "enduring commitment" this time.

Few Pakistanis trust these fidelity vows, especially since there is still no hint of the one litmus test by which they will judge US sincerity - a loan write-off. In fact, many worry that Pakistan could be the next US target. Even so, the Indians (and Israelis) dread the thought of the US being eventually forced to focus on the causes of "terrorism." The din in Delhi was, thus, intended primarily to drown out Pakistani whispers into the American ears of its standard distinction between terrorists and freedom-fighters.

By threatening to distract world attention from the US "activities" in Afghanistan, India has created bargaining chips where none seemed to exist. Unlike the misplaced chivalry of the Pakistanis, the Indians are hardnosed bargainers and single-mindedly focused on their strategic objectives. They would use their spoiler-value to dissuade the US from making any promise to Pakistan on Kashmir, or even military sales.

Simultaneously, while seeking a US commitment to include Kashmiri resistance in its war against terrorism, India would like the US to endorse its view that the Kashmir dispute does not exist beyond its "terrorist" dimension. If this is granted, India would feel freer to invoke self-defence in hitting the resistance bases in Azad Kashmir. Like Israel's infamous invasion of Lebanon, it may also like to redo the LoC to create a buffer-zone.

The Indians have succeeded thus far in "inviting" Secretary Powell to the sub-continent, pushing him back from Kashmir being "a central" issue between India and Pakistan to an "important" one and inveigling an invitation for premier Vajpayee to visit the US. Powell also repeated on the Indian soil the US commitment to target terrorism of all kinds, including the one afflicting India. These commitments would not have come had India not gone berserk.

But Pakistan can draw solace from Powell's reiteration in India of Kashmir being an unresolved dispute and the Kashmir-specific resistance groups evading the US list of terrorists. They do not, in any case, qualify as "terrorists with a global reach" against whom the US crusade is directed. But things will change and, too often in the past, these have changed to Pakistan's detriment.

Nonetheless, as Pakistan hopes for a debt write-off and a fair deal in Kashmir, and US must know that another betrayal could become the epitaph of the liberal, perhaps even the moderate, cause in Pakistan. That would create too many very obvious and ominous problems for the US (and India) without solving any. Having destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan, the already stretched US credibility will snap in selling Pakistan to the Muslim world as another deserving target while arguing that the "crusade" is not against Islam.

Which way the US bends in the Pak-India and Arab-Israeli cross winds on terrorism and how its self-defence Afghan war pans out should shape the new world, and determine its own shattered security. Only if the US leaders find the vision and the courage to see and redress state-terrorism, injustice, indignity and inequity as the main causes of a militant backlash would the world become a safer place for all.

The writer is a freelance columnist

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