Shafqat Mahmood

The writer is a former Senator and a former federal and provincial minister

smahmood@lhr.comsats.net.pk

Eyeballs must be getting pretty tired on the front line after being grimly locked for over two weeks now. This is not yet a hot war but it is not a cold war either. Apart from the occasional shelling that bored artillerymen get up to, the possibility of a real war is just a short order away. Theatrical handshakes in Kathmandu may be considered earth shattering by official publicists but histrionics are seldom a substitute for substance. Unless the Indians are convinced that their objectives have been met, they will continue to threaten war. It is up to us to decide when we had enough.

The convergence of forces against us does not look very good. It is not just the Indian army breathing down our neck. The Americans and the British seem to be working with it to put pressure on us. This new coalition has a common agenda. They want the Jihadi elements in Pakistan to be uprooted, banished or better still destroyed. The ball, in their mind, is in General Musharraf's court. If he is ready to move decisively against what they consider terrorist cells, they will give us a reprieve. If the General hesitates or his heart is not into it, a war will be imposed on us.

It is a no cost operation for the Americans. They will continue to pound Al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan while the Indians will do the dirty job against Pakistan. Our much-vaunted nuclear umbrella may prove an illusory source of security in a crunch situation. Nuclear weapons do not fly by themselves to enemy targets. They need delivery vehicles. The only two we have are the missiles or the F-16s. The Americans are watching every inch of our territory. The moment we bring the delivery vehicles and the weapons together, I wouldn't be surprised if a pre-emptive strike is launched. The justification for such an action against an ally would be easy. It would be done to forestall a nuclear holocaust. What can be nobler than that!

The message to us then is quite explicit right now. Take decisive action against the Jihadis or else get ready to face war. Cosmetics, or what are thought to be cosmetics, won't do. Some of us consider the actions already taken by the government against the Jihadi organisations as major events. Their fund collection has been stopped, their training camps in Pakistan have been rolled up and their leaders have been arrested. This is not enough either for the Americans or the Indians. They are looking for something more substantive.

They want all the Jihadi operations from bases in Azad Kashmir stopped altogether. They want an active participation of the Pakistan army in stopping cross border incursion. They essentially want the armed struggle in Kashmir, or at least the foreign variant of it, to end. In other words, they want us to do to Jihadis what we did to the Taliban. Both were flourishing with our support. We flipped sides in a hurry and helped the Americans in getting rid of the Taliban. Now they want us to do the same with the Jihadis. This, my friends, is what the second round of war on terror looks like.

Our sovereignty in this limited sense has been compromised but it could be worse. The Americans have for long campaigned against our nuclear programme. Much before the tests in 1998, far reaching sanctions had been slapped on us. There is little doubt that our nuclear capability makes them deeply uncomfortable. Given this hostility it is a bit of a surprise that they haven't asked us to dismantle these weapons of mass destruction. America has been in a belligerent mood since September 11. Making impossible demands of other nations is now par for the course. Yet, we have been spared this humiliation, so far.

Maybe General Musharraf is right. His active support for the war in Afghanistan did indeed preserve what is grandiosely described as our strategic assets. By one argument, they may not prove to be much of a help in the current impasse against India. But, the Indians cannot be totally sure that these would be neutralised in case of a conflict. So some dignity and some offensive capability has been preserved. Imagine for a moment that this impossible demand had been made by the Americans. What would we have done then?

There is little doubt that General Musharraf has been placed in a very difficult situation since September 11. He has so far negotiated his way out of trouble by making enough concessions to avert serious consequences. This has meant throwing overboard deeply held security doctrines. Whether it is strategic depth in Afghanistan or the tying up of large Indian forces in Kashmir, it has not been easy to make these policy turnarounds. Yet he has done what had to be done to save Pakistan from the ravages of war. He has weighed his options and decided to take the least hurtful course for the sake of the country.

This has meant some loss of face but it takes courage to take a hard look at our assets and capabilities and not invite disaster just to look heroic. Mullah Omar may have looked good to many a chest thumper when he told the Americans to get lost. Where is he now? Some say he was last seen escaping Kandahar on a motorbike. If it was just a question of an individual I may have joined others in praising Mullah Omar's courage in brandishing his sword against daisy cutters. The problem is that leaders with inflated egos invite disaster not only on themselves but also on to their people. An individual or two are expendable. An entire people are not.

Inflated sense of importance has been our problem for a long, long time. We have always had ambitions and agenda's far beyond our capabilities. Some of us have imagined ourselves as world players when our treasury has been empty and more than half of our people have lived below the poverty line. We have invested in weapons that we could not afford and created a defence infrastructure that was far beyond our resources. If we are now beginning to realise where we actually stand, and order our priorities according to our capacity, there is nothing wrong with that. In fact all sensible people should applaud it.

It takes courage to overcome natural human instincts to act like a gladiator. General Musharraf is demonstrating this courage and we should acknowledge it. He is doing it at some cost and taking some abuse. We are lucky that at this critical juncture in our history we have a pragmatist at the helm. Imagine an Aslam Beg or a Hamid Gul taking decisions for Pakistan. One need not be an Einstein to figure out what the result would have been.

Also, we need to see what is it that we are being asked to do. Dismantling the radical structure in Pakistan may have some marginal costs as far as Kashmir is concerned but the good outweighs this loss by a wide margin. If we can rid our society of radical and armed elements, if we start to give economic development the priority that it deserves, if we begin to live within our means, it can only be good for us. Most importantly, if we can come out of this dangerous situation in our region unscathed, we would have accomplished more for our country than inflated rhetoric and hot air of the past fifty-four years.