[sacw] sacw dispatch #2 (17 Jan 00)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch
17 January 2000
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#1. Pak army officials to attend peace meet in Calcutta
#2. You've Got the Bomb. So Do I. Now I Dare You to Fight.
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#1.
Times of India
17 January 2000

PAK ARMY OFFICIALS TO ATTEND PEACE MEET
CALCUTTA: At least 11 Pakistani delegates, including four former senior
army officials, will be among 10,000 participants from across the country
and abroad in the three-day South Asia Peace Meet and All India
Constructive Workers Conference beginning here on January 18.
Organised by Akhil Bharat Rachanatmak Samaj and Harijan Sevak Sangh, the
meet will focus on initiating a peace movement and fostering friendship
with Pakistan, besides attaining other social objectives, eminent Sarvodaya
leader Nirmala Deshpande said here yesterday.
Ms.Deshpande, who is the chairperson of Rachanatmak Samaj, told
newspapers that among the foreign dignitaries who had confirmed
participation were Md.Taher Mohammad Chowdhury, former minister in the
Julfikar Ali Bhutto cabinet, Pakistani historian Mobarak Ali and trade
union leader Keramat Ali, Nepalese leader Rudra Lal Mulmi and Bangladeshi
poet Md.Abdul Khalek, she said.
They would deliberate at the special session on ''peace initiatives in
South Asia'' on the opening day.
Tripura Governor Siddswar Prasad, West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu,
Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister
Digvijay Singh and Union Minister of State for External Affairs Ajit Kumar
Panja will also be among others attending the meet.
Ms.Deshpande said it was the common aspiration of the general public in
India and Pakistan to have a friendly bilateral relation and removal of all
obstacles through peaceful negotiations. With this objective the former
Pakistan officials, including Lt.Gen.(Retd.) Md.Nasir Akhtar,
Maj.Gen(Retd.) Jamshed Malik and Brigadier (Retd) Talat Sayed were taking
part in the meet, she said.
A massive peace march would be taken out on January 19 in which political
leaders cutting across party affiliations, besides delegates from the
country, are expected to take part, she said.
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#2.
The New York Times
Sunday, January 16, 2000
Week in Review

=46ALLING OUT
You've Got the Bomb. So Do I. Now I Dare You to Fight.
By CELIA W. DUGGER and BARRY BEARAK

India and Pakistan counted on nuclear deterrence. They may get war
instead.

NEW DELHI, India -- Just after New Year's, when most of the world's
leaders were welcoming the millennium like a flower about to bloom, the
government in New Delhi was denouncing its neighbor, Pakistan, accusing it
of masterminding the hijacking of an Indian airliner. Charges and
countercharges of assorted evils have since followed as officials of the
fledgling nuclear powers busy themselves with what often seems their
preoccupation: hating each other.

Relations between predominantly Hindu India and overwhelmingly Muslim
Pakistan are now near the low point of 1971, when they fought their third
all-out war. Things weren't supposed to be this way -- or at least that
was India's calculation when it unbottled the nuclear genie in May 1998 by
conducting underground nuclear tests.

But Pakistan responded quickly with matching nuclear tests. And rather
than making the subcontinent more secure, many experts on the region now
agree, India and Pakistan's open possession of the bomb appears to have
raised the risk of limited wars that could spiral out of control.

Their poisoned relationship has taken on a perverse dynamic. Smaller,
weaker Pakistan has been emboldened to view its nuclear arsenal as a magic
shield that will protect it from harm even if it endlessly gores India,
the dominant power in South Asia.

This has produced a war of "a thousand cuts" that is enraging India,
wearing its patience thin and prompting some Indian officials to threaten
stronger retaliation. Pakistan has consistently miscalculated India's
determination not to let possession of nuclear weapons deter it from
responding militarily. India's defense minister, George Fernandes,
recently boasted that "India can beat Pakistan anytime, anywhere."

The stark deterioration in relations between India and Pakistan has been
evident in a series of recent events -- most immediately in India's
response to the hijacking. But the decline began last summer, when
Pakistani forces occupied remote peaks in the Indian state of Kashmir, the
Himalayan territory that both countries claim, and India fought to root
them out with troops, artillery and fighter planes. Pakistan eventually
withdrew, but tensions have only grown.

The Pakistani government led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was toppled in
a military coup in October. The rise to power of Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf,
the army chief whom India holds responsible for Pakistan's ill-advised
summer adventure, has driven the two countries further apart.
Pakistani-backed guerrilla attacks on Indian security forces in Kashmir
are now at their worst level in a decade.

Gen. V.P. Malik, India's army chief, said recently that the restraint that
India showed last summer -- specifically its decision not to cross the
so-called Line of Control that separates the Indian- and Pakistani-held
portions of Kashmir -- "may not be applicable to the next war."

He voiced the belief that the escalation of limited wars could be tightly
controlled in part because the nuclear deterrent itself would help prevent
them from getting out of hand and in part because cool-headed leaders
would exercise discipline. In future wars, he said, "the escalation ladder
would be carefully climbed in a carefully controlled ascent by both
protagonists."

It is precisely such words that chill nuclear thinkers. Theories of
deterrence work only if those who possess the bomb believe that it is
dangerous to wage wars because violence may escalate frighteningly and
unpredictably. What if India decides to strike militant training camps
inside Pakistan next time? How will Pakistan react?

"My fear is that at some point, the Pakistanis will be tempted to up the
ante," said George Perkovich, author of "India's Nuclear Bomb" (University
of California Press, 1999). "There will be another provocation. Somebody
blows up something big and India says, 'That's it,' and takes out targets.
Then you're on your way. Who's going to back down?"

India's assumption that unwrapping its nuclear capability would make the
subcontinent safer was perhaps best expressed by Jaswant Singh, the
nation's chief of foreign affairs, in 1998: "If deterrence works in the
West -- it so obviously appears to, since Western nations insist on
continuing to possess nuclear weapons -- by what reasoning will it not
work in India?"

But that line of logic ignores a critical difference between how the Cold
War was fought and how India and Pakistan confront each other: With a
notable exception, the Americans and Soviets took care not to place their
own armies in direct military confrontation. The exception was the Cuban
missile crisis of 1962, which experts say was the moment when the two
sides came closest to stumbling into an all-out nuclear war.

The Indian and Pakistani armies confront each other constantly along the
Line of Control in Kashmir. More than 500 Indian soldiers were killed in
last summer's fighting, and with them died the trust of India's prime
minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, for Sharif, then prime minister. Peace
talks stopped. Just months earlier, Vajpayee, the Hindu nationalist
leader, had gone by bus to Pakistan, where he and Sharif shook hands and
agreed that their nations would sort out their differences over a
bargaining table.

With President Clinton planning to visit India this spring, U.S. diplomats
are trying to get India and Pakistan back to the negotiating table. "The
United States has repeatedly said, 'You have to be talking to each other,
not shouting at each other, especially when things seem to be at their
worst,"' said Richard Celeste, the U.S. ambassador in New Delhi.

But India has other ideas. In order to end the hijacking on New Year's
Eve, India traded three imprisoned militants for the hijacked plane's
passengers and crew -- a choice that many in India, even some of
Vajpayee's allies, have depicted as a humiliating setback for his
government. Since then, India has aggressively pushed for the United
States and other nations to declare Pakistan a terrorist nation, isolating
it as a pariah.

India claims to have evidence of a Pakistani plot for the hijacking, but
has yet to produce it. A high-level intelligence official asserted in an
interview last week that the conclusive proof lay in the fact that no such
proof exists. "This was a very professional operation, and a professional
agency leaves no proof," he said, exhibiting a logic common to both
countries' military and political elites.

Some U.S. officials worry that they would lose influence over Pakistan if
they declared it a terrorist nation, noting that it was President
Clinton's intercession last summer that persuaded Pakistan to pull back
from Indian-held Kashmir. And the last thing India needs is an imploding
Pakistan on its border, with growing numbers of alienated young people
flocking to the banners of Islamic fundamentalism and a holy war against
India.

"If the United States did put Pakistan on the list, any hope of Pakistan
climbing their way out of this economic morass would evaporate," said
Michael Krepon, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington,
citing Pakistan's huge debts and slim prospects for new capital. "It would
be disastrous."

Though relations between India and Pakistan are tense, the champions of
India's nuclear blasts still defend the tests. Brajesh Mishra, national
security adviser to India's prime minister, says he believes India is more
secure for having openly embraced the bomb. Years before the tests,
Pakistan was already suggesting that it might use nuclear weapons, Mishra
said. The new element added by India's tests was the certainty that India,
too, had the weapons, he said, adding that nuclear deterrence had kept the
recent conflict in Kashmir from widening.

But the tests do seem to have introduced a new element for both countries:
Certainty has replaced doubt about the effectiveness of their bombs.
Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, said in an
interview that the years of deterrence through "nuclear ambiguity" had
worked well enough, but that when India tested, Pakistan had no choice but
to follow suit. "You're never sure of designs until you test them," she
said.

Pakistan certainly seems emboldened. "When that capacity had been proved
and the Pakistani military down through the ranks saw the mountain shake,
the Pakistanis said, 'We can equal these guys,"' said Perkovich, the
expert on India's nuclear program.

=46or now, at least, it is difficult to see a way out of the bitter cycle of
violence over Kashmir that seems to endlessly repeat itself. "Much of
India-Pakistan relations has a strong sense of deja vu," said Ms. Lodhi.
"We've all been there before. We've had half a century of confrontation.
Are we going to spend the next century in conflict, too, or break out of
it?"

__________________________________________
SOUTH ASIA CITIZENS WEB DISPATCH is an informal, independent &
non-profit citizens wire service run by South Asia Citizens Web
(http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex) since1996.