India and Pakistan shouldn’t gamble with
nuclear war
Kashmir has again become the venue for a
confrontation between India and Pakistan. On September 11, militants attacked
an Indian military post in Poonch, and on September 18, another in Uri—both
towns in Indian Kashmir. They infiltrated the so-called Line of Control (LOC),
which separates the India- and Pakistan-administered portions of Kashmir and
has served as the de facto boundary since the armistice that ended the 1947–48
war between India and Pakistan.
An Indian policeman was killed in the
Poonch attack. In Uri, eighteen soldiers were killed (another died later
while being treated for injuries) before the assault was repelled and the
intruders shot dead. India insisted that in both instances the perpetrators
were armed and trained by Pakistan, as its Director General for Military
Operations added that twenty
similar incursions had been thwarted so far this year.
Facing calls for a tough response, Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered
“surgical strikes” against targets on Pakistan’s side of the LOC. Pakistani
officials claimed that no such Indian retaliation had occurred. Yet they acknowledged that two of their soldiers had been killed
by Indian gunfire.
On the nonmilitary front, there have been
the usual back-and-forth volleys of irate words and gestures. Pakistani
theaters have stopped showing
Bollywood movies, and Pakistan’s Electronic Media Regulatory Authority
announced plans to block Indian television transmissions.
India has sought to isolate Pakistan by labeling
it a state sponsor of terrorism. And it raised the possibility of reconsidering
the 1960 bilateral agreement
on sharing the waters of the Indus River and of revoking Pakistan’s Most Favored Nation Status,
which was granted in 1996. Sartaj Aziz, the Pakistani prime minister’s adviser
on foreign affairs, warned that reneging on the riverine treaty
and curtailing flows to Pakistan “can be taken as an act of war.”
This backdrop for this latest
conflagration was the unrest that erupted in Kashmir after Burhan Wani, a
young—he was twenty-two—Hizbul Mujahideen commander was killed in a July
shootout with Indian soldiers. During the demonstrations that followed his
death there were encounters between angry protesters and Indian security
forces. According to Indian press reports,
the resulting violence left seventy-five people dead. Kashmir has not witnessed
bloodshed on this scale since seventeen-year-old Tufail Mattoo was
shot dead by the police in June 2010, leading to violence in which some one hundred people died.
Seeking to restore order, the authorities
in Kashmir instituted curfews, shut down newspapers and, according to Indian news reports,
Internet and cellphone services. Khurram Parvez, a human rights activist who
has investigated the disappearance of Kashmiri detainees, was intercepted at New Delhi airport
before boarding a flight to Geneva to attend a UN Human Rights Council meeting,
and later arrested in Kashmir.
Calm has still not returned to Kashmir. On
October 2, militants struck an Indian army camp at Baramulla, northwest
of the capital, Srinagar.
In much of the Indian media, and certainly
in statements issued by India’s civilian and military leaders, Burhan Wani has
been portrayed as a terrorist, pure and simple. Hizbul Mujahideen has been
officially labeled a terrorist organization, not only by India but the United States and the European Union as
well. Still, painting Wani as nothing more than a poster boy for terrorism
sweeps under the rug the complexities of Kashmir’s decades-long turmoil.
The details of Wani’s
path to the insurgency help illuminate the problem India faces in Kashmir. By
all accounts he was a superior student who, according to an interview his father gave
to the Times of India, aspired to join the Indian army or to play
cricket for India’s national team. Instead, in 2010, at age fifteen, he left
home and joined Hizbul Mujahideen a few months after he and his brother were
beaten up (the latter severely) by Indian security personnel, and for no good
reason.
Such incidents are not uncommon in
Kashmir. Indeed, the Wani brothers got away lightly on that occasion. Following
on-site investigations, respected human-rights organizations have concluded
that Indian security forces raid Kashmiris’ homes, execute or torture some who
are taken into custody, use lethal force against unarmed demonstrators and even
commit rape. (The
anti-Indian insurgents, it should be said, have also abducted, murdered and
raped, all to intimidate civilians or to punish suspected informants.)
Thus, many Kashmiri Muslims have likely shared some version of what the young
Wani brothers experienced. Not surprisingly, Burhan Wani, widely vilified in
India as a terrorist and separatist, was lionized by his fellow Kashmiri
Muslims. Many see him as a hero who fought against an occupation enforced by
the India’s army and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). Tens of thousands of
people, and according to one eyewitness account as many as two hundred thousand, turned out
to grieve at Wani’s funeral in the town of Tral and at other ceremonies held
after his death.
The resentment Kashmiri Muslims feel
toward Indian security personnel feeds the insurgency, ensuring it a steady
supply of recruits like Wani. India has the soldiers, police and firepower to
deal with demonstrators and armed separatists. What it evidently lacks is a strategy
to win the trust of Kashmiri Muslims.
Pakistani leaders dismiss India’s claim
that Hizbul Mujahideen’s armed uprising owes its existence and survival to
support from Pakistan’s radical Islamist groups (particularly Lashkar-e-Taiba
and Jaish-e-Muhammad) and its Inter-Services Intelligence. They insist that the
insurgency represents homegrown resistance to an oppressive Indian occupation.
Pakistan uses this narrative to advance
its own agenda in Kashmir. But that should not obscure the fact that the Kashmir
insurgency emerged in 1988–89, following local elections rigged to favor the
pro-Indian National Conference against the Muslim United Front (MUF) coalition,
which the Indian government regarded as pro-Pakistani. During the election
campaign, it arrested MUF leaders, fearing the party’s popularity among
Kashmir’s Muslim voters. They were neither charged nor tried.
Still, Pakistan has used the disaffection
of Kashmiri Muslims to systematically stoke the insurgency—not just by
expressing solidarity but also by providing its fighters funding, training and
sanctuaries. It has also permitted groups such as Lashkar and Jaish to train
and equip them. Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir,
serves as Hizbul Mujahideen's headquarters. Its leader, Syed Salahuddin, lives
there. (Salahuddin, then known as Muhammad Yusuf Shah,
led the NUF during Kashmir’s 1987 election and was among those arrested.)
Pakistan has backed Hizbul Mujahedeen,
which supports union with Pakistan, and distanced itself from the Jammu and
Kashmir Liberation Front, a non-Islamist movement that stands for an
independent Kashmir.
And though India has abandoned its original
commitment to allow a plebiscite, Pakistan has insisted that independence
cannot be among the choices presented to Kashmiris. Self-determination is
fine—so long as Pakistan, rather than Kashmiris themselves, define the terms.
So while India reduces the insurgency to
“cross-border terrorism,” Pakistan has its own self-serving presentation.
The Kashmir dispute has remained
unresolved for almost seventy years. Alas, there’s no solution in sight. The
standard proposals on offer to resolve civil wars won’t work in Kashmir.
Partition—recommended by some scholars,
criticized by others—won’t be acceptable to any of the parties.
India claims rightful ownership of all of
Kashmir, including Azad (“Free”) Kashmir and the
Northern Territories, now governed by Pakistan. Accepting a
partition would require the Indian government to abandon that position. There’s
no sign that it is prepared to do so. More importantly, partition won’t suit
Pakistan. Dividing Kashmir along the LOC, the most that India will ever allow,
assuming it will be open to partition at some point, would leave almost
two-thirds of Kashmir in India’s hands, including the jewel in the crown, the
Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley.
Besides, Islamabad
believes that Kashmir should have been part of Pakistan all along. In 1947,
parts of British India, Punjab and Bengal, were partitioned to create Pakistan
as a homeland for South Asia’s Muslims. But Muslim-majority Kashmir became part
of India following the “Instrument of Accession”
its Hindu monarch, Hari Singh, signed in October 1947 after a rebellion in
Poonch and raids by Pakistani tribesmen unnerved him. Finally, most Kashmiri
Muslims—certainly those seeking independence or inclusion in Pakistan—would
reject partition as a deal done over their heads.
What of the plebiscite option, first
proposed in 1948 by UN Security Council Resolution
47?
Pakistan continues to favor it, and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called for its
implementation as recently as last month’s UN General Assembly session. After
the 1947–48 India-Pakistan war, India did pledge repeatedly to permit a
plebiscite. But that offer contained an important precondition: the withdrawal
of Pakistan’s troops from the parts of Kashmir on its side of the LOC. That
was, and remains, unacceptable to Pakistan.
Moreover, since the mid-1950s, India has
backtracked on its plebiscite promise. It maintains that Pakistan failed to
remove its troops from the portion of Kashmir it controls and had therefore not
complied with UNSCR 47, and that Kashmir’s Constituent Assembly ratified the
state’s accession to India in February 1954. Pakistan does not accept the
Assembly’s decision as a substitute for a plebiscite. And it rejects the
provision in Kashmir’s constitution (Part II.3)
stipulating that “the State of Jammu and Kashmir is and shall be an integral
part of the Union of India.”
But let’s assume for a moment that
Kashmiris were one day allowed to vote on their future status and that those
favoring union with Pakistan, Muslims in the Valley and elsewhere, prevailed.
Hindu-majority Jammu and the Buddhist majority (over 75 percent) in Ladakh’s
Leh district—its other district, Kargil, has a Shia Muslim majority—would
refuse to accept that outcome.
Only one realistic option remains:
managing the Kashmir problem in ways that maximize stability and minimize
violence and human-rights violations, as well as the probability of war.
For that to happen, India must take steps
to protect Kashmiri Muslims from mistreatment, even death, at the hands of the
Indian army, the CRPF and the local police. The army and the police are now
virtually unaccountable because of the immunity provided by the 1958 Armed Forces Special Powers Act,
which was extended to Kashmir in 1990.
As for Pakistan, it must stop arming the
insurgents and rein in the radical Islamist groups that launch attacks on
India. Its claim that it has no role in the insurgency is no more credible than
its insistence that it does not support the Taliban.
Nearly seventy thousand people have died
since the Kashmir insurgency started, the majority of them civilians. As long
as it continues, India will take military countermeasures, regardless of what
the outside world says. The historical records shows that states use pitiless
methods to quash secessionist movements—consider the American Civil War—and
India has demonstrated that it won’t be an exception. Forget about a
Czechoslovakian-style velvet divorce (a rarity in world politics anyway)
between India and Kashmir.
As for Pakistan, it seeks to tie Indian
forces down in Kashmir and to bloody them by arming and training the
insurgents. Nuclear weapons may have increased its confidence that it can
pursue this strategy with greater vigor because India will hesitate to
escalate. But when militants cross the LOC and launch attacks, India has struck
back and Pakistani leaders have come under pressure—especially from the armed
forces—to respond in the name of national honor. The crises produced by this
pattern of behavior have generally been contained. But it would foolish to assume
that they always be.
Some experts worry
that someday a tit-for-tat spiral, triggered by a clash in Kashmir between
India and Pakistan, could end in a full-blown war in which nuclear weapons are
used. Others side with the late Kenneth Waltz, who famously argued that
the iron logic of nuclear deterrence worked in the case of the United States
and the Soviet Union and will also restrain other nuclear-armed adversaries.
Perhaps so. But the two superpowers never fought a large-scale conventional war
(or even a minor one). Nor have any other states that possess nuclear weapons.
The 1969 border skirmishes between the Soviet and Chinese troops fell short of
that. So did the 1999 fighting between Indian and Pakistani forces in Kargil;
in any event neither country had an operational nuclear capability then, even
though both conducted nuclear tests the previous year.
It would be dangerous to trust an untested
theory that would have calamitous consequences if proved wrong. Some theories
are best left unverified; this one is for sure.
Rajan Menon is Anne and
Bernard Spitzer of International Relations at the Powell School, City College
of New York/City University of New York. He is a senior research fellow in the
Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. He is the
author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian
Intervention (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Image:
An Indian Agni-II intermediate range ballistic missile on a road-mobile
launcher. Wikimedia Commons/Antônio Milena
No comments:
Post a Comment