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About the only good news in the growing Pakistan muddle is Indian cricketers are going to go through with their proposed tour, after winning games with other Anglophile countries, now facing a rambunctious Karachi team. Hemming and hawing by New Delhi – security as well as political constraints – ended just as the Subcontinent’s two nuclear-clad enemies eased into their first peace talks since they almost went to war in 2002.
Attention is riveted, of course, on the incredible tale of an international bazaar of nuclear weapons centered around “the father of the Pakistan bomb”, Abdul Qadeer Khan. Technology and equipment deals spread across the globe – from China to Pakistan to North Korea to Iran and Libya with middlemen in Western Europe and the Persian Gulf. Although Pres. Bush outlined publicly the vast conspiracy, the U.S. will be chasing and chopping tentacles indefinitely [such as Indian media reports of their scientists and engineers in Libya and the manufacture of nuclear gear in a company owned by Malaysia’s new prime minister.]
The Bush Administration, as it heads into a nasty political campaign season, can empathize with Indian Prime Minister Behari Atal Vajpayee who is also running up to elections. His Hindu chauvinist rightwing is champing at the bit, a little like Bush’s conservative “base” disaffected with recent White House compromises on Capitol Hill. If they get out of hand – with cries of a “sellout” to Pakistan -- even the Congress Party’s inept leadership headed by Sonia Gandhi could deliver body blows to Vajpayee’s always shaky governing coalition of a three dozen parties.
Yet, contradictorily, it is to Pakistan that Washington strategists must concentrate their attention. That will be hard with so many competing problems.
Pakistan’s Pres.-Gen. Pervez Musharraf is closer to the incarnation of the Hindu godhead Vishnu with its four or more arms grasping at different straws than to the Turkey’s soldier-statesman-reformer Ataturk whom he is said to privately want to emulate. And should he fail to balance all his conflicts, or get cut down by one of the repeated assassination attempts, there would be an increasing threat of war and chaos among a fifth of mankind.
Musharraf, as viewed from Washington and by less partisan observers in New Delhi, has been making progress toward cleaning up Islamabad’s mess. Whatever his contribution to these earlier Pak policies as a major military figure before his 1999 coup, he has moved against remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists whom he now publicly acknowledged in the notorious Pakistan-Afghanistan tribal areas [perhaps including Osma Ben Ladin], helped round up some of the most important terrorist leaders, trimmed back the infiltration into Indian-occupied Kashmir, called a unilateral ceasefire on the Line of Control between the two armies in Kashmir, conceded publicly that old Pakistan negotiating positions [insistence on the proposed UN Kashmir plebiscite] might be compromised. These actions have not been as forthcoming as Washington – and New Delhi – would have wanted. But in the Pakistan political environment, hounded by the small but potent Islamicist right and the old, corrupt, feudal secular politicians, Musharraf is walking a tight rope.
He now promises, with U.S. help, to run down the whole proliferation scandal – knowing full well that an “India” lobby in full cry in the U.S. Congress could again seek to impose sanctions on Pakistan. The pardon given Khan, necessary from Musharraf’s internal political balancing act for a “hero of the nation”, is said to be conditional. That may well be, as some of the Pakistan media have reported, that Khan – however much he was a freelancer – could not have functioned without the benign neglect if not the collaboration of some of Musharraf’s crucial military colleagues [and supporters].
Musharraf is playing from a very poor hand. The relative strength of the Indian economy, their recent huge purchases of new Russianweapons and Israeli radar systems, the U.S. promise to lift restrictions on dual purpose technology to India, all can be argued by Musharraf’s domestic opposition to be weakening Pakistan in a Subcontinent’s zero sum game. [He will be pushing for compensatory U.S. arms.] Furthermore, Pakistanis see growing bonds with India as Washington’s acquiescence to New Delhi’s old claims for hegemony in South Asia. It does not help that a growing India lobby in the Congress has strong ties to the Vajpayee’s Hindu right, or that former leaders such as ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto [with circumstantial evidence she abetted nuclear technology swaps for missiles to North Korea] get a hearing in Washington.
What Washington – and the shrewder heads in New Delhi – must keep in mind is that another implosion in Pakistan, were it to come from either an Islamicist-inspired coup or connivance of the old politicos, would find its first victim in the subcontinent – India.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@comcast.net),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.