USA: The world's 911

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

What seems to be a well substantiated report in The Hindustan Times, one of India’s most reliable and independent media voices, dramatizes just how large the role of America as the lone hyperpower [as the French insist] has become. And it also demonstrates how deep the U.S. entanglement has become, not just in Afghanistan but in South Asia.

Apparently what happened was that a rogue Indian army commander took his strike force out of its reserve position up against the Pakistan border and put it into battlefront deployment, a position that could only be interpreted as the beginning of fullscale war. Washington saw it on its satellites. The U.S. warned Pakistan and the Indian political figures. The Indian strike force commander has been removed and the strike force brought back into the line.

It is not clear how far up the line of the Indian command the strike commander’s action was condoned. It seems unlikely, the Indian newspaper notes, that the strike force commander would have acted without his immediate commander’s approval. And we may never know the whole story of this episode.

But with almost a million men gun barrel to gun barrel along the Indo-Pakistan frontier – especially in Kashmir where for months a dozen or so military and civilian casualties have resulted daily from Pakistan/Kahsmiri guerrilla penetration and Indian occupation and counter-terror – the subcontinent is a tinderbox. Furthermore, it is a nuclear accidental exchange waiting to happen.

The episode only points up how fraught with danger is the new activist American policy in the subcontinent – however much necessary and unavoidable. Before the terrorist episode in New York and Washington, the U.S. was already becoming deeply involved in the affairs of the Subcontinent. Not only was there all the entanglements of the Clinton Administration’s half-hearted anti-terrorist activities against Osama Ben ladin in Afghanistan but Pres. Clinton had initiated a new policy toward India.

A decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, and India’s long time infatuation with Moscow’s supposed shortcuts to industrialization and modernity, it became apparent to both New Delhi and Washington that a new relationship after a half century of hostility might be in the making. India was ostensibly abandoning its commitment to a planned economy, Soviet style. Trade with the U.S. was mushrooming as it began to liberalize. With the bankruptcy of Pakistan and the takeover of some of its institutions – notably its intelligence operations – by allies of the fundamentalists in Afghanistan and in the Arab world, India’s old claim to hegemony in South Asia was getting a new hearing in Washington. And there was the temptation to look at a map – as that house organ of the Washington bureaucracy, The New Republic, recently put it – and see India’s mass and its billion people as a counter to the possibility of any threat China might pose to peace in stability in East and South Asia.

Then came the atroicities of September 11. India immediately offered its help in the “war against terrorism with a global reach”. But it became obvious that Pakistan, with its dubious but intimate connections with the Taliban hosts of Osama Ben Ladin and his worldwide network, was crucial to American efforts. Pres.-Gen. Musharraf almost immediately began to reverse Pakistani policy to join the U.S.-led coalition against the terrorists. And, once again, the U.S. was in a balancing act between Pakistan and India.

What must be assumed as elements beyond the control of Pres.-Gen. Musharaf – perhaps one of the last desperate gasps of the Al Qaeda network in the region – fired up the Kashmir imbroglio with a bloody attack in November on the Kashmiri assembly. Then came the New Delhi attack on the Indian parliament, which only by luck and timing, apparently, missed gunning down most of the Indian government leaders.

India, quite rightly, invoked the precedent of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan as the basis for bringing an end to Pakistan-sponsored support of Kashmir anti-Indian movements and using infiltrators to pin down more than a half million Indian security forces in the fabled Vale. There were bellicose demands for India to move against Pakistan, particularly from the bowels of the BJP Hindu revivalist party which heads the Indian government coalition. And the U.S. was immediately caught in the crossfire.

Washington has tried to wet down the hostility between the two countries – Sec. Colin Powell has just put in yeomen service on the ground . At the same time, Washington has almost restored Pakistan to its old position of an American ally, and whatever the differences in private, extolled the help Musharraf at unknown jeopardy to his hold on power, has been lending to the Afghanistan [and Pakistan] cleanup. The movement toward India, too, has continued with a steady stream of U.S. and Indian visitors – including high military and security consultations – with continued professions of dedication to a new relationship of close cooperation if not alliance.

This week’s episode of defusing a near-battlefield situation, however, demonstrates, again, if more evidence were needed, how complex and fraught with danger these new relationships are. It also suggests, if it were not already apparent, how the White House’s switchboard, always a marvel of efficiency and beehive activity, has now become the world’s 911 emergency call number.