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Welcome to USAGOLD's "Gilded
Opinion" pages.
We invite you to browse our index
of outstanding gold-based commentary.
(Back to Holger Jensen Index)
While we find Mr. Jensen's columns particularly informative with respect to foreign affairs, his opinions do not necessarily represent those of Centennial Precious Metals, USAGOLD, its management and clientele.
INSIDE FOREIGN AFFAIRS
India, Pakistan conflict
troublesome for America
by Holger Jensen, International Editor
Once again, India and Pakistan are edging toward a war both say they don't want but India seems eager to fight.
Indian warplanes have been deployed closer to the Pakistani border and Defense Minister George Fernandes says missile systems are "in position." Daily exchanges of mortar and machine gun fire are taking place on the Himalayan frontier in Kashmir.
"We do not want war, but war is being thrust on us and we will have to face it," Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee told the youth wing of his Bharatiya Janata Party on Christmas Day.
"Your armed forces are fully prepared and capable of defeating all challenges," Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told his nation the same day.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since the Asian subcontinent was partitioned in 1947. Two of these wars were over Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim region that was supposed to have its own independence after the end of British colonial rule but wound up being ceded to predominantly Hindu India.
That triggered the first Indo-Pakistan war, which ended in 1949 with one-third of Kashmir belonging to Muslim Pakistan and the rest in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. A second war in 1965 left the boundaries unchanged and the two nations fought a third war in 1971 when Indian troops helped East Pakistan break away to become Bangladesh.
Muslim militants in the Indian portion of Kashmir launched a rebellion in 1990, with Pakistan providing arms and sanctuary to the insurgents. At least six different guerrilla groups are fighting in that war, which has killed about 60,000 soldiers and civilians over the past 12 years.
India and Pakistan added a dangerous new element to their confrontation in 1998 when both came out of the nuclear closet, staging tit-for-tat missile tests that led to the imposition of U.S. sanctions.
Under pressure from Washington, the two tried to make peace in 1999, with Vajpayee paying a rare visit to the Pakistani city of Lahore. But negotiations collapsed when India accused Pakistani troops of invading the Kargil region of Kashmir, leading to three months of heavy fighting and airstrikes by both sides. CIA Director George Tenet told Congress they nearly came to nuclear blows.
In February, "earthquake diplomacy" again raised prospects of peace between the two neighbors. After a devastating earthquake killed 25,000 people in India's Gujarat state, Musharraf telephoned Vajpayee to express sympathy and sent planes with humanitarian supplies for the survivors.
Three months later, Vajpayee invited Musharraf to visit him in India. But a July summit saw no breakthrough, with India refusing to discuss a Kashmir settlement until Pakistan halted all aid to the rebels. The rebels, in turn, did not help their cause by staging two suicide attacks that put them on the wrong side of President Bush's war on terrorism.
The first killed 40 people at the Kashmir state legislature Oct. 1. The second killed 14 people at India's Parliament Dec. 13. Noting that all the attackers who died in the New Delhi raid were Pakistani citizens, India blamed two Kashmiri guerrilla groups -- Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad -- along with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
Pakistan has frozen the assets of both groups and detained the leader of Jaish, which is on Washington's list of terrorist organizations. But Musharraf still calls them "freedom fighters" rather than terrorists while denying that his government helps or has any control over them.
India says that is not good enough.
Its claim of ISI involvement with the Kashmiri guerrillas is probably true. Pakistan's military intelligence agency served as a conduit for U.S. arms to the Afghan mujahideen in their war against Soviet occupation, later helped the Taliban army rout those selfsame mujahideen factions when it took over Afghanistan, and now keeps tabs on Kashmiri guerrilla groups and their Pakistani "volunteers."
That makes Pakistan a sponsor of terrorism, says India, pleading the right of self-defense. But it cannot count on U.S. support, or even sympathy, for starting another war in South Asia. Having enlisted both countries as allies in his war on terrorism, President Bush is not about to side with one against another -- and the last thing he wants is a nuclear distraction.
December 27, 2001
India-Pakistan conflict not only one in South Asia
Despite ominous saber-rattling and the biggest military buildup on their border in 15 years, nuclear-armed India and Pakistan appear to be stepping back from the brink of war.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee will be staying at the same hotel this weekend while attending a summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in Katmandu, Nepal.
Although Vajpayee's spokesman said there is "no chance" of private meetings between the two while their troops trade fire in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, an Indian foreign ministry statement hinted at the possibility of peace talks between their foreign ministers.
India accuses Pakistan of harboring terrorists by giving sanctuary and military aid to separatist guerrilla groups fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. Pakistan says it gives only moral support to those it regards as "freedom fighters."
But Pakistan and India have fought two wars over Kashmir since Britain partitioned the Asian subcontinent in 1947. A third confrontation in 1999 nearly turned nuclear when both staged air raids on each other's territory during three months of border fighting in the Kargil region.
Tensions rose again after a Dec. 13 suicide bomb attack on India's Parliament. India blamed two Pakistan-based groups fighting for Kashmir's independence -- Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad -- and charged that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency was involved.
As mortar and machine-gun exchanges erupted along their frontier, India moved up warplanes and missiles, Pakistan responded in kind and both severed transport links and kicked out each other's ambassadors. President Bush, publicly worried that Indo-Pakistan hostilities could unravel his global coalition against terrorism, engaged in some frantic telephone diplomacy.
India, assured of U.S. support in its battle against terrorism, was gratified to see Lashkar and Jaish placed on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations. Pakistan, pressured to arrest its militants, did so by detaining the leaders of both groups and rounding up two dozen other Kashmiri militants "for questioning."
There the matter rests, for now. It is, said Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, "a grim warning" that Bush's war on terrorism can get sidetracked by local conflicts, and may even worsen them.
India, for example, may feel more justified in attacking Pakistan since the United States launched its war on terrorism in Afghanistan. And any diversion of Pakistani troops to the Indian border takes them away from the Afghan border, where they were deployed to prevent fleeing Taliban -- and perhaps Osama bin Laden -- from escaping into Pakistan.
While the Indo-Pakistan standoff is certain to dominate the SAARC summit in Katmandu, it is by no means the only conflict in South Asia.
Summit host Nepal is waging its own war against Maoist rebels who have been trying to overthrow the monarchy since 1996. About 2,200 people have died in the insurgency, which abated during a truce last year but escalated after the rebels renewed their attacks in November.
Nepal is now under a state of emergency. India has provided two helicopters to help the Nepalese army flush the rebels out of their mountain hideouts, and the kingdom has purchased two more gunships from Russia.
The Indian state of Assam, rich in tea plantations and oil, also suffers periodic attacks by separatist guerrillas who accuse the New Delhi government of plundering its resources and giving nothing back. The rebels are based in neighboring Bhutan, another mountain kingdom, but were given a New Year's deadline to dismantle their training camps and ammunition dumps there.
South Asia's longest running, and bloodiest, war is in Sri Lanka, where Tamil separatists have been battling the Sinhalese government for 18 years. More than 64,000 people have died in the conflict, which features one of the world's most prolific suicide squads, earning the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam a place on the State Department's terrorist roster since 1996.
The rebels declared a Christmas cease-fire, raising hopes that peace talks may be in the offing. But many such truces have collapsed before, usually broken by the Tigers.
January 3, 2002
Send your questions to international editor Holger Jensen, who will answer one each day. E-mail: hjens@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 The E.W. Scripps Co. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted by USAGOLD with permission of Mr. Jensen. No further reproduction without permission.
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