MJ Akbar
If even 20,000 of the 93,000 had chosen Paradise instead of their village, the war of December 1971 could have extended to January. Pakistan would not have won the war, but the political consequences might have been different since the world was taking a call at the UN on how to intervene. The UN was still young and credible in 1971, quite different from its current dotage. Pakistan’s abject surrender on December 16 made the UN debate infructuous. De facto prevailed, as it often does, over de jure.
Ironically, the best argument for a soldier’s duty was made during the first India-Pakistan war by the Mahatma of non-violence. Seven days after Jinnah sent the raiders into India, Gandhi told his prayer meeting on the evening of October 29, 1947 that the “job of armed soldiers is to march ahead and repel the attacking enemy. They die in fighting but never retreat….” He described the Pakistan-sponsored terrorists as aggressors and plunderers. On January 27, 1948 Gandhi told the British journalist Kingsley Martin that the Government of India could not be non-violent in its defence of the nation.
A valid assumption
An assumption is valid: those 93,000 soldiers and officers did not risk their lives because they did not believe in either jihad or Pakistan. They did not believe that Pakistan was worth dying for. Such has been the trauma of 1971 that the Pakistan Army has never fought another war. After that defeat, the Pakistan Army decided that its regular troops were much safer in the barracks and behind barbed-wire walls than on a battlefield. War was outsourced to terrorists on a wholesale basis.
Pakistan invented modern terrorism in the first war when it sent some 5,000 raiders to loot, pillage and rape in Kashmir; but in 1947 and 1965 this was the opening act before regular troops entered battle. After seizing power in a coup, General Zia converted terrorism, the immoral doctrine of the impotent, as his Army’s central strategy, giving military and financial aid to secessionists in the hope that they would weaken India and segregate its northwest from the rest of the mainland. Kargil was its most ambitious terrorist operation. Failure has not deterred the killerfantasists. One definition of insanity is repeating the same thing in the hope of getting a different result. Pakistan has become addicted to belligerent insanity.
The nuclear cloak
The possession of nuclear weapons persuaded Pakistan’s military complex that it had found an invincible cloak for its policy of sustained terrorism. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s stark announcement that the age of nuclear blackmail is over has ended any ambiguity. The fog of war has not fully lifted, but there are credible reports that Pakistan was shaken and Washington stirred when deep-penetration Indian missiles hit the Nur Khan airbase adjacent to Pakistan’s nuclear assets. The air is currently alive with talk of satellite images showing damage, and a rise in the radiation count over the Sargodha region.
Washington certainly began to use the telephone lines to Islamabad and Delhi when its intelligence agencies reported that the subcontinent could be on the brink of unprecedented disaster. When public opinion, inflamed by war rhetoric, becomes a judge in the competition between tit and tat, it is difficult to quantify the first in order to measure the second. One miscalculation is sufficient to trigger catastrophe in the name of Armageddon.
Terror consequences
It is far easier to start a war than to stop it. Pakistan started this war. Pakistan recognised India had a leader with nerves of steel. Pakistan accepted that once again its communal terrorism had become counterproductive. Terrorism may remain the same, but its consequences have changed after Operation Sindoor.
To prevent the unthinkable from becoming reality you must make it thinkable. Prime Minister Modi has done so. More conventional parameters have also shifted, as the new normal begins to be defined. Water strategy is as old as the Biblical age: around 2,700 years ago, King Hezekiah of Judah, one of the “good” monarchs of the Old Testament, stopped the flow of “brooks” to prevent water from reaching the Assyrians. The thesis is the same when Modi says about the Indus: “India’s water will flow for India’s benefit, it will be conserved for India’s benefit, and it will be used for India’s progress.” Water is not soft power; it is a hard and even harsh weapon.
In a coincidence, the man who coined the term soft power, Joseph Nye, passed away very recently. Soft power was never more than a business proposition, the soap opera of the global economy.
History is patient. It may take its time when asking a question about the DNA of a dangerous dilemma, but it will compel an answer.
