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[Ahsan Waheed]

Pushing Pakistan to the wall

Ahsan Waheed

Obama has elected to retain Robert Gates as his future Secretary of Defence. This indicates there is to be no major policy shift on US security related issues and reinforces Obama’s vision of an enhanced US military presence in Afghanistan, even as the future president searches for the means of implementing a drawdown in Iraq.

Meantime, incumbent US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, working to facilitate the passage of the future Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has borne in on the Mumbai blasts attributed to Pakistan by an Indian cabinet blowing hot and cold over a retaliatory war and attempted to pour oil on troubled waters with a New Dehli-Islamabad visit.

Ms Rice is reported to have urged Pakistan to cooperate fully with transparency to end the crisis and simultaneously warned India not to undertake action that might provoke “unintended consequences”.

The Chairman US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, on a visit to Islamabad over the same period of time, has also asked Pakistan to investigate the attacks on Mumbai, India’s financial hub, and urged both the civil and military leaders of in Pakistan to broaden the campaign against fundamentalist militancy.

Ms Rice’s and Admiral Mullen’s efforts to defuse the situation have not yet borne much fruit, as the opposition parties in India appear bent on approaching the United Nations for a mandate to conduct strikes on suspected militant targets inside Pakistan. The Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal belt, meanwhile, have tendered their unsullied support to Pakistan should war break out.

Pakistan’s president, Asif Zardari, during an interview with CNN’s Larry King, did his best to allay India’s suspicions of the Mumbai massacre being state sponsored, but openly balked at the idea of suspected terrorists, or their alleged sponsors, being tried in Indian courts. He asked for hard evidence to support India’s charges that the banned outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba was still buoyant.

With elections around the corner, the Indian establishment is loathe to attribute blame to indigenous elements for the Mumbai carnage, despite the notations of sundry observers that it looked very much like an “inside job”, as the information in regard to the targets displayed by the terrorists could not have come from outside sources.

This notwithstanding, the citizens of the huge metropolis of Mumbai have taken to the streets to protest the security lapse that permitted the terrorists such leeway. And, that has pushed the incumbent Indian government towards a confrontation, which threatens to spiral totally out of control should India persist with pushing Pakistan to the wall.

Here is where, arguably, the US thought to intervene given the leverage it has on closing or clouding the Indo-US nuclear energy deal. However, it may take considerably more than that to resolve India’s energy requirements, as the nuclear energy deal has been assessed to meet only 20 percent of India’s energy needs.

As for the rest, the Iran-Pakistan- India gas pipeline comes as the harbinger of peace and progress in the region. India, then, might be better advised to persuade the US look in that direction, rather than taking an adversarial position in regard to Pakistan and the militancy accruing from unidentified sources, which threatens to uproot the moorings of both countries.