Category Error: Attacking Norway for Pearl Harbor

Bahukutumbi Raman, in a recent dispatch labeled “PAK ARMY & ISI: DANGEROUS MIX OF HUMILIATION & DESPERATION”, warns that Pakistan may be planning to redeem itself by orchestrating a successful strike against India, especially in the contentious Kashmir region.

No doubt, Pakistan’s citizens are seriously concerned about the ability of their government and armed forces to protect them. No doubt there has been talk on the streets of intelligence failure at best or illicit collusion with the Americans at worst.

Yet, all this follows a familiar pattern. Most military incursions into sovereign territory for any reason are done in stealth. The inevitable questions and accusations follow. Did Roosevelt know about Pearl Harbor in advance? Did Bush know about 9/11? And in her column in yesterday’s Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick accuses Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defense Minister of failing to anticipate trouble along the country’s Syrian border on Nakba Day.

The truth is, no government can promise ironclad security to its citizens. A successful strategy, however, must involve the threat of consequences for anyone intending such a move. If Pakistan were to attack India in the wake of its so-called ‘humiliation’, such redemption would be short lived. For one thing, India had nothing to do with the bin Laden raid.

President Bush underwent a hell of tortures for his decision to attack Iraq in the wake of 9/11. His opponents constantly labeled it as “the wrong war”. In the end, rightly or wrongly, it proved to be his undoing.

My own sense of Pakistan’s leadership is that it is too mature to attack India as a direct consequence of the U.S. bin Laden raid. It has far better options: Turning its focus away from Washington to cooperating more with China is one. If India is attacked, it will not be because of anything that happened in Abbottabad.

I wish I had a similar degree of confidence in America’s foreign policy.

Finding the Entrance

I must posit here that we have all collectively entered a kind of perpetual motion machine. There is literally no end to it. It has no hallowed purpose. There is only continued violence simply for violence’s sake. In order to address the problem, we must examine how we got here. And, then, walk ourselves painstakingly back and hope of finding the entrance.

The temptation for us is to accept that it has always been this way. But that would be wrong. I remember vacationing in Kashmir on a houseboat on Dal Lake back in the early 70’s. Friends of mine traveled through Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq and reported having had a wonderful time. My senior year in high school, our class hosted two foreign exchange students – one from Germany and one from Afghanistan – both of whom became close friends. Something has changed in the meantime. It behooves us to define precisely what this is.

We might begin – as our president Obama has often suggested – that we confront all our enemies face to face in a room and ask them what it is they want. Islamists would say that they want all the unbelievers to abandon their 'evil' ways and submit to their concept of God. Communists would say they want a central governmental authority that would require everyone to submit to the dictates of a single all-powerful state. These in a nutshell are the demands of our enemies. The common bond between them is ‘submission’. Never mind (for now), that both these goals are unachievable and that, even if they were (achievable), all hell would soon break loose between whatever remains.

India has been declared an enemy by Pakistan only in the sense that Pakistani Islamists see her as having aligned herself with western values – democracy and capitalism. Both these concepts fall under the heading of ‘evil’ in the Islamic and communist lexicons. As both - the Islamic vision of the world as well as the communist vision - are in essence unattainable, the conflict must continue endlessly.

The pressure has been building on all parties to show results. The West is tired, and is quite prepared to submit in this, what has become a war of attrition. Obama’s election represents a capitulation to both communism and to Islam. However, a powerful backlash is presently building. The breach will come if and when Israel acts or falls. Expect all-out war. In war, reason stops. All that matters is survival.

How India ends up after all this depends on how the (I Ching) yarrow stalks happen to arrange themselves. America as she has been may disappear - or she may not. One thing is for certain, everyone will be greatly diminished. It’ll be the perfect time to start over.

India's Enemies

India, a leader in the region, also has enemies. The flash points are disputed territory with China to the east, and disputed territory with Pakistan in the (north-)west. Pakistan is a client state (if you can still call it a ‘state’) of China. This is not to say that, if India were to give up all disputed territories unilaterally, there would be peace. Much deeper problems - mostly unspoken - exist between China and India. These are primarily ideological.

China's leadership (as JB has often said) is an unelected tyranny. India is much closer to being a democracy. Looking even casually around the political world shows that these two systems of governance do not easily coexist. Even within our own country there has developed a split, an irreconcilable divide along similar lines.

China continually agitates India. It funds Maoist rebels to create havoc along border areas. It encourages Pakistan to keep up pressure on Kashmir. It releases policy statements saying that India is not a country and should be broken up into parts. And it has clearly used its influence to dissuade the U.S. from favoring India in any matter involving these two nations.

Obama clearly has shown to have greater affinity for tyrants than for the freely-elected leaders of a people. Notwithstanding the huge sums we owe China, our president personally finds far greater kinship with the Communist regime. That much has become obvious from the policy decisions Obama has made since assuming office. And this has not gone unnoticed in the region. It seems to have confounded and perplexed many Indians, though; especially since the roundly despised Bush administration – the demonization of which Indian media has gleefully participated in, not to mention the over-the-top deification of Barrack Hussein Obama – appears to have held India in far higher esteem.