Pakistan's responsibility

Of all the words uttered about the atrocities in Bombay, the most empty come from across the border:

"We deplore these attacks. We condemn all acts of terrorism and I think that such wanton targeting of civilians should be condemned in the strongest possible terms," [Pakistani] Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan said.

Pakistan patently doesn't condemn all acts of terrorism. After her military defeat in 1965, she set her intelligence agency, the ISI, to train Indian and Kashmiri Muslims in terrorist camps, with financial and technical support from Arab countries, notably Libya and Saudi Arabia. (See Walter Laqueur's The New Terrorism, 1999, pp. 150-54, which makes the additional observation that such support received far less publicity than support for similar activities targeted on Israel. Unsurprisingly, sponsors of terrorism are reluctant to be seen to be conducting a proxy war against a militarily powerful state: an adversary that can hit back and has international support is a less tempting proposition than a state that is constantly under rhetorical attack and threat of diplomatic isolation.)

Indian diplomacy has been shockingly inept over Kashmir, while the Hindu nationalists, especially those in Bombay, are as repellent as any force driven by religious intolerance. Neither of those factors absolves Pakistan of responsibility over many years for transforming a territorial dispute in Kashmir into a theocratic jihad. Pakistan does not even dispute having provided material (though not military) aid in the past to the Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Front. India has had strong suspicions also of Pakistani aid to the Harakat al Ansar, an explicitly Islamist group responsible for bombings in the 1990s in New Delhi and elsewhere.

It's as yet unclear who planted the bombs in Bombay, but the presumption must be that Islamist terrorists were at work again. It is no presumption but a matter of record that Pakistan has encouraged that Frankenstein's monster till it has coincided with an international campaign of terror against us and what we stand for. The same message must go to Pakistan, under untrustworthy military rule, as President Bush has rightly given to the Palestinian Authority, a squalid and corrupt autocracy: you may not have built these terrorist fractions, but you fostered them, and you know where they are. Stop dissembling, stop making excuses, and crack down hard.

Comments

[john b]

Confused re the bracketed passage "This support...diplomatic isolation". Does it claim that Israel is a) a militarily powerful state and b) a state with strong international support, while India is neither a) nor b)?

Point a) seems questionable given the size of India's army and its nuclear deterrent, and b) seems a bit strange given the less-than-total support Israel has historically received from the international community.

Excellent post in general, however. The way that western observers tend to view India and Pakistan as equally at fault over Kashmir is even more perplexing than the perception strangenesses in Israel/Palestine...

[Anticipatory Retaliation]

It would seem that this recent rash of bombings might be the Islamicist Tet. Essentially, the three targets were Israel, Iraq, and India, which (aside from the fact they all begin with "I") are three of the countries that the muslim militants thinks are truly oppressive occupiers. It would not suprise me to see a large bombing in Chechnya and/or Afghanistan within the fortnight.