MANIPAL, India, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- Although
both are democracies, Israel and India are polar opposites in their response to
"asymmetrical" warfare -- also known as terrorism. While India until
now has consistently adopted a soft -- some would say soggy -- policy toward
the Pakistani army's tactics of using jihadis to weaken India socially,
militarily and economically, Israel has almost invariably responded with force
to similar tactics by Hamas, Hezbollah and other jihadist organizations that
seek to attack the Jewish state.
In both Lebanon and Gaza, Hezbollah and
Hamas, respectively, have not concealed the fact that they regard themselves as
being at war with Israel. Those who voted for either certainly must have
understood that the coming to office of these two military formations would
mean war with Israel, a conflict in which both sides would be expected to
deploy the forces available to them. The citizens of Lebanon are now
discovering the likely consequences if they elect Hezbollah to power, the way
Gazans did with Hamas in the last election.
While Shiite Hezbollah depends almost
entirely on Iran for its resources and on Syria for infrastructural support, Sunni
Hamas gets funding from well-wishers across the world, including a number in
Europe and North America who route their contributions through safe channels.
Although accurate estimates are difficult, an average of four informed
guesstimates puts the Iranian contribution at 35 percent of the total funds
made available to Hamas.
However, more important than the money is
access to weaponry and the oxygen that full-blooded backing by an important
state ensures. The mullahs in Iran, through their covert and overt support to
movements actively attempting the destruction or debilitation of Israel, seek
to convince Muslim populations worldwide that Shiite Islam can provide a more
robust defense against perceived foes such as the Judeo-Christians than Sunni
political groups have managed thus far. Since 1948 each Sunni attempt to defeat
Israel militarily has ended in disaster.
However, the 2006 Lebanon cease-fire
between Hezbollah and Israel illustrates that a struggle -- even without a
perceptible defeat of the other side -- can give oxygen even to foes that have
been severely bloodied in combat.
An earlier example of such a premature
cease-fire was the 1973 agreement that halted the Yom Kippur War with Egypt and
Syria. By agreeing to a cessation of hostilities before Israel could
comprehensively defeat them, Egypt and Syria gave Arab populations the illusion
that Israel could be defeated militarily by its neighbors. This perception has
led to the present contempt for Arab governments seen as unwilling to challenge
the Jewish state by force.
Forcing Israel to accept a premature
cease-fire in 1973 proved as deleterious to the security of that country as
U.S. President Bill Clinton's grandstanding did to both Pakistan and India in
1999, when he offered a face-saving withdrawal to Pakistani Prime Minister
Nawaz Sharif just days before Indian forces would have destroyed an invading
force commanded by Pervez Musharraf.
This columnist wrote then, on Rediff.com,
that the Clinton cease-fire would result in the fall of Nawaz Sharif, who would
be portrayed by the army as having stabbed it in the back rather than having
saved it from a total rout, and in an intensification of jihadist attacks on
India -- both of which happened. Unhappily for the future, the Clinton cohort
seems to be back in force in what hopefully will not turn out to be only a
nominal Obama role in foreign policy.
In 1948, unlike Israel -- which continued
its offensive until the Arab armies facing it had been crushed -- India's
Jawaharlal Nehru succumbed to the blandishments of the United Kingdom and
agreed to a Kashmir cease-fire when more than one-third of the territory
remained in Pakistan's control. That single error of judgment has resulted in
six decades of Indian-Pakistani conflict, which since 1989 has taken on a
jihadist hue.
In 1965 it was pressure from Russian
Premier Alexei Kosygin -- who was eager to win friends for Moscow in the Muslim
world at the expense of India -- that led Indian Prime Minister L.B. Shastri to
return to Pakistani control the Haji Pir Pass captured just weeks earlier.
Since then more than 70 percent of jihadist infiltration into India has come
via this pass.
In 1972, without asking for a final
settlement on Kashmir, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi returned 93,000
prisoners of war to Pakistan and made a hurried exit from Bangladesh without
ensuring that the army there had been cleansed of its Pakistani connections.
This mistake has made Bangladesh a nesting place for jihadis nurtured by the
Pakistani army since the mid-1990s.
Among the more recent of India's
life-threatening compromises was the 2001 release of several top Inter-Services
Intelligence/al-Qaida operatives, after an Indian airliner was hijacked by
jihadists in Kathmandu. The role of the Clinton White House in persuading a
hesitant India to make this damaging compromise -- which ensured the release of
one of the Sept. 11 plotters -- has as yet to be made public. Yet a
Cabinet-level individual has confirmed that the Clinton team was insistent that
the hijacking be "peacefully resolved" and that the use of force be
avoided even at the price of releasing the jihadists.
Since the 1980s the Pakistani army has
continued its policy of using jihadists to fight India, even though these days
the baleful effects of this course have become obvious to most Pakistanis not
addicted to money secured through the narcotics trade. The generals have done
this in the belief that India's timid bureaucracy would not resort to force to
punish Islamabad, paralyzed by fear of nuclear retaliation.
In reality, such an escalation is
inconceivable because of India's second-strike capability. The nuclear
destruction of just four cities -- Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar and Rawalpindi --
would destroy Pakistan, and the planned Indian response to a first strike by
Pakistan is the destruction of not four but 10 cities in that country, thus
making a nuclear attack synonymous with national suicide for even the most
reckless among Islamabad's brass.
The soggy -- "soft" is too mild
a term -- Indian response to the Pakistani army's jihad against it has directly
resulted in India being hit by more mass terror attacks than the rest of the
world combined, excluding the "terror triangle" of Pakistan, Iraq and
Afghanistan. Were Israel to go soggy, it would not be long before the country
would resemble a Guy Fawkes bonfire display almost every week, if not every
day.
A cease-fire before a comprehensive
result has been secured is usually a prescription for recurring, and often more
lethal, conflict. India's sorry example may be one reason that Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert no longer seems ready to accept a cease-fire that would
give Hamas the "victory" that Hezbollah claimed in 2006 -- a
perceived outcome that has encouraged increased rocket attacks from Gaza.
-(Professor M.D. Nalapat is vice chair of
the Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO peace chair, and professor of
geopolitics at Manipal University. Copyright M.D. Nalapat.)
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