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| India-Pakistan | |
| Pakistan Irredenta - a Waki Paki primer | |
| 2005-12-16 | |
Since the 1980s Pakistan has allowed extreme Islamist groups to operate openly within its borders. Even proscribed terrorist organizations flourish; when listed by the U.S. State Department they tend to change their names so as to avoid a crackdown. Lots more at the link. | |
| Posted by:Seafarious |
| #15 another good thread @ Rantburg U! |
| Posted by: Red Dog 2005-12-16 20:53 |
| #14 Pakistan can wait till after Iran is resolved. Then they'll be surrounded. |
| Posted by: Ebbereck Chavith1482 2005-12-16 10:35 |
| #13 Nobody disputes that a lot of the British legacy has been good. The Indian PM Manmohan Singh recently stated so in a speech to his alma mater (Oxford). But there was a lot of bad also. Some Indians have written that it was all worth it because colonialism finally removed the "yoke of muslim rule". Whenever Islamic rule waned in the subcontinent, a fresh invasion restored it. The conquests of Ranjit Singh (the Punjab and Afghanistan) and the Mahratta kings who drove the Mughals back may have been only temporary but for the Raj. The sclerosis of the Ottomans and the British death blows to both the Ottoman and the Mughal Empires ended any hope for muslim domination (and set the stage for the current wave of islamism) |
| Posted by: john 2005-12-16 08:13 |
| #12 A lot of Indian history about British rule is fantasy. Sleeman gathered tons of evidence of the Thuggee cult. He had informers who identified not only other Thugs, but also led to the uncovering of victims' bodies. He put together intricate family trees showing the connections between the members, and those led him to new informers who provided more accurate information. And most of the modern books you find that talk about the Thugs refer to them as a colonial myth, invented by Sleeman to justify British rule of India. I don't blame the Indians so much as the whole post-colonial "blame the west for the rest of the world's problems" mentality. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-12-16 07:55 |
| #11 A lot of Indian history about British rule is fantasy. This 1908 article in the New Yorker might interest you. Or is this just American fantasy? |
| Posted by: john 2005-12-16 07:53 |
| #10 John said: The jihadis are not simply a tool. Many in the pak elite share the jihadi mindset.... Pakistani identity lies in muslim superiority and the negation of India. A Pakistani is (a) muslim and (b) NOT Indian. A few months go we had on Rantburg an atrticle where an article where a Pakistani political party prodly told it was the only paty who advocated giving every Pakistani an Indian slave after India had been conquered |
| Posted by: JFM 2005-12-16 07:43 |
| #9 summarized by imperial palaces like the Taj Mahal. The activities of muslim conquerors from Arabia and Central Asia can hardly be considered examples of native Indian rule. |
| Posted by: john 2005-12-16 07:41 |
| #8 For India, there is nothing "plausible" about the Pak deniability. They have intercepted enough radio traffic, captured enough jihadis and have enough spies to know exactly what is going on. However the Pakistan military is a formidible opponent to a country like India. Unlike the USA, it cannot being overwhelming force to bear. It simply doesn't have the capability. And since the early 1980s, courtesy of China, there have been nukes. Pakistan has used its nuclear weapons as cover for the jihad. The Pak columnist Ejaz Haidar talks about permanent "subconventional war". It can bleed India by "a war of a thouand cuts" while threatening to go nuclear if India crosses various "red lines". Thus the Pak army can fire artillery barrages onto Indian positions as cover for the infiltration of groups of jihadis across the LOC. This is unique for a nuclear power dealing with another nuclear power. Unheard of during the cold war. The press will report this as India-Pakistan "trading fire" without actually stating the reason for the exchange. And limited war is still a possibility. The Pak strategy is to grab territory for a later trade. They rely on the outside world to place enough pressure (arms and oil embargo by the UNSC against the combatants) on India that any war will be of short duration and limited in scope. War will bring outside mediation and "external balancing" - the influence of great powers and thereby force India to give concessions . |
| Posted by: john 2005-12-16 07:32 |
| #7 nehru: I remember many a time when our senior generals came to us, and wrote to the defence ministry saying that they wanted certain things... If we had had foresight, known exactly what would happen, we would have done something else... what India has learnt from the Chinese invasion is that in the world of today there is no place for weak nations... We have been living in an unreal world of our own creation. A lot of Indian history about British rule is fantasy. Why should fantastical defense policies be a surprise? India itself is an artificial country unified by British force of arms - against other comers, including Persia, Russia and China. For Nehru to decide that a military did not matter is sheer fantasy. Don't get me started about how Indian history portrays the British as exploiters and scum of the earth. They were there for a few hundred years and brought to India railways, sanitation, universal education, et al. What Indian rulers brought in their thousands of years of rule can be summarized by imperial palaces like the Taj Mahal. There is no despot like a native despot. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-12-16 07:09 |
| #6 I guess I kind of see the point of Pakistan's tame jihadis. They get money from across the globe. Muslims will donate money for a holy war in Kashmir. They're not going to donate money to the Pakistani military so it can become bigger and stronger. Using terrorists in Kashmir also gives Pakistan plausible deniability. If Pakistan actually attacked Kashmir directly, it would result in the Indian military pushing right back. By using terrorists against India, Pakistan gets some free hits without any Indian response. Pakistan is willing to fight to the last dead jihadi. A similar type of reasoning applies to Muslim sponsorship for terrorist attacks against American targets. What many Muslim countries are angry about in the post-9/11 environment, because of Afghanistan and Iraq, is that they can't get free hits against Uncle Sam, except in those two countries. But that's expensive and involves heavy Muslim casualties. But what Muslims really like is to kill large numbers of American civilians. Unfortunately for them, they can't really do this any more. Unlike India, the US will strike out at the top several Muslim countries on its enemies list. And this impotence in terms of killing American civilians is what's getting Muslims riled up, more than anything else. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-12-16 07:03 |
| #5 One wonders if the Pak strategy could have succeeded. Nehru believed that partition would be temporary. In 1960 he said to the British writer, Leonard Mosley: âWe expected that partition would be temporary, that Pakistan was bound to come back to us.â Nehru was anti-military, not just from his pacifist beliefs but seeing the Indian army as a colonial force. This is from an article by R V Parasnis, a former IAF Wing Commander: "The roots of politicisation of the army are to be found in Nehru's hatred for the man in uniform. Soon after Independence the first commander-in-chief of the Indian armed forces, General Sir Robert Lockhart, presented a paper outlining a plan for the growth of the Indian Army to Prime Minister Nehru. Nehru's reply: "We don't need a defence plan. Our policy is non-violence. We foresee no military threats. You can scrap the army. The police are good enough to meet our security needs." He didn't waste much time. On September 16, 1947, he directed that the army's then strength of 280,000 be brought down to 150,000. Even in fiscal 1950-51, when the Chinese threat had begun to loom large on the horizon, 50,000 army personnel were sent home as per his original plan to disband the armed forces. After Independence, he once noticed a few men in uniform in a small office the army had in North Block, and angrily had them evicted. " Pakistan would have been well placed to finish the job of partition in 1965 if Nehru had continued. The 1962 Indian-Chinese war put a stop to all this This was Nehru, in a 1963 speech to the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of the Indian parliament) "I remember many a time when our senior generals came to us, and wrote to the defence ministry saying that they wanted certain things... If we had had foresight, known exactly what would happen, we would have done something else... what India has learnt from the Chinese invasion is that in the world of today there is no place for weak nations... We have been living in an unreal world of our own creation." |
| Posted by: john 2005-12-16 06:59 |
| #4 BTW holding the terrorists âby the scruff of the neck,â are actually Musharraf's words. During the Kargil war, he visted China, hoping for support. The telephone in his Beijing hotel suite was tapped (by a country friendly to India) and his conversation with another General taped. He was insistent he could control the jihadis. He had them by the neck and they would not dare act without permission. |
| Posted by: john 2005-12-16 06:41 |
| #3 The jihadis are not simply a tool. Many in the pak elite share the jihadi mindset. Even if Pakistan got Kashmir, Hyderabad, Sir Creek, Junagadh (all of which it considers "disputed") it would still be much smaller and weaker than India. Pakistani identity lies in muslim superiority and the negation of India. A Pakistani is (a) muslim and (b) NOT Indian. The common culture, history etc are to be ignored. As long as India exists in the current form, with even a greater muslim population than Pakistan, the "Land of the Pure" remains stillborn. Rehmat Ali, who actually coined the term "Pakistan" had far more expansive plans This is from the Pak editor Khalid Hasan: "It was to include the entire northwest of India, Kashmir, the Kathiawar peninsula, Kutch, several enclaves deep within UP, including Delhi and Lucknow. There were to be two independent Muslim states besides Pakistan: Bangistan comprising Bengal and Assam in the east and Osmanistan in the south. These two were to form a federation with Pakistan. The 243 principalities or Rajwaras were to be divided among caste Hindus and "others" and then herded together in a ghetto called Hanoodia. As for the Sikhs, they were to be pushed into an enclave called Sikhia. Other races and religions were to inhabit an encampment by the name of Hanadika. Every non-Muslim was to remain subservient to the master race he called "The Paks". And yes, the subcontinent was to be renamed Dinia. " The Pak strategy aims to dismember India. Only surrounded by a number of small weak states could Pakistan, and its army, flourish. It would dominate the subcontinent, recreating the fantasy of muslim superiority. This is from Pak columnist Ayaz Amir: "Islam was not in danger in pre-1947 India. Indeed, considering the sectarian violence and religious bigotry we face today, it was in better health then. Nor was democracy the issue because even if partition had not happened, India was getting democracy once the British left. The Indian Independence Act promised that. So what was the compelling reason for the Muslims to insist on a separate homeland especially when there was no going around the uncomfortable fact that, no matter how generously the frontiers of the new state were drawn, an uncomfortably large number of Muslims would remain in India? The purpose of Pakistan, transcending anything to do with safeguarding Islam or promoting democracy, was to create conditions for the Muslims of India, or those who found themselves in the new state, to recreate the days of their lost glory." This is key to understanding "Pakistan Irredenta". |
| Posted by: john 2005-12-16 06:30 |
| #2 especially like to hear see john's thoughts me three Sea. |
| Posted by: Red Dog 2005-12-16 01:34 |
| #1 It is basically a reiteration of what I and others have been saying for years, the Jihadi organisations in Pakistan serve as a deniable and self-sustaining force to fight the Military's proxy wars in Kashmir and Afghanistan. As long as the Generals perceive that the Jihadis advance Pakistan's strategic objectives in those regions, they will always allow the Jihadi infrastructure to exist in the country, whilst moving against the 'free agents' of Al Qaeda who aren't good at following orders. |
| Posted by: Paul Moloney 2005-12-16 01:29 |