Three Views
| WRMEA Archives 2006-2010 - 2009 January-February |
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January-February 2009, pages 12-14
Three Views
Terror in Mumbai
Terrorist Attacks Rock Mumbai, Stun the World
By M.M. Ali
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BOMB BLASTS in several parts of Mumbai, the major Indian port city and commercial and financial hub formerly known as Bombay, and the takeover of two of the city’s 5-star hotels, the Taj Mahal and Oberoi, and a near by synagogue stunned the world and posed a serious challenge to the Indian government. The well-coordinated attacks, which began Nov. 26, lasted for the next 36 hours, killed more than 170 people, and injured more than 300.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Foreign Minister Pranab Mukerji were quick to accuse Pakistan of being behind the killings and violence, and demanded that Islamabad hand over “20 suspects” now living in Pakistan. These included the names of Ibrahim Dawood and Mian Azhar, whom Delhi has blamed for past violence in India and Kashmir.
The Indian and world media were transfixed by the crises in Mumbai, speculating on a variety of theories as to motives and perpetrators. Some analysts feared that elements opposed to improved relations between Delhi and Islamabad were responsible. Not long ago Pakistan’s new president, Asif Ali Zardari, had offered to sign an agreement with India promising not to use nuclear weapons to resolve disputes, and making borders between the two parts of the disputed state of Kashmir more fluid for travel and trade. This was in line with the Confidence Building Measures (CBM) the two nuclear neighbors have been discussing for the last four years.
Another speculation was that, in anticipation of upcoming elections, India’s extremist Hindu opposition parties under the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) coalition are trying to create unrest to unite the Hindu majority against the ruling Congress government. Indeed, such tactics have been effective in the past.
Yet another view is that the Taliban and/or al-Qaeda may be behind the Mumbai turmoil in an effort to engulf the entire subcontinent.
Regardless of which theory is advanced, however, fingers are being pointed at a small number of extremists among India’s 150 million Muslim citizens, the 160 million Bangladeshi Muslims and the 170 million Muslims of Pakistan.
Pakistan has said it will move its troops from its border with Afghanistan if India mobilizes its forces on the Pakistan border. Delhi has assured Islamabad that it will not use the military option to resolve the present crisis, and Pakistan has said it will offer full cooperation to Delhi’s investigations, without compromising its right to try its own Pakistani citizens. Oral guarantees may not suffice, however, to calm relations between two traditionally unfriendly nuclear states. No wonder U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rushed to speak to leaders in New Delhi and Islamabad.
Prof. M.M. Ali is a specialist on South Asia based in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.
What Is the Message of Terrorism Without a Message?
By William Pfaff
What is the message of a terrorist attack that fails to deliver a message? Threats and warnings are being exchanged by India and Pakistan about the terrorist attack on Mumbai, carried out by presumed Muslim extremists. But acting to what purpose, and under whose instructions?
The attacks are thought to have to do with the Kashmiri Muslims fighting to force India to withdraw from their part of the disputed region in the north of the Indian subcontinent, bordering the two countries as well as Tibet and China. Its Hindu ruler chose in 1947 to deliver its Muslim population to India during the frantic days of British India’s partition. The U.N. ordered a referendum among the Muslims (believed today to favor independence). India has never accepted it.
If Kashmir’s situation was the motive for the Mumbai attacks, why were the targets hotels and restaurants frequented by Western tourists, but also by residents of Mumbai and other prosperous Indians, and a Lubavitch Hasidic Jewish center, presumably associated with America and Israel? None of them have anything to do with Kashmir.
This makes the message seem a Middle Eastern message, having to do with Iraq and Palestine. But the terrorist who was captured said he was a Pakistani, and the evidence thus far is that the terrorist party embarked in Pakistan.
Could Samuel Huntington be right after all, and it is now indiscriminate war between civilizations? No. We know as a fact that the modern conflict between Muslims and the Europeans and Americans began with the Europeans’ post-1918 partition and colonization of the Ottoman Empire’s Arab possessions, and a quarter-century later, by Israel’s European-supported installation in Palestine.
After that there was the Suez attack, a fiasco for Britain and France, when Washington supported Egypt. A quarter-century after that, the Americans and the Muslim Pakistanis, together with the Saudi Arabians, organized the successful Muslim mujahideen resistance to the Russian invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
In 1980 there was a terrible war between Muslim Iraqis and Muslim Iranians. The Desert War followed that, caused by the invasion of Muslim Kuwait by Muslim Iraq, resisted by Muslim as well as European armies under American leadership. After that came the American refusal to remove the military bases it had built in Saudi Arabia, which was the grievance that inspired Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 attack on New York and Washington.
The Asian Muslim countries, including Indonesia, where more Muslims live than anywhere else, had nothing to do with any of this. So what actually is it all about? Certainly not Huntington’s fantasy of a war of civilizations, despite the American political and journalistic habit of forgetting the past and pinning everything that happens today on the Muslims, plus the well-publicized and self-serving obsession of Osama bin Laden and his acolytes that they are leading a mighty jihad that soon will conquer Spain, France, Britain, and Germany, and besiege the United States—which is still more dangerous nonsense.
There is wide concern today that India will retaliate against Pakistan for the Mumbai attacks, even though there is no conclusive proof of Pakistani official responsibility. That the attack was by a militant offshoot of the Kashmir clash is more plausible.
It would be deeply illogical for the new Pakistani civilian government to be involved with an action that embroiled it in further conflict with India, when it simultaneously has extremely difficult relations with the United States over American attacks on supposed Taliban and al-Qaeda centers inside the Pakistani frontier tribal zones, and while intense American and NATO pressure is on Pakistan to do more against the Taliban.
Der Spiegel Online carried an article on Nov. 27 entitled “Terror in India—Obama’s First Test.” Why a test for Obama? Even if he were already president of the U.S., what would he be expected to do about it? It would be closer to the truth to suggest that this might have been influenced by conflicts in which the United States has directly or indirectly taken an irresponsible hand in the past, without positive results for the United States and with tragic results for others. But the U.S. has never had anything to do with Kashmir.
The mind-set expressed in the Spiegel headline, that anything unpleasant that happens in the world is either the result of American actions or something for which the United States must take responsibility, is widespread, and the result of an American policy of global interventionism which Barack Obama and his new national security team seems ready to continue. If they do so, they are likely to regret it.
William Pfaff is the author of eight books on American foreign policy, international relations, and contemporary history. Visit his Web site at <www.williampfaff.com>. Copyright © 2008 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
The Rationale of Terror
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Arguably the most successful act of revolutionary terror was the June 1914 assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
Believing his mission to murder the heir to the Austrian throne had failed, Gavrilo Princip suddenly found himself standing a few feet away from the royal car. He fired twice, mortally wounding the archduke and his wife.
Tactically, that act of terror eliminated the reformist Ferdinand, who meant to address the grievances of his Slav subjects by granting them greater autonomy and equality with Austrians and Hungarians inside the empire.
Strategically, the assassination succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its Black Hand plotters.
Hard-liners in Austria demanded an ultimatum to Serbia. When her demands were not met in full, Vienna declared war. Czar Nicholas mobilized in support of Russia’s little Slav brothers. The Kaiser ordered mobilization. When the French refused to declare neutrality, Germany declared war. In hours, the British cabinet had reversed itself to back war with Germany on behalf of Belgium and France.
Princip had lit the fuse that set off in six weeks the greatest war in history. While Serbia suffered per capita losses as great as any other nation, she ended the Great War as the lead nation in a Kingdom of the South Slavs embracing Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Macedonians and Hungarians. The Habsburg Empire at which Princip had struck had vanished.
The November Mumbai massacre seems a similar triumph of terror.
Tactically, by sending a platoon of suicide warriors into India’s financial capital, terrorizing a train station, two five-star hotels, and a Jewish center, and killing nearly 200 in over 60 hours, the plotters assured themselves of round-the-clock worldwide television coverage.
In so riveting the world’s attention for four days, this terrorist atrocity was a success.
And by using Pakistanis to perpetrate the massacres and Karachi as port of embarkation, the plotters focused India’s rage exactly where they want it, against Pakistan. By this slaughter in India’s commercial capital, the Islamists have destroyed the détente Pakistan was seeking with India and pushed both toward war. Out to murder moderation and stoke militancy, the terrorists succeeded.
Years ago, this writer observed:
“Terrorism is a tactic, a technique, a weapon that fanatics, dictators, and warriors have resorted to through history. If, as [Carl von] Clausewitz wrote, war is the continuation of politics by other means, terrorism is the continuation of war by other means.”
Yet terrorism—the killing of innocents for political ends—can only triumph if the aggrieved play the role the terror masters have scripted for them in their bloody drama. What, then, may we surmise are the tactical and strategic goals of the terror masters of Mumbai?
To humiliate, wound, and outrage India in her pride as a great new democratic and economic power in Asia. To imperil Mumbai’s future as a safe and secure financial capital in which to live, work, and invest. To awe the world and inspire Islam’s young by their audacity. To attain immortality.
But the strategic target of the militants is the Pakistani government.
Pakistan’s offenses? Cooperating with America in Afghanistan and the border region, battling al-Qaeda and the Taliban, withdrawing from the fight for Kashmir, seeking peace with a Hindu nation where 170 million Muslims are denied their place in the sun.
President Bush should pray New Delhi does not adopt his Bush Doctrine of preventive war or the Cheney Doctrine: “Even if there’s just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty.” For war in the subcontinent between India and Pakistan would be a calamity and a triumph for the terrorists across what Zbigniew Brzezinski has called the “Global Balkans.”
War would pit two nuclear powers against each other for the first time since the Sino-Soviet border clash of 1969. It would spawn bloodshed between Muslim and Hindu in India. It would see the collapse of Pakistan, its possible dissolution, and a military dictator in a nation already divided against itself over whether to continue resisting al-Qaeda and the Taliban, or cut ties to the unpopular Americans.
Wounded and enraged by the atrocities of 9/11, America lashed out, first at Afghanistan and the al-Qaeda source of the conspiracy, then at Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks. Thus did the Bush administration disunite its nation and forfeit its mandate.
For India to lash out at a Pakistan that was not complicit in the Mumbai crimes against humanity, but harbors elements within that are guilty and are celebrating, would be as great a mistake.
India and Pakistan both have a vital interest in no new war.
But a new war is exactly what the terrorists killed for and died for.
Should it come, they win—and enter history as revolutionary terrorists alongside Princip and the perpetrators of 9/11.
Patrick J. Buchanan’s latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. This article first appeared on Antiwar.com, <www.antiwar.com>, Dec. 2, 2008. Copyright © 2008 Creators Syndicate, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Patrick J. Buchanan and Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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