Page 2 of 2 The hottest place in the world
By Chan Akya
final breakdown of its command structure. It goes without saying that only the
al-Qaeda/Taliban combine stand to take advantage of such a breakdown of the
army command structure, using the opportunity to seize control of nuclear
weapons.
Now, just to state the obvious from my perspective, there isn't anything
particularly bad about people belonging to a particular religion or ethnic
group securing nuclear weapons capability. The problem with al-Qaeda and the
Taliban taking control of these weapons of mass destruction though are that the
groups put the survival of their own people second to the achievement of
longer-term principles. This casual disregard for the lives of their own people
- well witnessed in Afghanistan, Iraq and other theaters of
al-Qaeda/Taliban operations - is what makes the idea of them seizing nuclear
weapons so much more of a strategic nightmare.
As for India ...
Seeing the events of the Thanksgiving massacre unfold in Mumbai, I was reminded
of an awful joke from Israeli television during the first Gulf War in 1990,
after Saddam Hussein launched daily Scud missile attacks on the Jewish state.
Told that the wild targeting and the inbuilt inaccuracy of the Scud missiles
meant that the chances of anyone actually dying from such an attack were
broadly the same as winning the national lottery, one comic deadpanned, "Yes,
but you didn't tell me there were so many draws every day."
That sick joke must have gone through the minds of more than one person in
Mumbai over the past few days as the latest attacks add to the recent history
of terrorism against people in the city that started with the serial bombings
of 1993 that killed more than a thousand people. More recently, there have been
sporadic attacks using bombs in taxis and trains that have killed over 500
people.
A security expert on television made the point that the terrorists had chosen
soft targets such as hotels and hospitals, but this comment only caused me to
laugh mirthlessly. For it appears to me that the Indian government long ago
beat the terrorists to that job, by making not just Mumbai but other big Indian
cities also soft targets for terrorism.
In the months after 9/11 in the US, as well as the terrorist attacks on Madrid
it became clear that the ultimate objective of al-Qaeda and its related groups
was to destabilize multi-ethnic democracies everywhere. Being the only one of
its kind in Asia, it would have been foolhardy for India not to see itself as a
target even before taking into account specific issues such as the simmering
Kashmir insurgency, its relative proximity to the US and lastly the large
Muslim population that lives in its secular rather than theocratic framework
that directly challenges the orthodox ideology of al-Qaeda.
Yet and almost alone among all such democracies, the Indian government refused
to change its homeland security apparatus in the months following the terrorist
attacks on the Indian parliament in 2001, as well as deeper provocations such
as the attacks on Mumbai in later months.
There is no national body coordinating counter-terrorist intelligence across
state lines; this would be tragic in a monolingual country like the United
States but completely unfathomable in a multi-ethnic multilingual country like
India. There is no apparent infrastructure to enable responses to crisis
situations that aren’t conventional military attacks such as the Kargil war
mentioned previously in this article.
Much has been made of the commercial importance of Mumbai, a fact that even
economists like me only understand when looking at the domicile of India’s
largest companies and its richest people. An overwhelming majority of India's
richest 100 people live and work in Mumbai, a journalist friend recently
pointed out that over a quarter of the country’s revenue from taxing salaries
arose from companies domiciled in this one city.
In any other emerging market leave alone democracy, Mumbai would automatically
have been accorded protected status with governments bending over backwards to
improve infrastructure and ensure security. None of these things have happened
though, due to the curious and illogical domination of the Indian political
spectrum by communists. As I wrote in another article for Asia Times Online (India’s
real terrorists May 17, 2008), the role of communists in pushing back
efforts to modernize and protect Mumbai cannot be overstated.
Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak made the point on Friday that India's
special forces unit that dealt with the siege at the top hotels in Mumbai did
not appear to be well prepared, nor could they be considered sufficiently well
trained for such complex operations. This is a matter not just of concern for
Indians, but also an invitation to question the absence of coordination with
security experts from Israel and the United States. Interestingly, while India
is one of the largest buyers of defense equipment from Israel, it has thus far
failed to secure much training in anti-terrorism from Israeli and American
experts.
The reason isn't hard to find - efforts to enlarge such cooperation with Israel
and the United States inevitably run into opposition from a motley crew of
communists across the country. While their opposition to the US on ideological
grounds is well known (as shown by the recent blocking of the nuclear deal with
the US even though the positive effects of securing safe power stations running
on nuclear fuel is obvious to any industrialist), it is interesting to note
that protests against "Zionism" are usually led by the same communists. The
arguments were first aired by the USSR at the height of the Cold War, and
India’s communists are the only ones in the world to still subscribe to that
world view.
Driven as much by envy of the industrious people of the city as by its relative
prosperity and ability to attract the best talent from around the country,
communists have steadily pushed against infrastructure improvements. Much of
the security ills of the famously diverse city arise from the under-investment
on infrastructure and inability to corral the criminal groups that operate
openly in the city.
On the heels of this attack, India has once again made some cosmetic changes by
replacing its most senior politician in charge of security with Finance
Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram. Given that I have not been impressed with the
country’s ability to manage its finances over the past five years, it is
unlikely that the government will do much to improve.
There are only two courses of action open to the Indian government; firstly to
launch a strike against Pakistan-based training camps for Islamic terrorists
such as those belonging to the banned Laskhar-e-Taiba and the Jaish Mohammad;
this course of action risks opening up a full scale war with Pakistan. The
second course of action would for the government to do precisely nothing but to
passively sit around awaiting another terrorist attack on the country’s
citizens.
While I fear the first course of action, I am well inclined to believe that it
is the second course of action that will most likely emerge. In terms of
protecting the well-being of its citizens as I have noted previously on many
occasions, India is not China.
Spengler comments:
As Chan Akya observes, Pakistan's military age population is far greater than
those of other Muslim military powers in the region. With about 20 million men
of military age, Pakistan today has as much manpower as Turkey and Iran
combined, and by 2035 it will have half again as many.
Half the country is illiterate and three-quarters of it subsists on less than
$2 a day, according to the World Bank. That is to say that Pakistan's young men
are more abundant as well as cheaper than in any other country in the region.
Very poor and ignorant young men, especially if their only education has been
in Salafi madrassas (seminaries), are very easy to enlist in military
adventures.
The West presently is unable to cope with a failed state like Somalia, with
less than a tenth as many military-age men as Pakistan, but which nonetheless
constitutes a threat to world shipping and a likely source of funding for
terrorism. How can the West cope with the humiliation of Pakistan's
pro-American president and the inability of its duly-constituted government to
suppress Islamist elements in its army and intelligence services? For the
moment, Washington will do its best to prop up its creature, President Asif Ali
Zardari, but to no avail. The alternatives will require the West to add several
zeros to whatever the prevailing ceiling might be for acceptable collateral
damage.
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