India or Israel: Who Has The Right Response to Terrorism?
India and Israel have both been victims of terrorist attacks in recent months. Their response could not be more different. Israel has opted for direct action, in a bold and widely condemned attack on Gaza, from where Hamas launched rockets to attack Israeli civilians. India has taken a judicial approach, collecting evidence against the Mumbai attackers and pressing Pakistan to extradite the terrorist commanders who directed the operation from within its territory. Which strategy will work in the long term?
I will not go into the root causes of either conflict. Instead, I will try to explain why each Nation is acting the way it is, and examine whether it is rational for them to act as they do.
Part of the reason for India’s more cautious approach is that the terrorist organizations it faces were created by Pakistan, a nuclear armed state which has fought several wars against it. Elements within Pakistani Army are not under the control of the elected Government and the possibility that they are still supportive of the terrorists they created cannot be ruled out. India must be cautious in its response as the command and control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are also not yet with the civilian government .
Israel took early decisive actions to eliminate any nuclear threat to itself, while acquiring its own nuclear deterrent; so it has more options available to it when attacked. Nevertheless, it is not obvious that such a blunt response is more effective in the long term. Although powerful militarily, Israel is a small state that is in danger of being overrun by weaker but more populous adversaries.
Had India bombed the terrorist training camps operating out of Pakistan, it would have unified the many movements that vie for power within Pakistan. It would have provided an excuse for the Army to stop its reluctant operations against the extremists and turn to a war against India. By collecting evidence and publicly exposing the role of Pakistani organizations, India is making the Government of Pakistan either deal with the terrorists in their midst, or be branded a terrorist state by international organizations. At a time when its economy is growing fast (despite the worldwide slowdown) and Pakistan’s is dependent on handouts from the IMF, India has more to lose from an outright war. Better to play for time to gain economic advantage and form strategic alliances with more powerful powers. Why fight a direct war when Pakistan is already being destabilized from within and is under daily attack from without by drones?
India is six times the size of Pakistan. It has already succeeded in dividing Pakistan in two in the last declared war. While the loss of life from terrorist attacks is terrible, it is not an existential threat. In time, part of Pakistan will be lost to Afghanistan and other parts (Balochistan) will break off to form independent pieces analogous to Bangladesh. India already dominates Pakistan culturally: Indian movies are the pop culture of Pakistan. The Captain of the Pakistani Cricket team plays for a professional team in Delhi. India can afford to strengthen Pakistani civil society by rewarding positive behavior while punishing the irresponsibility of an extreme minority.
The procession of nuclear weapons is no guarantee against internal upheaval, as the demise of the Soviet Union shows. Give its people a reason to stay united for the economic betterment of each other, and stay out of military adventures in foreign lands. That is all India needs to do for now. Its political system is working and the economy is thriving. A war can slow down all that progress.
Israel is facing a very different situation. Its opponent has no economy to speak of; Israel is totally dominant militarily. But it is small and therefore vulnerable. It is facing a threat to its very existence. In this situation it has to act much more decisively. But military action creates new enemies, sometimes more than are vanquished by it. Israel might find that a more subtle approach holds out greater dividends in the long term. Israel has many option of soft power it can exert over Palestine. For example, Palestinian political activists learned how to organize while in Israeli jails, much like Indian leaders learned from the British.
India will eventually have to act to protect its own interests. The security of India depends on dismantling the terrorist training camps across the border. If Pakistan does not, or cannot do it, India will have to take action. By waiting and building evidence, India can reduce-but not eliminate- international condemnation of such action.
India has limited military options, but many strategic possibilities in the long term. Israel has many military options in the short term, but faces more dangers in the long term.
A judicial approach and a military response both have their limitations. We might see each learning Nation from the experience of the other in future conflicts. Already, it is an open secret that India and Israel are co-operating in defense matters. This co-operation is only likely to increase.
1. David E. Sanger of the NYTimes: Obama’s Worst Nightmare
Mr. Sanger has a fine sense of humor:
Washington’s sanguinity was not increased when Pakistan’s new prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, arrived in Washington over the summer for what turned out to be a disastrous first visit. Gilani, as the country’s first civilian leader in more than a decade, was under huge pressure to show he could bring the intelligence agency, and the country, under control. He couldn’t — a brief effort to force the ISI to report to the civilian leadership was quashed — but he thought he had better show up with a gift for President Bush.
Gilani wanted to tell Bush that he had sent forces into the tribal areas to clean out a major madrassa where hard-line ideology and intolerance were part of the daily curriculum. There were roughly 25,000 such private Islamic schools around Pakistan, though only a small number of them regularly bred young terrorists. The one he decided to target was run by the Haqqani faction of Islamic militants, one of the most powerful in the tribal areas.
Though Gilani never knew it, Bush was aware of this gift in advance. The National Security Agency had picked up intercepts indicating that a Pakistani unit warned the leadership of the school about what was coming before carrying out its raid. “They must have called 1-800-HAQQANI,” said one person who was familiar with the intercepted conversation. According to another, the account of the warning sent to the school was almost comic.
It was something like,
Hey, we’re going to hit your place in a few days, so if anyone important is there, you might want to tell them to scram
.
When the “attack” on the madrassa came, the Pakistani forces grabbed a few guns and hauled away a few teenagers. Sure enough, a few days later Gilani showed up in the Oval Office and conveyed the wonderful news to Bush: the great crackdown on the madrassas had begun. The officials in the room — Bush; his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley; and others — did not want to confront Gilani with the evidence that the school had been warned. That would have required revealing sensitive intercepts, and they judged, according to participants in the discussion, that Gilani was both incapable of keeping a secret and incapable of cracking down on his military and intelligence units. Indeed, Gilani may not even have been aware that his gift was a charade: Bush and Hadley may well have known more about the military’s actions than the prime minister himself.
2. Review of Book by Bhumitra Chakma in the Daily Times of Pakistan. The reviewer, Khaled Ahmed, appears to be one of the sensible people in Pakistan.
3. Want to be scared and laugh out aloud at the same time? Put on your tinfoil hat and read the Reviews of the book on Doomsday by Sultan Bashir-Ud-Din Mahmood. Mr. Mahmood, pictured below in a genial mood, is one of the architects of the Pakistani Nuclear Bomb. He also has some remarkable views on how to hasten the arrival of Doomsday.
4. A. Q. Khan and some of his associates were put on a US State Dept. watch list today. Mostly symbolic. It is the official American way of saying that Khan is a bad guy. More action could be coming, judging by the increase of news stories on Pakistani Nuclear safety.
5. Shashi Tharoor, former Undersecretary of the UN has expressed similar views.
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