Kashmir News Network Asks India to Call Musharraf’s Nuclear Bluff

Pakistani dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf's statement on April 6 threatening India with nuclear weapons is not surprising. Such a threat has long been part of Pakistan's strategy to continue its export of terrorism to India unimpeded. Since 1990, Pakistan has flooded Jammu and Kashmir and other parts of India with trained jehadis, using the nuclear threat to deter an attack and Indian attack on Pakistani terrorist centers.

In the last 12 years, however, this is the first time the threat has been made overtly and publicly. Kashmir News Network (KNN) believes that the explicitness of the nuclear threat by Gen. Musharraf has been brought about by the silence of the United States in acknowledging Musharraf's failures to roll back his government's sponsorship of terrorism. This silence has emboldened Musharraf to ignore his own January 12th speech in which he promised to reverse his country’s love affair with terrorism.

Violence in Jammu and Kashmir has escalated since that speech, with Hindus and pro-India Muslims as the targets. Pakistan-based terrorists are also aiming to disrupt legislative elections set for this fall in the state. According to latest reports, thousands of terrorists are gathered in

Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, waiting to infiltrate into India.

Pakistan's arrest of a couple of Talibans here and a couple of Al Qaida there, under pressure from the United States, does not make it a "front-line

ally" against terrorism, contrary to the Bush administration's regular pronouncements. Pakistan has continued its revolving door policy with Islamic terrorists. Hundreds of terrorists arrested with much fanfare earlier this year have been released, including Maulana Masood Azhar and Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed, leaders of the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Toiba.

Jim Hoagland recently pointed out Musharraf’s deception in a Washington Post column, and compared his backsliding to Saddam Hussein's behavior just before the Kuwait invasion in 1990. The majority of the Al Qaida and Taliban remnants are suspected to be hosted in Pakistan, with help from the ISI. US commander Gen. Tommy Franks has suggested attacking Pakistani hideouts of Al Qaida, but has been overruled by the Bush administration.

For India, the peril from Pakistan's deceptive perpetuation of terror export is much more stark and immediate. KNN believes that India can not wait for the US to finish its "global war against terrorism" (which may go on for years or even decades) before it takes steps to eradicate the roots of terrorism in Pakistan. The violence exported from Pakistan not only threatens to undermine the democratic process in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, but portends potential September 11-like events in the near future.

Subodh Atal of KNN, in an article published in Tehelka.com Online Magazine

(http://www.tehelka.com/channels/commentary/2002/apr/6/com040602war1.htm) has pointed out that India has military options it can exercise to retake strategic POK territory which contains infiltration routes and logistical bases for launching terrorists into India. Pakistan, despite its bluster, would be unlikely to resort to nuclear weapons, if India concentrates its land thrusts into POK and does not seriously threaten Pakistani mainland. If Pakistan does use nuclear weapons, their effect would be blunted by India's anti-missile defense systems. On the other hand, Pakistan as a nation would not survive the certain massive retaliatory second strike by India.

Such an action by India is likely to result in cleaning out the remnants of Al Qaida and Taliban from Pakistan and defuse the terrorist threat to Jammu and Kashmir, setting the stage for its return to normalcy. The United States should think out of the box and collaborate with India during such a conflict in helping locate and dismantle Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, which are destined to fall into Al Qaida hands sooner or later.