By Achal Mehra

Musharaff's nuclear gamble.

The loose and bellicose talk by leading Pakistani officials about nuking India appear to be a calculated gamble on the part of its establishment to force international mediation of the Kashmir dispute.
Pakistani leaders have concluded, perhaps accurately, that once the United States has mopped up its operations in Afghanistan, its interest in the region will wane and potentially even turn on Pakistan, which itself is a hotbed for Muslim extremism.
Given Pakistan's pivotal role in the current U.S. campaign against terrorism, General Pervez Musharraf likely decided to ratchet up the ante in the hope that the United States and its allies would feel compelled to entangle themselves in Kashmir if a crisis erupted at this crucial juncture.
It is a Machiavellian move and it is seemingly working, although the U.S. government has wisened up to the crafty ways of the wily general.
The events in Kashmir lay bare the hypocrisy of the U.S. war on terrorism. While President Bush told West Point graduates on June 1 that "The war on terror will not be won on the defensive," he counsels restraint upon India, which has been victimized for 13 long years by a coordinated terror campaign by Islamic militants with support from Pakistan. While he exhorts future American military officers at the academy, "We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt its plans, and confront the worst threats BEFORE they emerge," he presses India that "war is not the answer" to the clear and present campaign of terror fueled from across its border.
There is no question that the brutal terror campaign in Kashmir, which over the past decade has claimed tens of thousand of Indian lives, is made possible by extremists who find refuge on the Pakistani side of the border. It has been long known that these guerillas have been financed and armed by the Pakistani army and intelligence services. In January, General Musharraf pledged to cut off aid to these terror groups, while promising moral and political support to their campaign to "liberate" Kashmir. Musharraf is under considerable international pressure to clean out the terrorist camps in Pakistan, but he faces even greater risk internally from religious fanatics who would react violently if he were to buckle under the pressure, yet again. It is therefore, unlikely that will act to reign in terrorists targeting Kashmir from Pakistan.
Notwithstanding the general's insistance that the Pakistani establishment no longer provides logistical support to these terrorists, terrorists continue to infiltrate India across its border with Pakistan. That means either that the Pakistani government is still conniving with these groups or that it is powerless in controlling them. In either event, by President Bush's logic, India "must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt its plans, and confront the worst threats ..." If Pakistan will not, or cannot, dismantle the terrorists' infrastructure within its border, India, or an international coalition, well should.
Of course, any such attempt is constrained by the spectre of a nuclear war, whose bogey is very calculatingly turned off and on by Pakistani government officials. It is now clear just unwise it was for India to bring its ambiguous nuclear program into the open, which provided the pretext for Pakistan to also enter the nuclear club.
Even though India's nuclear program is considerably more advanced than Pakistan's, just the threat of a nuclear exchange serves as a deterrent against any Indian offensive. By contrast, India's overwhelming superiority over Pakistan in a "conventional" war may well have given it the latitude today to clean out the terrorist camps in Pakistan.
In the realm of violence, today's jaws of victory are tomorrow's fountains of defeat.

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