Carl wrote:Rudradev wrote:If India gives up J&K because of Pakistani terrorists or Chinese brinkmanship, it will be India's own fault... and as Shiv states, Mother India deserves to be sentenced to death if she lets the Pakistanis or Chinese do that to her children.
Rudra ji, it would always have been our "own fault" if we let go of J&K, whether or not the US played an active role in it or not. In Af-Pak the US is having a tough time because there are people there who attack the US like they have nothing to lose and everything to gain in the hereafter - and they
have lost a lot, willingly. But we Indians are still very protective of our commercial interests and so the US can do a lot to hurt us in this world. The question is howmuch blood India is willing to shed - our own as well as the other b@stard's blood - in the fight for the whole of J&K, and howmuch commercial pain are we willing to endure. Brinkmanship with China is therefore a factor in this calculus, since the K-issue can be used to set us back a dcade or two, just like Af-Pak has done to Pureland. If we had been willing to shed more blood for Kashmir, then we could have done so in hunting down mujahids in cave-to-cave combat in Af-Pak itself. But we didn't want to co-operate or be seen to cooperate with the US there. The fact is that when the equations are written in blood, China will not be willing to spill that much so far from Beijing as India
ought to be willing to do so a stone's throw from Delhi.
Carl ji, I agree with you in broad terms. However, just a few minor points:
But we Indians are still very protective of our commercial interests and so the US can do a lot to hurt us in this world.
I'm wondering how true that is anymore. Yes it is certainly true to some extent. But it was even more true in 1998, when after Pokhran II, the US sanctioned us. At that time we had a less robust economy than we do now, and less trade with the US (so it cost US entities less to sanction India.) Also, India going nuclear was a much bigger national-interest provocation for the US than any Indian actions in the matter of J&K could ever be.
Yet... whatever commercial pain the 1998 sanctions caused India, we were willing to risk for our national interest; and, while the sanctions may have set India back economically to some extent, they didn't reverse the course of dramatic economic expansion that continued right through the 1998-2004 period. Today the power of the US to mess with us economically, while it still exists, is significantly less... and many aspects of the geopolitical picture, including AfPak, China and the US economy itself, are very different now. Would the US, today, use sanctions against India over an issue like J&K?
In Af-Pak the US is having a tough time because there are people there who attack the US like they have nothing to lose and everything to gain in the hereafter - and they have lost a lot, willingly.
I think that just as there are myths about US omnipotence, there is a myth (very commonly held among non-Muslim Indians, though the US isn't immune from it) about Muslims. i.e. that they are some sort of fanatic savage beasts whom you mustn't mess with, otherwise they will come at you in a wild rage and kill you, thinking nothing of the consequences for themselves. When we talk about Muslims "fighting like they have nothing to lose, and everything to gain in the afterlife"... in a sense we're just rationalizing that same myth, while assuming a more detached and scholarly stance rooted in economics and sociology.
The fact is, these same people who have been fighting the US "as if they had nothing to lose" from 2001-present in AfPak, were also coming into J&K and fighting India "as if they had nothing to lose" since the early 1990s. The fanaticism/mystical-motivation didn't enable them to change a thing about India's possession of J&K; or even to inhibit the economic rise of India in any secondary way. If the US claims to feel hopeless fighting such people in AfPak... that is either because the US subscribes to a certain myth that the non-Muslim world has long entertained about Muslims, or because they would like to use this popular perception as a cover for drawing down from a mission that doesn't seem worthwhile for other reasons. We hear all the time that "Afghanistan was never conquered by anybody"... in truth, Ranjit Singh conquered it, and his governor reportedly kept it peaceful by throwing 5 Afghans from the ramparts of Kandahar fort every morning, their yells audible across the valley as they fell all the way to the rocky ground. When there's a will there's a way
If we had been willing to shed more blood for Kashmir, then we could have done so in hunting down mujahids in cave-to-cave combat in Af-Pak itself. But we didn't want to co-operate or be seen to cooperate with the US there.
Would that have withstood a C/B ratio analysis? Leave aside motivations of appeasing vote banks or having a "not-too-pro-US image" for now.
The US and NATO killed many mujahids who might otherwise have turned up in J&K, and been ours to kill. But perhaps, by not being directly involved, we have given the surviving mujahids new priorities which are much higher than helping Pakistan wage jihad in J&K. On the one hand, how much could we have added to the mujahid body count by sending our own jawans into the AfPak fray? On the other hand, how might Indian involvement in killing mujahids in AfPak, have produced a regional situation that was *more* in India's interest (on J&K and other matters) than the way things are now? How many of the Pakhtun factions that are now deeply hateful of Pakistan, might instead have been turned into primary enemies of India (and co-opted as friends of Islamabad) had we actually gone into AfPak?
