I once read an article in “Omni” magazine looking at the likelihood of nuclear war. The article provided two possible scenarios, neither involving America and Russia. The first was between India and Pakistan which the author said would result in a “Pyhrric victory” for the former. The second was in the Middle East pitting the Israelis against the Arabs.
What made the scenarios so chilling is that unlike America and Russia, the antagonists had repeatedly gone to war with each other. Pakistan and India have fought three wars since the two countries gained their independence from Great Britain and India has had to face an ongoing, Pakistani-backed insurgency in predominantly Muslim Kashmir. Israel has fought a half-dozen conventional wars with the surrounding Arab states and continues to face terrorist attacks from groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Given their history, there exists a strong likelihood that there will be future wars between these powers which could conceivably go nuclear. While Israel's enemies still lack nuclear weapons India and Pakistan both possess nuclear arsenals. Another war between them could be catastrophic and that's why the crisis growing out of the Mumbai attacks will be such a crucial test of the Obama administration.
The Mumbai attack is just the latest in a series perpetrated by Muslim terrorists in India. In 2005, Mumbai was the target of a series of bombings that killed more than 200 people. This was followed by attacks in Jaipur and Bangalore earlier this year that also resulted in over 200 deaths.
Muslim terrorism in India is often traced back to Pakistan, whose intelligence service, the ISI, has a long history of assisting groups like Al-Qaida and the Taliban. The surviving Mumbai terrorist has reportedly told his Indian interrogators that he is Pakistani and a member of another ISI-supported, Al-Qaida-allied group, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. This has led some in the Indian government to accuse Pakistan of complicity in the attack.
What makes the attack worse than its predecessors is it comes just as relations between India and Pakistan were improving. Pakistan's new civilian government is more inclined to reduced tensions with India than its military predecessors. It has renounced the first use of nuclear weapons in the event of war and has been negotiating with India to open trade between the Indian and Pakistani halves of Kashmir.
The Pakistani government is also taking a harder line against Al-Qaida and the Taliban in the tribal areas of the country along its border with Afghanistan. Though the results have been mixed, this is a positive development that holds the promise of depriving the terrorists of their most important sanctuary and base of operations.
Obama and his foreign policy team will have to devote much of their first months in office encouraging Pakistan and India to improve relations and join together to fight the terrorists that are damaging both countries. This is crucial because India is a rising power and, as the world's largest democracy, a natural ally for the United States as it deals with both Islamic terrorism and Red China. Some even speculate India could be more powerful than China in a few decades, another reason to not get into a war with Pakistan.
Pakistan's democratic government is weak but shows promise as a partner of both India and America. That would be undone if Pakistan goes to war with India. This war, however, could end with both countries drowning in radioactive fallout.
Preventing this from happening will be Obama's first test as president and for everyone's sake he had better get an A-plus.
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Charles Warner is a staff writer for The Union Daily Times (cwarner@uniondailytimes.com)
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