Indo-Pakistan Relations: Time to bury the hatchet?

Columnist Brig (Retd) SHER KHAN comes to the conclusion that peace must break out between Pakistan and India.

The international media gave extensive coverage at the end of April to mark the twenty fifth year of the end of the Vietnam War. There was much introspection and analysis of how the conflict had escalated during the over twenty years that it lasted, the lessons learnt, or sometimes not learnt either, by American policy makers after the ignominious exit of the last Americans from Saigon on 30 April 1975 by helicopters to ships waiting offshore. Some Pakistani papers carried articles written recently by Dr Henry Kissinger on the mood in the Gerald Ford White House as the North Vietnamese Army  (NVA) and the Viet Cong tightened the noose around the encircled regime in Saigon in the last few days. The end, when it came, was swift, and painful for those who had fought against the NVA but could not escape before the fall of Saigon. Far from a sense of humiliation, Gerald Ford was apparently ‘proud’ that he had avoided further loss of American lives in what was a long drawn out futile war. (The futility of the war was evident to everybody except the policy makers in the White House as soon as American involvement began to escalate in Vietnam, yet at first they first tried to bludgeon the NVA with preponderant American might and technology, and then got bogged down in trying to make an honourable exit). For many years after defeat at the hands of an apparently rag-tag, pajama-clad army, the American military and policy makers suffered from what came to be known as the Vietnam Syndrome: avoid getting into a conflict situation in the first instance, and if military intervention is unavoidable, do so with clear-cut, achievable objectives with preponderant might so as to avoid any loss of American lives. Yet, these lessons were lost in American involvement in Somalia where Third Worlders like Pakistan had to bail out the Americans at considerable loss of life.

The Vietnam War started as a small-scale American involvement in South Vietnam in the early 1960s when late President John F. Kennedy authorized the dispatch of American military advisors to stem the growth of Communism when the Domino Theory held sway.  American involvement peaked to a high of 536,000 troops in late 1968, with another 100,000 stationed in Thailand, Guam, sites of major US bomber bases, and on ships off the Vietnamese coast. From 1961 till its end in 1975, some 56,555 US soldiers died in Vietnam in addition to 303,654 wounded. Vietnamese dead included at least 200,000 Saigon soldiers, perhaps a million NVA/ Viet Cong, and half a million civilians. Millions more were wounded, and some ten millions became refugees. Despite these horrendous figures, the former adversaries have been able to put the past behind them and have begun to move towards better economic and other relations, as was evident in the weeklong extensive television coverage on satellite television towards the end of April.

Elsewhere in Asia, relations between sworn enemies like North and South Korea  are beginning to thaw, howsoever slightly, after nearly half a century of eyeball to eyeball confrontation across the Demilitarized Zone. The scale of the suffering in the Korean War in the early fifties is too well known to bear repetition; some of the scars of that conflict are evident even today. The atrocities and suffering inflicted by the Imperial Japanese Army in China, Korea, and other territories that it invaded and occupied are also the stuff of legend. Yet, since many years, the Japanese have been mending their fences with former enemies for the mutual benefit of the people of the region. Not to be forgotten is the bloodletting that took place between the Americans and the Japanese forces in the Pacific, which came to an end when the Americans dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 in a bid, amongst other reasons, to avoid further loss of American lives. Yet soon afterwards, the American Occupation Forces played a major role in the rebuilding of the Japanese economy, and relations between the two countries have been extremely cordial since soon after the war ended.

And in the Middle East, a conflict as old as that between India and Pakistan is drawing closer to resolution as the Palestinians and the Israelis continue their on-again - off-again negotiations to arrive at a peaceful settlement. There is hope that the Syrians will come around to the negotiating table in the not too distant future. Other Arab countries in the region, i.e. Egypt and Jordan, have already made their separate peace with their former enemy, namely Israel, with which they went to war a number of times. Yet, it seems strange that Pakistan, which refused to recognize Israel for half a century and more in a move of solidarity with the Arabs, continues to maintain its rigid stance over Israeli recognition at the behest of the powerful religious lobby, while the countries and peoples for whose sake it adopted this policy have already come to terms, or are in the process, with Israel. More loyal to the king than the king himself?

The case of Europe is no different: steeped in a history of years of bloody conflict over the centuries, including two World Wars in the last century that wrought so much havoc and suffering, former sworn enemies are the best of friends, allied under NATO for their mutual defence, even though there is no longer a credible enemy or threat in the shape of the former Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact, and joined in the European Union for their mutual economic well-being. (Not forgetting that they are also joined together to exploit the under-developed world through devious means even as they talk of globalization, breaking the tariff barriers, where and when it suits them, the World Trade Order, etc.)

Cutting across to South Asia, and the two biggest neighbours on the sub-continent which have been locked in a death embrace from the day that they came into the world in 1947 as independent nations. They have fought three wars, of which two were specifically because of Kashmir, while last year there was the Kargil caper which threatened to unleash yet another full scale conflagration amongst newly nuclear weapons capable states. Since 1984, when an ambitious Indian major general in search of a third star on his epaulettes (which ironically he did not succeed in getting anyway) launched an incursion into the hitherto isolated wasteland called the Siachin glacier, the armies of the two countries have been locked in conflict on the forbidding, worthless heights where a blade of grass does not grow or even a bird dare fly. For years on end, brave young men from both sides have continued to die or suffer untold miseries as they battle the biggest enemies of them all: the cold, the isolation, the loss of oxygen, the avalanches on those windswept heights. After untold deaths and other casualties, the low intensity conflict continues to cost Pakistan a million dollars a day according to some estimates; the figure for India could be much higher, but that should only be considered as cold comfort, since people on both sides are hurting, and very badly. War mongers on both sides of the border continue to beat their bellicose chests, seldom mentioning that they have never offered any personal sacrifice, and always disregarding the fact that this small part of the world is home to over a billion of the world’s six billion inhabitants, of whom no less than four hundred million try to survive, unbelievable as it might sound, on less than the equivalent of one dollar a day!

In this scenario, commonsense would say that statesmen on both sides would have come together long ago and resolved their differences, and channelled their already meagre resources for the uplift and betterment of their respective peoples. Unfortunately, while both sides have had ‘leaders’, they have been woefully short of statesmen and men, and women, of vision. That is why, more than fifty years on, we still seem to be on the verge of yet another open conflict. It is time, if it is not already too late, for good men to proffer the olive branch, and men of good faith on the other side to rise above themselves and grasp the proffered olive branch. It is high time that we sheathed the sword and buried the hatchet, and engaged in sincere dialogue with a readiness to give and take. It just might do some good, but in any case it can do little or no harm. But then, as in most dances, it takes two to tango.