"Dual Deterrence:
Pakistan's Strategic Bonus"

Columnist Dr SM RAHMAN carries out an in-depth analysis of nuclear events that have given Pakistan a dual advantage

In the case of Pakistan, the imposition of sanctions by the US and Japan, and the looming threat to our already fragile economy is indeed a blessing without disguise. Pakistan's historic decision to explode six nuclear warheads on 28th and 30th May 1998 in response to India's megalomanic power display by detonating five nuclear devices on 11th and 13th May 1998, are essentially courageous acts of strategic defiance, a concept advocated, in the context of Gulf War in 1990, that unless the friendly countries jointly resisted the nefarious designs of US in collusion with Israel, to systematically nibble at their growing military power, particularly of countries like Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, they would serve only as `pawns' on the chess-board of the global power politics and would be relegated to position of subservience to the western domination and hegemony. Therefore as a precondition, the affected countries must perceive the `threat' that they encounter and dispassionately arrive at a strategic consensus to be able to mobilize a collective response. But unfortunately, the lingering legacy of Balkanization of the Muslim World, had so conditioned the psyche in a manner that atomized existence had become a way of life. Selfish orientations had obscured their vision and there was no empathy for each other's sufferings, crises and exploitation.

The worst conceivable irony that runs all through the Muslim history is that the states withered and the empires collapsed for sheer lack of support-moral and material from brotherly countries in neighbourhood or beyond. The Muslim power in Spain was obliterated, Baghdad was ravaged and the great Ottoman Empire was dashed to the ground. All these occurred as there was no combined strategy to face the ordeals. Similarly, the Mughal rule in India, came to an ignonimous end, and the 1857 movement to throw the shackles of British slavery was crushed. Coming to more recent times, Pakistan was sliced into two, as part of a well-hatched conspiracy in 1971. Iraq and Iran were made to fight an internecine war so that their economic and military potentials could be diluted. The Gulf War of 1990, is an eloquent testimony as to how Muslim countries were manipulated so as not to pursue a regional solution to the crises and instead allowed USA and its allies to take full control of the oil wealth of the region and establish the hegemony of Israel over the region. Muslim populations in Eastern Europe and Africa are undergoing systematic annihilation and ethnic cleansing and are not even allowed to democratically determine their socio-political and economic programmes. The brutalities that are being perpetuated on the helpless Kashmiri's have evoked only knee-jerk responses from the Muslim countries, whereas a well determined and cohesive response of the Muslim World perhaps would have made all the difference in curtailing their miseries and restoration of their right to live in dignity and exercise their right of self-determination as per commitments made by the United Nations.

A consciousness towards Muslim Unity and using oil as a weapon had emerged in the OIC Summit organised by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1974, and Shah Faisal had agreed to transform the idea into operation. Both of these leaders had to be eliminated as they threatened the Western commercial interests of sustaining its affluence at the cost of low

priced oil, constituting the Muslim wealth. It is an irony and outright plundering that the price of oil which was $ 12 per barrel in 1974 came only to $ 12.30 in 1990. Bhutto's sin was multiplied, as he had also conceived the idea that Pakistan should have atomic bomb to safeguard its security. A major breakthrough, however, towards the imperative of building a collective strategic thought was realised in the recent OIC Summit held in Iran during December 1997, and a spontaneous upsurge of Muslim unity and sense of vicarious accomplishment was exhibited when Pakistan achieved the unique status of being the first Muslim country to be placed in the group of nuclear nations of the world. It was indeed no ordinary achievement and the Muslim countries, barring only a very few who thought it expedient to voice their condemnation to suit the US-Israeli lobby, perhaps, as a quid-pro-quo for some real or anticipated gratification, expressed their sense of joy and elation. In fact, their gestures spoke louder than words. Iran overwhelmed with the historic achievement, came out with the most generous material support to Pakistan to gloss over the impediments and hurdles imposed as sanctions, which ironically is a queer way of economically strangulating a country. Exercising its right of self-defence Pakistan has only communicated to its adversary through counter nuclear blasts that not to be nuclearly black-mailed is the inherent right of any self-respecting nation.

Equating India - the initiator of nuclear adventures both in 1974 and 1998 - with Pakistan, which has only reacted with a measured response is an expression of inverted logic and perverted sense of justice, and that too at the hands of those who proselytise day in and out, on the virtues of democracy, egalitarian norms and non

discriminative dispensation of justice.

The brotherly countries like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Turkey and others have also not lagged behind to express their whole-hearted support for a bold display of nuclear muscle. This has gone to restore power equilibrium in the region, which had grossly tilted in favour of India and its strategic ally Israel, with whom nuclear collaboration has increased by leaps and bounds - initially covertly but now quite overtly and blatantly disregarding the sensitivities of the South Asian and West Asian nations, living under the perpetual dread of nuclear belligerency. The attitudinal congruence and gravitational pull of the BJP government in India, and Benjamin Netanyahu's Government of Israel, towards each other is a symbiotic perception of being chosen people of the world based on racial purity, their land being holy and the rest of the delusional manifestations of grandeur. Paul Johnson in History of the Jews writes: The world was created for the sake of Israel ... this means that the raison d'etre of the world is the establishment of the regime of Torah in the land of Israel ... there are now Jews living in their homeland and fulfilling the Torah. But completion has not yet been attained, for all Israel does not yet live in its land and (not even) all Israel is yet fulfilling the Torah.1 This brings into light as to why Israel is so desperately pursuing expansionist agenda of achieving Eretza Israel, analogous to Akhand Bharat, the favourite rhetoric of the Hindutva proponents. Violating the United Nations Charter, Israel still occupies the territories of three sovereign Arab countries and is obsessed to obliterate every imprint of Muslim identity in Jerusalem. Just as the Hindu fundamentalists are committed to building Rama Temple at the site of Babri Mosque at Ayodhya, the Israeli's are out to build Solomon's Temple at the site of Al-Aqsa Mosque. The holy land of Bharat only belongs to Hindus, according to Savarkar, who spells out this idea in his book Who is a Hindu? The Holy Land (Punyabhu) and Fatherland (Pitribhu) are the two essential elements for any one to be a Hindu. Others can not be trusted. For Mohammedan or Christian, Hindustan is only Pitribhu and not Punyabhu - their holy land is far off in Arabia or Palestine. Bharat is only for the Aryans.2

The BJP agenda has a striking similarity with that of Hitler's National Socialist agenda of Germany in 1930's as contained in his book Mein Kampf. In fact the Hindu sensibility, has a compelling passion to display macho power. Bal Thackeray said quite explicitly: We have to prove we are not eunuchs.3 Well, if one has to prove, it does reflect some serious inner defect, and anxiety. The paranoid disposition is as evident in neo-Nazism, the Hindu Fundamentalists, as it was in Hitler's brand Nazism. J.N.Dixit the Ex-Foreign Secretary of India defying all norms of diplomacy, made a very blunt assertion. India, he said, would take care of Pakistan like the West took care of eastern Europe.4

The post-Pokhran so called pro-active policy of teaching Pakistan a lesson, is reminiscent of a mind-set which Bruno Mussolini provides of his exploits from the air, in the Abyssinian war: We had to set fire to

the wooded hills, to the fields and little villages. The bombs hardly touched the earth before they burst out into white smoke and an enormous flame and the dry grass began to burn. I thought of the animals: God, how they ran .... After the bomb racks were emptied. I began throwing bombs by hand ... It was most amusing: a big Zariba surrounded by all trees was not easy to hit. I had to aim carefully at the straw roof and only succeeded at the third shot. The wretches who were inside, seeing their roof burning, jumped out and ran off like mad. Surrounded by a circle of fire about five thousand Abyssinians came to a sticky end. It was like hell.5 With this typical callous disposition, what one is witnessing in the Indian held Kashmir, there is not much logic for those who plead that Pakistan's ambiguous nuclear deterrence would have worked. There was a definite need to answer back with counter explosions which effectively communicated: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It is this language which a bully tends to comprehend.

Had the Indian BJP leadership been rational, perhaps a credible non weaponised deterrence may have achieved the objective. But the Big Bomb buoyancy spilling all over and immensely saturating their minds had completely desensitized the objectivity. A wishful assumption was that Pakistan was only bluffing and that it had no nuclear bomb to bang. On the contrary it came as a rude shock and surprise and the Indian strategic pundits were only dumb founded. Had Pakistan resisted it would have meant a strategic Harakari and would have been far too dangerous for the region. Pakistan's explosion not only effectively balanced Pakistan's security, but saved the region from a probable holocaust, that would have been the worst parting calamity of the 20th Century for South Asia, which is already the ghetto of the world, and where human miseries and deprivations present a very dismal profile of humanity.

It was indeed a great historical aberration that the west hob nobbed with the Nazis with typical Chamberlain type reasoning that a Nazi state would be able to contain the Russian Communism. A similar erroneous assumption still persists that a nuclear India would be able to check mate the rise of communist China. It is a grave fallacy, which has induced the west, particularly USA to serve as abettor to let India emerge as the sixth nuclear weapon state. With the kind of nuclear spoon-feeding that India has so lavishly received from USA, Canada, the former USSR and other surrogate western nations to claim it as an indigenous achievement, is to totally camouflage the reality. With the facilitative climate under which it acquired the nuclear reactors, the heavy water and all the constituents that go to make a bomb, as well as full tutoring into their mechanics and the prototypes of delivering systems which were provided ready to be replicated, India became a nuclear progeny.

Pakistan's nuclear story is opposite. It is inconceivable if any country which found enormous nuclear road-blocks, impediments, Presslerization, sanctions and surveillance could ever hope to become a nuclear power, as Pakistan did through sheer determination and indomitable will. As an illustration it may be cited that the father of the nuclear bomb Dr. Abdul Kalam of India spent four months in training in the US. After visiting NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia Coast, where he saw the US Scout Space rocket in action, he returned to build a copy, as per report, US behind India's nuke, missile capability.6 Gary Milholin, Director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a long-time critic of India's nuclear programme, claimed in an article in the Washington Post that not only did American exports of sensitive technology help build India's programmes in the past, but the next generation of nuclear missiles will probably be designed with the help of American - made equipment.'7 The author concludes that virtually every element of India's nuclear and missile programme has been imported directly or copied from imported designs. The Agni's second stage rocket motor is derived from Russian supplied Surface to Air Missile and the Agni's guidance system was developed with help from Germany's space agency.8 It is no secret that the most powerful super computers were supplied to the Indian Institute of Science (IIS), Bangalore, which plays very vital role in the making of nuclear bombs and missiles. In contrast, it is indeed cruel how Pakistan's architect of the nuclear bomb -

Any dispassionate appraisal of the nuclear programmes of India and Pakistan would reveal how much the latter accomplished in the shortest possible time, without any help and support from other nuclear powers of the world. This speaks volumes of its potentials and scientific ingenuity. To dub Pakistan a failed state was a deliberate machination to sap its morale and to dampen its creative impulses. The nation was re-ignited through the Chagai blasts. Living in the neighbourhood of India is no easy task for Pakistan or for any other country. Nearly every littoral state in South Asian region, in varying degrees has experienced how ruthless could India be in the pursuit of its hegemonic ambitions. Pakistan stands like a rock and would not let India treat Pakistan as Sikkim or Bhutan. It is this dialects of two different mind-sets, which are the basic impediments to peace in the region. Going nuclear for Pakistan is only an adjustment modality. For India it is a symbol of domination and power. When Pakistan came into being, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah had hoped that the division of the sub-continent would be a precursor to peace and amity between the two neighbours whereas the Indian political stalwarts, viewed it only as a tactical stop-gap arrangement. Eventually, the division' was to enable to get re-merged together. These diametrically opposite perspectives have been the major determinants of confrontation, three successive wars, arms race and eventually becoming nuclear powers. We usually tend to see the symptoms but overlook the inner roots of conflict.

Pakistan's counter nuclear blasts turned out to be many a splendoured

thing, as never before it felt as secure as it does today. In the pre-Pokhran phase, India had a decided nuclear edge over Pakistan, as it had conducted an explosion even though for so called peaceful' purposes. Today, Pakistan is at par with its adversary. India's explosion, has brought a divisive fall-out on the political firmament, and conscientious objectors are seriously questioning, if it was at all a sane venture. Pakistan's matching response based on higher moral imperatives has created a social-fusion-effect, generating a sense of collective pride and meaning into existence. There is also an appreciable realization of Pakistan's righteous stand among the world community, barring of course those who tend to see Pakistan or any Muslim country for that matter with the prism glass of prejudices. Conversely India is being perceived as a bull' in the China shop. Kuldip Nayar comments, Against the barrage of criticism, they see a ray of hope in the statements of lightweight Gobon. If the island of Tanga, which has a vote in the UN, also comes out in our support, should we clap our hands?

The fact is that the leadership was itself so much lost on the euphoria it would create by detonating the bomb that it made no prior preparations for adverse world reactions.9 Truly speaking, prior preparations are hardly necessary, if actions convey ethical principles. India is in the grip of confusion. In this medley of voices New Delhi, seems without policy says Nayar, as no body knows what is India's bomb policy.10 It has offered to have talks on the CTBT. There is no response from the big five because they also probably see the lack of direction, and there is no doubt that the nation is deeply divided.11