NEW DELHI — India and Pakistan have found something on which to agree: This is not the moment to challenge the United States by escalating their long and nasty conflict into a shooting war. The two South Asian rivals have moved back from the brink to play for time while American bombs still fall nearby.
They shifted from rattling their small nuclear arsenals at each other to hosting Secretary of State Colin Powell last week on a trip that underscores the central role the United States has now accepted in the Asian subcontinent. That role enables the Bush administration to pursue its war against global terrorism more effectively and to seek a new strategic relationship with India, an old U.S. antagonist throughout the Cold War.
Paradoxically, U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan seem to have inhibited India and Pakistan from going to war themselves. With so much American muscle in the area, even regional powers carefully calibrate their steps.
India and Pakistan went on a war footing after the Dec. 13 terrorist attack on India’s Parliament. India, blaming Pakistan for the attack and the United States for being taken in by President Pervez Musharraf, mobilized for a retaliatory strike.
But intense pressure from Washington extracted promises from Gen. Musharraf that Pakistan’s intelligence service and army will cease giving food, weapons and other logistical help to infiltrators who carry out terrorist raids into India and Indian-controlled Kashmir. The army will no longer provide mortar fire to cover the infiltrators, who have been cut adrift by Musharraf.
By making those promises in the knowledge they would be conveyed to India and monitored, Musharraf in effect declared an end to his state’s support for cross-border terrorism.
He hinted as much in his heralded Jan. 12 speech. Musharraf unequivocally condemned all acts of terrorism, including those carried out in the name of freeing Kashmir’s Muslim majority from Indian rule. He also pledged to combat Islamic extremism and lawlessness within Pakistan itself.
Comments by Indian officials suggest that the private pledges were the key to India’s decision to treat Musharraf’s speech as a major step forward and the basis for freezing their military buildup, which still stands at menacing levels.
"The temperature has gone from 104 to 100," one Western diplomat says. "It will go down more, or shoot back up, depending on whether the Indians see that Musharraf is or is not doing what he said he would do to stop cross-border terrorism. It will be pretty obvious to them."
The news is not India’s trust of Musharraf. That still does not go very far. The news is India’s trust of a conservative Republican president in Washington. The Bush administration has scored its first clear diplomatic success abroad — if it can now consolidate the uneasy standdown between New Delhi and Islamabad.
American diplomacy seemed to Indians to be its old unbalanced self in the first phase of the war on terrorism. Powell courted Musharraf and showered economic aid on him in return for logistical support for U.S. attacks on Afghanistan. Indian complaints were treated as whining at the State Department.
But the Dec. 13 attack and India’s buildup ended the imbalance in policy. Powell relentlessly pursued Musharraf and squeezed him into making the Jan. 12 unequivocal break with terrorism. President Bush worked just as hard to calm India’s fears. They in effect made South Asia the center of the next big step in the war on terrorism after Afghanistan.
It is, however, still an incomplete triumph. It will take India three to four weeks to judge how fully Musharraf’s commitments on infiltration are being carried out. Kashmiri extremists may respond to the Pakistani leader’s reversal by trying to carry out new outrages on their own to provoke an Indian attack.
There are also pitfalls on the diplomatic front. In his speech Musharraf called on the United States to reward him for his very belated recognition of the evils of terrorism and religious extremism by intervening in the Kashmir dispute and pressuring India for concessions. Powell has wisely shown no inclination to use his current trip for that purpose.
Musharraf deserves no rewards for having to be hauled kicking and screaming into denouncing the evil that has flourished under his nose. He has proven that he has all along had much more room to accept significant change than he has acknowledged.
There were heroic flourishes in his Jan. 12 declaration. But Musharraf’s role in creating the disasters that led to the need for that speech cannot be simply forgotten or forgiven, or compensated.
Jim Hoagland can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or hoaglandj@washpost.com.
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