{"id":2721,"date":"2003-04-03T00:04:59","date_gmt":"2003-04-02T18:34:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alpha.ravikiran.com\/blog\/2003\/04\/03\/hizb-commander-shot-dead\/"},"modified":"2003-04-03T00:04:59","modified_gmt":"2003-04-02T18:34:59","slug":"hizb-commander-shot-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/vintage\/200304\/hizb-commander-shot-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Hizb commander shot dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good news<\/a>
A couple of months back, I thought of composing a hopeful post. The hopeful post would note that Kashmir had been quiet for a while. It would hope that perhaps Kashmiri terrorism would follow its Punjabi predecessor into oblivion. The handful of terrorists who rape and murder Kashmiris had been hunted down. The ordinary people were tired of terrorism, and, while not completely happy with the Indian (or Jammu and Kashmir ) government, had found that they were better off working with an imperfect democracy than with a bunch of jihadists.<\/p>\n

Then something told me to wait for summer, and that something was right<\/a>. Now that summer has begun, the killing has resumed. If proof is required that terrorism in Kashmir is, at least now, entirely Pakistan’s handiwork, this is it. <\/p>\n

Tavleen Singh<\/a> (via Shanti<\/a>) asks why we can’t strike Shock and Awe, the way the US is doing with Iraq. I think the answer is obvious – for the same reason the US couldn’t strike shock and awe against USSR. A limited war with Pakistan would be pointless; an all out war would be devastating for both.
Leaning on the US to put pressure on Pakistan should be tried, but I don’t think it will work. The US is trying to push Pakistan towards “moderation”. But in Pakistan, an
extremist<\/b> is someone who wants to export jihad all over the world including to the US, whereas
moderate<\/b> is someone who wants to keep the jihadis under leash for the limited purpose of harrassing India. Musharraf is a moderate only in the sense that he is dismayed by the extent to which Islamisation in the Pakistani army has taken a life of its own and now he wants to control the Frankenstein’s monster, not to kill it. <\/p>\n

It is obvious why the US wants Pakistan to moderate itself, but it is not clear to me what difference it makes to India. A collapse of authority in Pakistan would make the US unhappy. It wouldn’t be
good for us either – after all, we don’t want Pakistan’s nuclear suitcase to fall into the hands of nutcases. <\/p>\n

Frankly, our choices aren’t good, and I think that we have made the best of a bad situation. In Jammu and Kashmir, I think that we have won the war of legitimacy. If cross-border terrorism would just go away, Kashmir would be as peaceful in a year as Punjab is now. I think our best options are to use covert operations to kill as many terrorists as possible in Pakistan, ex?loit differences among the groups to weaken them and wait for the Pakistani army to get really unpopular and get it replaced by a democratic government. The US won’t do it for us. It will be afraid of “destabilisation”. India will have to do it. for itself<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Good newsA couple of months back, I thought of composing a hopeful post. The hopeful post would note that Kashmir had been quiet for a while. It would hope that perhaps Kashmiri terrorism would follow its Punjabi predecessor into oblivion. The handful of terrorists who rape and murder Kashmiris had been hunted down. The ordinary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2721"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2721\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}