Salman Masood reports in The New York Times today about the rising frenzy in Pakistan over the US waging war against the country. Smelling high ratings in broadcasting this paranoid non-sense Pakistan’s particularly creative news channels are doing their best to keep the frenzy going.
It is hard to distil down the widespread conspiracies into a single coherent narrative but the best one can make of it is this. Pakistan believes that the United States is after its nuclear weapons and it wants to bequeath Afghanistan to India. Both these fears create in this very male-centric nation a deep sense of emasculation.
Like all conspiracy believers, Pakistanis have also suspended disbelief so that they can free up some more space for phantoms run amuck in their fertile minds. It is not my case that it is beyond the US to contemplate at the very least a limited military engagement in Pakistan. It is also not my case that India has no compelling strategic interest in Afghanistan.
My case is that at this point in history the US does not have the critical strength to meddle directly in a country which sits practically buffeted between two rival Asian giants—China and India. Not when President Barack Obama is so politically beleaguered domestically and faces the very real prospect of becoming a one-term president. And certainly not when the country is passing through probably its worst phase of economic self-defeatism.
India may have very legitimate strategic interests in Afghanistan but the Indian leadership knows that while it can barely meet its own domestic challenges, it would be foolish to get deeper into the Afghan mess. Afghanistan’s enormous mineral wealth including the very essential copper, which China is already exploiting, is a definite attraction for India as well, but philosophically the Indian diplomatic dial is set on human development rather than mineral development.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh took a subtle swipe at China during his address at the United Nations General Assembly the other day when he said in the context of Africa, “We have to pay particular attention to Africa. Africa’s richest resources are not its minerals but its people.” The same logic extends to Afghanistan as well.
Coming back to the war frenzy being whipped up in Pakistan,while it may help hawks in the country to rally the country behind an insidious agenda there is no way it can be in its long-term interests.
