Terror from Pak isn't just India's problem

Pakistan has become a major worry for the world on two counts. It has for long been deemed by the world to be the headquarters, the epicentre and the most pristine university of international terrorism. A new dimension has been added to this already existing worry — that the politics in Pakistan is so internally unstable, and its once professional military so contaminated by the militant extremist outlook — that there could be a real threat of the emergence of a nuclear suicide bomber. The Democratic nominee for the presidential election in the United States, Hillary Clinton, voiced the apprehension in February this year in the course of her campaign at a fundraiser in Virginia, the New York Times has recently reported.

She said, according to the newspaper, “We live in fear that they’re going to have a coup, that jihadis are going to take over the government, they’re going to get access to nuclear weapons, and you’ll have suicide nuclear bombers. So, this could not be a more threatening scenario.” This was before the Uri terrorist attack that Pakistan still pretends it had nothing to do with, but Ms Clinton’s lucid articulation points to anxieties that prevail at the highest levels of Western political leadership.

The September 18 Uri attack (the latest in a string of terrorist strikes on military stations in this country), India’s “surgical strikes” or precision hits by commandos on terrorist launch pads just across the LoC on September 29, and the reckless nuclear venom spewed by Pakistan’s defence minister Khawaja Asif recently, beg the question: “When will the US effectively move to take action against Pakistan’s leadership, especially on the military side, at whose behest the headquarters of the jihad has been nurtured?”

It is out of line, and wholly unrealistic, to counsel restraint. The implication is that India and Pakistan should both act differently so that an atmosphere of peace may be generated. This is misdirected. India has acted calculatedly and politically to hit at terror camps after being the victim of jihadist assaults for decades and over an extended period of strategic forbearance.  It is hard to see any power — major or minor — acting with the same fortitude.

If the dam of patience has at last been breached, those who have been fattening up Pakistan with financial and military resources in spite of Islamabad’s duplicitous ways and its proclivity to ignore its bilateral, regional and international commitments to fight terrorism, also need to ask themselves some questions. What greater proof of this can there be than Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif extolling, from the forum of the UN General Assembly, a major terrorist commander of an outfit that is proscribed by the UN and the US?