Obama: India Has the Right to Protect Itself
Speaking Monday, U.S. president-elect Barack Obama said that India is a sovereign country and has, as a result, every right to protect itself.
He said so in response to questions whether he would support India if it would use military force against terrorists in Pakistan.
During the election campaign, Obama said that the U.S. had the right to strike against terrorist training camps inside Pakistan if it deemed doing so necessary. Obama’s reaction to the terrorist attack in India shows that he does not merely believe that the U.S. but also others have the right to protect itself against terrorists.
Although Obama said that the U.S. should be willing to strike against terrorist targets in Pakistan, many left-wing columnists and bloggers thought he was ‘one of them,’ meaning a foreign policy dove. His reaction to the attack in India, however, shows that not progressives but moderates were right about the foreign policy Obama would pursue: it seems increasingly clear that Obama is a foreign policy pragmatist willing to use force when necessary.
Some left-wing blogs, Firedoglake for instance, are starting to understand the above as well. The blog’s Ian Welsh comments: “The American doctrine that it’s ok to bomb other countries if you invoke the word ‘terrorism’ is a very dangerous one. Combined with the breaking up of Serbia, it is an assault on the over 350 year old idea of Westphalian internal sovereignty. The consequences could be war between Pakistan and India, just as Georgia’s breakup by the Russians was justified by the example of Serbia.”
To be sure, Obama did say that India should only act unilaterally when the ‘international community’ and / or Pakistan do not act in a satisfying manner, but since ’satisfying’ probably means ‘wiping out entire terrorist camps, the caveat is reasonably useless.
Of course, the question is not whether India has the right to attack terrorists in Pakistan: it does. The main question is whether it would be wise for India to do so.
To this, I think the answer should be a resounding ‘no.’
India and Pakistan have been enemies for decades. The two governments hated each other and fought against each other, often via proxies, for years. India is Pakistan’s main enemy and vice versa. India counts quite some Hindu extremists, and Pakistan has a very serious Muslim extremist problem. If India would drop bombs in Pakistan, you can bet on it that the Pakistani people will demand revenge from their government. If Asif Ali Zardari remains silent and conciliatory, he risks being removed by either ‘the people’ or the army.
Considering the already existing tensions in Pakistan, a military or, worse, an Islamist coup would be utterly disastrous. It would jeopardize the security and stability of the entire region: lest we forget, Pakistan is a nuclear country.
On the other hand, if Zardari would fire back, the situation could escalate into a full scale war; never a pleasant experience, especially not when both sides have nuclear weapons.
As such, using force against India is not an option for Zardari, but remaining silent and doing nothing is not either.
Obama is right: India has the right to protect itself. But one can only hope that India will let Pakistan and the U.S. take care of the problem, for Indian involvement would escalate the crisis tremendously.
Of course, India should let Pakistan and the US take care of this problem. But neither can be trusted to take into account India’s interests in whatever they decide is the solution.
India should give the two nations 3 months to do something. If no adequate action is taken in that time, it is time to move troops to the border and take some Pakistani territory. (don’t even bother to go after the terrorists). After India gets some land, then they can negotiate with Pakistan about the terrorists. As for the possibility of nuclear war – India should never use them first and let the US worry about Pakistan using that option.
Wow. That might be the most foolish plan I’ve heard of in quite some time. To physically invade a nuclear-armed country and assert that the potential for nuclear retaliation is just someone else’s problem is really not smart. And wouldn’t an invasion of Pakistan by India give al-Qaeda exactly what they were trying to provoke?
It is almost always a bad idea to give the real enemy exactly what they want strategically. Though domestic political constraints might make this impossible, the strategically smartest thing that India could do here is use the Mumbai attacks as a pretext to demand a multilateral regional peace summit that includes Pakistan, submits the Kashmir question to binding arbitration by the ICJ, and begins building a framework for a cooperative response in South Asia to the threat of Islamic extremism.