It's all disquiet on the western front. US President George Bush’s public statements on Thursday underline just how seriously the US foreign policy establishment is taking the current stand-off between India and Pakistan. There are three reasons for this — not necessarily in this order of import for the Americans. One, the hostilities along the Indo-Pak border have shifted the focus from the US-led battle against the Al-Qaeda, a development underlined by Pakistan President Musharraf’s moving more battalions from the Afghan border to the Indian one. Two, the nuclear edge to the threat of war in the subcontinent gives it a decided international significance. Three, the safety of an estimated 65,000 Americans currently in India and Pakistan, apart from an estimated 1,000 army personnel. Certainly, there are compelling reasons for US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld to follow on the heels of Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state, in visiting the region, and he himself may be followed by the peripatetic Colin Powell. India may be forgiven for concluding that this current rush of international and political diplomacy is a tad late. In fact, right from October 1, when the J&K assembly was stormed, India has been consistently highlighting the constant and unremitting threat from terrorists that it has been under. As time went by, the militants have been able to keep up their audacious project. They could have only done so under powerful political patronage. The general across the border has been making a lot of righteous noises on how he has cracked down on the terrorists operating on his soil, but he has never really delinked Pakistan conclusively from the project to ‘liberate’ Kashmir. Both in his January 12 speech and in the one he made on May 27, he dwelt on Pakistan’s emotional bonds with Kashmir. In other words, he is trying to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds, and the world is increasingly coming to perceive this duplicity. The UK foreign secretary’s unequivocal comments of standing fully behind India in its fight against terrorism has now found an echo in Bush’s observation that Musharraf ‘‘must stop incursions across the Line of Control’’. Translating this hope into reality would be the first step to ensuring a peace in the region. In the meanwhile, if all the president’s men could ensure that the general and his bureaucrats eschew the N-word from their rhetoric, so much the better. On Wednesday, we had the general promising to ‘‘unleash a storm’’. A day later, there was Pakistan’s ambassador to the UN openly threatening nuclear war. For US diplomats, their first task, it would seem, is to get the general and his officials to pipe down.
