When George beats around the bush on terrorism

That, for instance, the American President excludes Pakistan when he writes in The New York Times on September 11 that, ‘‘We believe that the deliberate murder of innocent civilians and the oppression of women are everywhere and always wrong. And we refuse to ignore or appease the aggression and brutality of evil men’’.

On the day that this article appeared, Jammu and Kashmir’s minister for law and parliamentary affairs, Mushtaq Ahmed Lone, was shot dead by killers who oppose democracy and continue to find safe havens in Pakistan. On that same day President Pervez Musharraf told Indian TV reporters that he would raise the issue of Kashmir in all the forums of America because what was happening there was a freedom struggle and not terrorism.

Are we missing something here? On the one hand we hear from President Bush that the ‘‘deliberate murder of innocent civilians’’ is always wrong and on the other his closest ally in this region is a man who openly declared at the Agra summit last July that if innocent people got killed in a ‘‘freedom struggle’’, that was justifiable.

Why is it so hard for the Americans to see that there can be no grey areas when it comes to terrorism, that if it is right in Kashmir then it has to be right in Israel and in New York and Washington?

The same is true when it comes to condemning the ‘‘evil men’’ who promote terrorism in the name of political causes. If it is right for the world to stand behind America as it goes to war with Iraq to effect ‘‘regime change’’ then what about Pakistan?

As in Iraq, we deal with a military dictator who has weapons of mass destruction and who—in Musharraf’s case—actually threatened to use them against India and yet this same man is America’s best friend and makes his threats of nuclear terrorism mainly because he is assured of American support. Does it make sense?

Does it make sense that the American President tells us, in the same NYT article, that he believes in ‘‘encouraging free and open societies on every continent’’ and yet he sits quietly by as General Musharraf defiles democracy with the military-guided election he is about to have.

American hypocrisy in these matters is not confined to South Asia, it exists on ‘‘every continent’’. So, Egypt is a friend despite the fact that they jail those who speak for democracy and Saudi Arabia is a friend despite evidence that it is Saudi money that pays for terrorist networks across the world. And, Iran and Iraq are part of the ‘‘axis of evil’’. Does it make sense? As someone who believes that the killing of unarmed civilians—whether by terrorists in New York or state-sponsored mobs in Ahmedabad—is cowardly and evil, I find myself reluctantly no longer on America’s side.

On the first anniversary of September 11, last week, I spent the day glued to BBC and CNN and wept at the poignancy of the ceremonies of commemoration. The 3,000 white rose petals—one for every person who died—that fell slowly from the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London was particularly moving as was the reading out in New York of all the names of the victims. It is important to never forget what happened and even more important to make sure that it never happens again anywhere in the world.

My problem with the American idea of a ‘‘global war’’ against terrorism is that the fight seems only to protect the lives of thos who live in what President Bush calls ‘‘the great powers’’. What about the rest of us? Does the world’s only superpower care at all what happens to us?

Whatever the political problems in Kashmir—and there are real reasons for the Kashmiris to be very angry—the terrorism we continue to see happen on a daily basis cannot be justified.

It is terrorism that for more than ten years has had the full support of the Pakistani government just as the Taliban had till September 11. Musharraf has made it clear that although he had no problems dumping his government’s Afghanistan policy he has serious problems changing direction in Kashmir. So, he closes his eyes to what his country’s Islamic fundamentalists are doing in Kashmir.

Infiltration across the border is quite simply not possible without at least passive support from the Pakistani army. Why is it so hard for the Americans to see this? Why is it so hard for President Bush to see that he cannot win this global war against terrorism if he continues to speak with a forked tongue?