INDIA/PAKISTAN: India and Pakistan are perched precariously on the sixth rung of an eight-point conflict escalation ladder. Military officers predicting imminent hostilities say it is only a matter of a few weeks before war breaks out and the two countries reach the nuclear threshold.
Senior army officers yesterday said the "war genie" had been let loose and it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the beleaguered Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party leadership, which heads the federal coalition, to bottle it again. "The government has taken certain irreversible steps that seem to indicate that conflict is imminent," an officer said, declining to elaborate.
Military sources indicate that they are awaiting political clearance to "operationalise" bold plans to launch air strikes inside Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in mid-June before the monsoon sets in over the region to isolate the disputed area from the rest of Pakistan.
This would be followed by the army advancing to take, and eventually hold, large swathes of territory, from which India claims the civil war in Jammu and Kashmir has originated for 13-years. Pakistan denies India's allegations of sponsoring Kashmir's insurgency, which has claimed more than 35,000 lives.
"They (the BJP) are fully aware that if they try backing down or blinking (in front of Pakistan) this time round, they face political oblivion," said an officer, declining to be identified. Its poor record of governance is severely hampering the BJP's future prospects since it came to office four years ago and party members privately admit a "good war" would significantly brighten their party's electoral prospects.
General elections are due by October 2004, but there has been speculation that the BJP might hold them earlier. "If we do not attack now, we never will," a military officer in Jammu said. To wait once again after nearly six months of deployment and intense provocation, like last month's attack by Pakistan-backed militants on a garrison in northern Jammu and Kashmir state, will be counter-productive. It would mean a victory for Islamabad, he stated. More than one million Indian and Pakistani soldiers mobilised last December following the attack on Delhi's parliament, which, like the Jammu attack, was blamed on Islamabad.
An internal army analysis said the nuclear rivals, following an "established" pattern of confrontation, had long crossed the five stages of no-war-no-peace that included daily artillery and mortar duels across the line of control, the building-up of a crisis over armed strikes by militants, followed by political, diplomatic and economic pressure. The next step - already crossed - was a show of force and significant troop mobilisation backed by the naval deployment on the western seaboard within "striking distance" of Karachi harbour, through which 90 per cent of Pakistan's oil supplies pass.
The rungs that remain to be ascended are border "incidents", a euphemism for military raids into enemy territory, and limited or "surgical strikes" by one or the other side, following the breakdown of international diplomatic and political initiatives presently under way. The US Assistant Secretary of State, Mr Richard Armitage, is in the region and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrives early next week.
These cross-border raids would trigger a full-blown conventional war whose outcome would eventually determine the nuclear, apocalyptic option the world dreads.
India's broad tactic is to execute air strikes in Pakistan-administered Kashmir that will "induce" Islamabad into extending the conflict.