There is something dream-like about contemplation of the drift to war in Kashmir. While India and Pakistan move their missiles into position, in Britain concerns were focused on the evacuation of its own citizens, the destination of the likely refugees, and the possibility that the Indian cricket team might be prevented from visiting England this month. That 12-million people could be vaporised if the war begins in earnest is viewed as regrettable, but nothing to do with the British.
In the United States the sense of detachment is even more palpable. Recently President George W Bush told the nation that ”we cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties and then systematically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialise, we will have waited too long.” But he was talking not about India or Pakistan, but about rogue states that might one day attack the US. He mentioned ”South Asia” once, but only as an example of a region whose leaders had been recruited to his cause.
In waging war Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were tumid with moral leadership and purpose. In waging peace they display only vapidity and irresolution. Deputies are dispatched on half-hearted missions to ask the two governments to negotiate, but no one is proposing the measures necessary to prevent what could become the most lethal conflict since World War II. The ”moral imperatives” so often invoked during the bombing of Afghanistan turn out to be nothing more than old-fashioned power politics. Now, with few clearly formulated domestic interests at stake, the new world order’s moral leaders are looking the other way.
Even if Britain, the US and other Western powers had no prior involvement in this conflict, the moral duty to help develop an effective international response would be unquestionable. But the West is up to its neck in it. The subcontinent’s dispute is the West’s dispute and to turn away from it could constitute the greatest collective dereliction since the failure of both the German people and the Allied powers to intervene in the Holocaust.
In 1947 the Maharajah of Kashmir, a Hindu installed by the British, decided neither to seek independence nor to join Pakistan, even though the majority of his people were Muslims, but to surrender the territory to India.
The British governor-general, Lord Mountbatten, insisted only that a plebiscite of the Kashmiri people be conducted. This never happened and Britain, which could have asked the United Nations to demand that the promise was kept, left India and Pakistan to tear the place apart.
More recently both states have drawn strength from the effective licence granted to them by the US. In 1998 then president Bill Clinton announced a ”quantum leap” in US relations with India, which the government there interpreted as a permit to resume nuclear testing. Last year the nuclear sanctions levied on Pakistan were lifted in return for its cooperation in the war on terror. Bush described General Pervez Musharraf as a ”man of great courage and vision”, and promised a $200-million aid package. Musharraf relaxed his grip on the militants slipping into India.
But at least the US has blocked arms sales to India and Pakistan. Britain, by contrast, has done everything in its power to promote them. Blair, who refuses to dirty his own hands, has sent the United Kingdom defence secretary and the deputy prime minister to Delhi to aid the effort to sell Hawk aircraft to India. The UK has continued to supply the spare parts for the Jaguar jets that India may use to drop the bomb. The moral leader deputes his officials to explain that if Britain doesn’t do it, someone else will.
More pertinent still, the nuclear weapons programmes in both India and Pakistan were initiated with the help of the West. As the Nuclear Control Institute has documented, both programmes emerged from the civilian industry, which was kickstarted with the help of the US ”Atoms for Peace” scheme.
India’s first nuclear device used plutonium produced by a Canadian research reactor and extracted in a reprocessing plant built with the help of the US. Germany supplied tritium, beryllium, heavy water plants and reprocessing components; France delivered uranium and fast-breeder technology; the US provided enriched uranium and several commercial reactors; and the UK distributed fuel, furnaces and the country’s first research reactor.
Pakistan’s heavy water plants came from Canada and Belgium; its uranium enrichment technology, beryllium, tritium, furnaces and milling machines from Germany; its research reactor from the US. All of these components have potential uses in nuclear weapons programmes; most appear to have been deployed for this purpose by India and Pakistan.
In 1998 Clinton approved a US-China nuclear cooperation agreement, despite intelligence briefings showing that China was supplying both Iran and Pakistan with nuclear components, in direct contravention of this treaty. Within a month of the signing of the agreement, China began shipping heavy water to Pakistan in far greater quantities than its civilian programme could have used. The agreement stood.
There are plenty of instruments the international community could use to prevent a nuclear war. It could explain to India and Pakistan that if either nation escalates even the conventional conflict, its leaders could expect to face a war crimes tribunal. It could not only discontinue all arms sales but also apply punitive sanctions to any company assisting the weapons industry in either nation. Most importantly, it could send peacekeepers to hold the lines apart and supervise disarmament.
But there is no peace industry that is equal to the world’s war industry. There are no vested interests to appease, no campaign contributions to be gained from preventing rather than encouraging the use of weapons. As a result the hundreds of thousands of peacekeepers whose deployment is required in Kashmir do not exist. While wars are plotted in loving detail, there is no global peace plan for the territory, despite 55 years of conflict.
In the new world order of which Bush and Blair have spoken, international support for a war pursued for domestic purposes is a moral imperative. Preventing two nations from vaporising each other’s civilians is a moral luxury, rather less pressing than the next visit by the Indian cricket team. Faced with the frightening and complicated task of waging peace rather than war, moral leadership turns to moral flight.