War is not the way

India is building a case with the rest of the world, especially the countries that count, to allow it to launch an attack on Pakistan – in retaliation for what it mistakenly thinks is Pakistan’s involvement in the Pahalgam attacks of April 22.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world, in particular the US, is not buying India’s argument or its ‘proofs’ – all unverified and never officially disclosed – that the attackers’ electronic signatures were traced to cities in Pakistan. Perhaps the view of the US on this so far can be summed up in what US President Donald Trump said the other day: that Pakistan and India had been fighting Kashmir for a “thousand years”, and that he was “very close” to both India as well as Pakistan. This further meant that he wasn’t going to accuse Pakistan of anything and that he didn’t agree with New Delhi accusing Islamabad of being involved in the attacks and of using that as a pretext to launch a ‘retaliatory’ attack inside Pakistan.

As for Pakistan, it has played its hand well by offering to be part of a probe into the attack that is neutral and independent it has shown to the rest of the world that it has nothing to hide. In fact, by refusing to agree to this, which is most likely, India will give the impression to the world that it is not in favour of a neutral and independent probe because it has something to hide.

And that brings us to several important questions, none of which are being asked by the mainstream media in India. However, one does see clips on social media of Indian citizens beginning to ask these most basic of questions surrounding the unfortunate attack.

The most obvious of these relate to the attack itself. It took place in a meadow surrounded by dense forests at a height of around 3,000 metres and which is accessible only by foot or horseback. Pahalgam is around 100 kms east of Srinagar, which is around 80-100 kms from the Line of Control. So the question is: where was the security? Why was the Jammu and Kashmir police unable to stop the attack? How could a group of heavily armed men reach a meadow accessible only by foot or horseback without drawing attention?

If, for the sake of argument, the Indian accusations are to be believed that the attackers came from Pakistan then how were they able to cross the LoC and traverse close to 200 kms to the location of the attack without being detected either by the police or the 700,000 Indian army soldiers posted in Indian-occupied Kashmir?

These are some of the very basic questions that one needs to see being asked by the Indian media of its government and its intelligence agencies. But that is not what’s happening at all – the Indian media is basically a ready facilitator of all the baseless allegations and accusations that the Indian government is lobbing at Pakistan.

The oft-repeated though wholly-unverified and basically made-up claim by India that it has traced some of the attackers to cities in Pakistan has yet to be disclosed in detail and simply India saying that this is the case is not going to convince the rest of the world. In fact, a neutral and independent probe, as alluded to by Pakistan’s prime minister and interior minister in recent days, would be able to precisely check the veracity of such claims.

The drumbeat of war in mainstream Indian media is inescapable and it appears as if most of the channels playing it think that a war has casualties and deaths only on one side and that victory will be guaranteed. They also seem to think that the other side will not respond in any way and – more crucially – also seems to conveniently forget that both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons.

You can’t expect to wage a war against a nuclear-armed neighbour and predict with even the smallest degree of accuracy that such a war won’t escalate to a point where either side may end up using its nuclear weapons, or even smaller tactical nuclear weapons. Even a war that is fought at the conventional level and doesn’t escalate – which in itself is very unlikely – will cause massive casualties on both sides.

What India needs to do is to listen to the countries and to its own citizens who are advising it to de-escalate and not think about launching a war. It should instead agree – like Pakistan has agreed – to a neutral and independent probe. Other than the obvious consequence of saving thousands of lives on either side, if India doesn’t, then the theory which is very strongly believed by most Pakistanis – that it was a false flag operation by the government to benefit the BJP and strengthen its Hindutva and anti-minority credentials among its vote bank – will only be reinforced in the eyes of the rest of the world as well.

The writer is a journalist based in Karachi. He tweets/posts @omar_quraishi and can be reached at: omarrquraishi@gmail.com