The Aftermath of 26/11

Shivshankar Menon’s book, Choices, talks of India’s decision to not go to war after the 26/11 Mumbai attack. That chapter of his book isn’t very satisfying; but I guess that’s inevitable due to the very nature of the problem called Pakistan.

 

The option of going to war was considered, writes Menon. And dismissed. First, he said, war would have converted 26/11 into “just another India-Pakistan dispute” in global eyes. External powers (US, China) would have forced an early stop to the war and India would have achieved nothing. Second, even a limited “surgical strike” at LeT facilities would have been pointless – their key cadre would have been evacuated long before, and worse, their facilities were deliberately built in densely populated civilian areas, and one knows how the Western press would have painted any such casualties. But more importantly, even such a strike would achieve nothing in the bigger scheme of things – Pakistan would continue to sponsor, train and send in more terrorists.

 

Ok, but did not going to war do any good for India either? Only minimally:

“The real success was in organizing the international community, in isolating Pakistan… India began to get unprecedented cooperation from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf countries.”

While it doesn’t help India, Pakistan itself pays a massive cost for that isolation. Not that they care, you may say. But it does have consequences – they matter less and less internationally (just see how their claim to “control” the Taliban has no takers today), and the “image” cost of doing any kind of business with Pakistan for any country (other than China) has become impossibly high. And that becomes a vicious cycle – when nobody wants to do business, their economy matters even less, and the cycle reinforces itself.

“We may consider where India and Pakistan were ten years ago in terms of security, internal development, and international standing and where they are today.”

 

Pakistan’s refusal to act against any of the perpetrators of 26/11 has given India the moral justification to act after future attacks, as and how it deems fit. Nobody internationally condemned India when it carried out the commando attacks after the Uri attack or even after the surgical strikes after Balakot.

 

Lastly, Menon brings up an interesting effect today:

“Thanks to Pakistan’s secular decline into irrelevance… Pakistan is increasingly becoming a single-issue country in Indian discourse, and that issue is the zero-sum one of security. As a result, it is harder and harder to interest a young and aspirational Indian public outside the Punjab (and its colonies, such as Delhi) in the relationship with Pakistan.”

So true. India v/s Australia is the great cricket rivalry now. Hell, we don’t even need Pakistan as the enemy in popular spy serials like The Family Man (it was the LTTE cadre in Season 2, and it will be China in Season 3)…

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