Kill A Chicken, Scare A Monkey
And other bestial allusions as India warns Obama to back off on Kashmir. Financial Times:
MK Narayanan, India’s national security advisor, said that the new US administration was in danger of dredging up out of date Clinton administration-era strategies in a bid to bring about improved ties between the two nuclear armed neighbours.
“I do think that we could make President Obama understand, if he does nurse any such view, that he is barking up the wrong tree. I think Kashmir today has become one of the quieter and safer places in this part of the world,” Mr Narayanan said in an interview with CNBC TV18.
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The warning comes as Richard Holbrooke, Mr Obama’s special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, prepares to come to the region for the first time in his new capacity. Mr Narayanan is close to Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, and Sonia Gandhi, the president of the ruling Congress Party.
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Last month, David Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary, angered the Indian government by saying that the unresolved dispute over Kashmir was a cause of terrorism in the region. Its vilification of Mr Miliband was interpreted as a tacit signal to Washington to keep out.
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“References made by president Obama, which seem to suggest that there is some kind of link with settlement on Pakistan’s western border and the Kashmir issue certainly have caused concern,” said Mr Narayanan. But he said the new US administration and India had yet to have direct contact over the issue.
C. Raja Mohan, professor of international relations at Singapore’s Nanyang University, said New Delhi’s treatment of Mr Miliband had helped persuade Washington to abandon any overt linkage of the Kashmir dispute with combating extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Washington’s decision to drop India from formal inclusion in Mr Holbrooke’s special envoy mandate reflected these sensitivities.
“You kill a chicken to scare a monkey,” Mr Mohan said at a recent seminar in New Delhi on US relations with South Asia. “We killed the chicken and the monkey got the message.”
Kashmir is a mess dating back more than 60 years with no innocent parties, but at this point, it’s not the dispute over Kashmir that is fueling terrorism in the region. That would be Pakistan’s tolerance for Islamic extremism and harboring of terrorists. It’s like the Middle East dispute that way. It would be nice to resolve it but even if you theoretically did, Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and the Iranian mullahs would still be Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and Iranian mullahs.
Topics: Pakistan, india, terrorists
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:04 am on Wednesday, February 4, 2009
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