Ranjit Devraj

While the US is portraying its new relationship with Pakistan as one focused on its ‘war against terrorism’, analysts in India fear that this could end up stoking the arms race in South Asia. For instance, the accordance of ‘major non-North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) ally’ status to Pakistan, announced by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in Islamabad on March 18 was a bombshell for India.

Pakistan’s new status has already led to several benefits for it. On Wednesday, US President Bush ordered the lifting of sanctions imposed on Pakistan soon after Musharraf led a military coup in October 1999 against the elected government of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. This cleared the decks for the resumption of arms sales to Pakistan, including a long-pending deal to sell it F-16 fighters.According to Prof C Raja Mohan, who teaches international relations at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, India would be keen to limit US arms sales to Pakistan and ensure that strong ties with Washington would not lead to a revival of cross-border infiltration into Indian-controlled Kashmir by militants based on the Pakistan-controlled part of the divided territory.

India is already on an arms buying spree. It has just acquired an aircraft carrier from Russia, inked a long-pending deal to buy advanced jet trainers from the Britain and acquiring airborne early warning (AEW) systems from Israel. New Delhi’s consternation over Pakistan’s non-NATO ally status proceeds first from the fact that it did not expect an elevation for Pakistan so soon after the revelations in February that nuclear technology had been leaked by its nuclear establishment to Libya, Iran and North Korea. Second, it followed a suggestion by Pakistan President Musharraf on March 14, while making a video address to an eminent persons’ conclave in New Delhi, that Kashmir remains a core issue and that unless it is addressed in the recently resumed dialogue between the two countries, “everything will slide back to square one”.

Musharraf, when he as Pakistan’s army chief, is said to have masterminded the incursions at Kargil. This led to an undeclared war between the two countries in 1999, a year after both countries declared themselves nuclear powers.India and Pakistan are scheduled to hold the next round of diplomatic dialogue in May or June as part of a series of confidence-building measures begun soon after Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Musharraf pledged to work toward building peace during a regional summit in Islamabad in January. Since then, the two nuclear-armed rivals have been attempting to build peace through increasing business and sporting ties and by increasing travel facilities for citizens overland and by air.

Given its status of a major non-NATO ally, Pakistan is now clubbed with a group of close US allies that in the Asia-Pacific region includes Japan, Australia, Israel, Egypt, South Korea, New Zealand and the Philippines. All these countries may stockpile US military hardware and benefit from loans to finance arms deals.

This means that except for nuclear bombs and missiles, Pakistan can buy almost anything that the US military uses and at the same prices, Indian analysts say. Massive arms transfers and aid to Pakistan by the Washington during a covert war to build up the Taliban and expel the former Soviet Union from Afghanistan ended up being used for what many here call a ‘proxy war’ against India in Kashmir. The South Waziristan tribal agency in an area of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan, where the Pakistan army is now battling al-Qaeda on Washington’s bidding, also happens to border Kashmir on the east. — IPS