If the CIA is watching India and Pakistan now, it will have to do better than it did in 1998.In 1998, the CIA subjected India to strict surveillance to ensure it was complying with its commitment not to test nuclear weapons. The agency used satellites, communications intercepts and agents to watch the nuclear facility at Pokhran in Rajasthan state. India could not detonate warheads, which would inevitably lead Pakistan to follow suit, without the United States knowing in advance. Or so the United States thought.Washington went into shock on May 11, 1998, when Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced that his country had just detonated not one, but five nuclear warheads at Pokhran. “India is now a nuclear power state,” Vajpayee declared. R. Jeffrey Smith reported two days later in The Washington Post that CIA analysts responsible for monitoring India’s nuclear program “had not expected the tests and were not on alert, several officials said. They were, according to one senior official, asleep at their homes and did not see the (satellite) pictures until they arrived at work in the morning.” U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby called the negligence “the biggest failure of our intelligence-gathering agencies in the past 10 years or more.” Pakistan responded by testing five of its nuclear bombs on May 28. Pandora’s box was wide open, threatening mass destruction to the Asian subcontinent if the Pakistani and Indian armies squared off along the Line of Control that separated their forces in the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir. That happened a year later when Pakistani paramilitaries masquerading as indigenous Kashmiri rebel jihadists penetrated the Line of Control in Kashmir’s Kargil region. The Indian army confronted them, and U.S. intelligence detected Pakistan moving tactical nuclear weapons onto the battlefield. American diplomat Bruce Reidel wrote in his informative book, Avoiding Armageddon: America, India, and Pakistan to the Brink and Back, “The last war that India and Pakistan fought, over Kargil, threated to expand to a nuclear conflict.” It didn’t go nuclear, following U.S. President Bill Clinton’s demand that Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif withdraw his forces. It was a close call.A Matter of International ConcernIf the CIA is watching India and Pakistan now, it will have to do better than it did in 1998. In 2019, with passions high over India’s abrogation of Kashmir’s legal, if fictitious, autonomy, the outcome would not be waking up to discover one side or the other had tested weapons. It would be the sight of nuclear war taking millions of lives. Although the stakes in Kashmir could not be higher, the United States and much of the international community call the dispute India’s “internal affair” or a “bilateral” issue between India and Pakistan. It isn’t. A potential nuclear conflagration cannot be anything other than a matter of international peace and security. The Indian and Pakistani armed forces possess both strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, which local commanders could use on the battlefield in populated areas. This would be the first use in war of atomic weapons since the U.S. destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.The possibility of the conflict going nuclear may have increased on Aug. 16 when Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh seemed to abandon India’s “no first use” doctrine when he tweeted that “India has strictly adhered to this doctrine. What happens in the future depends on the circumstances.” The circumstances are not hopeful. Correspondents for The New York Times in Kashmir reported meeting a herdsman beside his flock in the Kashmiri capital, Srinigar:As a car carrying a reporter slowed down to approach him, he sprang up and jogged to the window.”We are ready to pick up guns,” he said, unprompted.If the decadeslong armed rebellion in Kashmir grows more intense in response to India’s revocation of the region’s autonomy and its imposition of a total security lockdown, India will blame Pakistan, which in years past supported Kashmiri insurgents. Imran Khan, who became Pakistan’s prime minister in August 2018, was not involved in his predecessors’ interference in Indian-controlled Kashmir.Seeking a Moderating VoiceFollowing Modi’s clampdown in Kashmir, Khan has sought mediation support from U.S. President Donald Trump (who had offered to mediate when he met Khan at the White House in July), the United Nations, fellow Muslim leaders and countries that might influence Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His pleas, he recently told me over the telephone, fell on deaf ears. His problem is how to avoid war while defending the people of Kashmir, who are overwhelmingly Muslim in India’s only Muslim-majority state. Muslims throughout India, who have been subjected to new tests to prove their right to citizenship, are living in fear of Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.India and Pakistan came to blows last February, following an insurgent attack on Indian troops in Kashmir. The Pakistanis downed an Indian fighter jet and captured its pilot, Abhinandan Varthaman. When Khan returned the Indian pilot on March 1, Modi did not acknowledge his conciliatory gesture. Nor has his government been willing to discuss Kashmir, whose people were promised a plebiscite on their future by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1947. The vote never took place, but several wars have. The question is, what do the people of Kashmir — those in the Indian-held two-thirds of the region, the Pakistani-held western third and the Hindu Kashmiris who were expelled from their homes in 1947 and are still officially displaced — want? No one is asking them, but that may be the only way to save them, and the world, from nuclear war.The Question That Never Gets Asked About Kashmir is republished with the permission of Stratfor Worldview, a geopolitical intelligence and advisory firm.Image: Reuters.
August 24, 2019Read More
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August 24, 2019Read More
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With well over twenty candidates vying for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, the Republican side appears downright quaint. Joe Walsh wants to change that. The former one-term congressman, radio host, and inveterate Twitter personality is seriously considering a primary challenge to incumbent Donald Trump. Walsh has said he’ll make a final decision by Labor Day, with an announcement as early as this weekend.Walsh, elected to represent Illinois in the Tea Party wave of 2010, would challenge him from the Right, making the case that Trump has too many unfulfilled promises to deserve reelection. But more than that, Walsh wants to smooth out the edges to Trump, which he says are toxic electorally and ethically. “The fact is, Mr. Trump is a racial arsonist who encourages bigotry and xenophobia to rouse his base and advance his electoral prospects. In this, he inspires imitators,” wrote Walsh in a New York Times op-ed last week, testing the waters of his candidacy.Walsh told Politico that he doesn’t think this would be a suicide mission. “There’s a drumbeat from a lot of people out there for somebody who wants to take this on,” he said, confident that he could get financial support from dissatisfied Republicans. Donald Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is currently over eighty percent, and major donors Charles Koch and Robert Mercer, who opposed Trump’s nomination in 2016, have made their peace with the party leader.“A lot of what he’s saying is that Trump doesn’t have support from within the Republican Party, and I think the obvious answer is that he does. And I think criticizing Trump as being a conman, and immoral, and a bad example for children, I think that criticism has already been factored into Trump supporters’ equation,” explained Geoffrey Kabaservice, director of political studies at the Niskanen Center. “A lot of them understand that he’s not the nicest guy out there, but they feel like he’s fighting for their interest and they’re going to support him to the hilt.”However, despite his play for decency, Joe Walsh is far from fitting the “nice guy” mold himself. The potential candidate has years of controversies, insensitive statements, and loose language at his back.Walsh has a history of using the n-word on Twitter, typically complaining about his inability to use it on air or making false equivalencies between its use and the terms “redneck” or “cracker.”After the twin mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Walsh was very critical of Trump’s response. “Today, our biggest domestic terror threat is white American men radicalized by white supremacy. Conservatives must be honest enough to acknowledge this,” tweeted Walsh. But in 2017, regarding the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Walsh said “I’m sick and tired of the Sandy Hook parents. They’re partisan & political. They can be attacked just like anyone else.” When someone took issue with his language, Walsh continued. “Oh grow up. These Sandy Hook parents are anti-gun partisans. We have every right to criticize them. Deal with it.”In his op-ed Walsh accused the president of inciting violence with his language. But Walsh has also tested how far partisan language can go. “On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?” he asked his audience before the 2016 election. Earlier that year, after the shooting of police officers in Dallas, Walsh said, “This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you.” The latter tweet was removed by Twitter for violating its terms of service.Interestingly, one thing Walsh does agree with the president on is his response to the violence in Charlottesville in 2017. “Why we’re pissed & what Trump got right: TWO hateful ideologies converged in Charlottesville. The media denounces on, ignores the other,” he said. Walsh even attacked the “DC GOP” he’s now trying to court because “they stabbed Trump after Charlottesville.”There are problems of message consistency as well. In June 2018 Walsh said, “The media is NOT the enemy of the American people. Anyone saying that ought to be ashamed of themselves,” rebuking the president’s preferred turn of phrase as dangerous and un-American. But in October 2016 Walsh told the media, “You are the enemy.”“What if the guy sent to Washington to ‘drain the swamp’ turns out to be the most corrupt person to ever inhabit the White House?” asked Walsh in May. But his own corruption may follow his campaign. In 2011, during his only term in the House, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) named Walsh among the most corrupt members of Congress. Alleging that he was “a deadbeat dad,” the organization pointed to court documents showing that at the time Walsh owed over $100,000 in unpaid child support.Since his announcement in 2015, Donald Trump has been dogged by his promotion of birtherism in 2011 and 2012, the accusation that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. But even more recently, Joe Walsh lent credence to the conspiracy that Obama was a secret Muslim. “The truth: as practiced by most Muslims, Islam is not a religion. These Muslims are at war w us. Barack Obama, a Muslim, is on their side,” Walsh said in 2015. As late as summer 2017, Walsh was making the same accusation, including a defense of Trump. “Cracks me up that after 8 yrs of a Muslim, Socialist, community organizer in the White House, people are worried about Trump. Hilarious.” Just last year, Walsh continued to defend the position. “I have a right to call Obama a Muslim . . . That’s America.”A deep-seeded fear of Islam appears to motivate a lot of Walsh’s political positions. Claiming that “Muslims . . . have destroyed Europe,” Walsh wants to explicitly stifle all Muslim immigration to the United States. Walsh has been supportive of President Trump’s travel ban, praised his cuts to the number of refugees admitted, and wants to give preference to Christian refugees over Muslim ones during selection.“There won’t be peace in that part of the world until Muslims want peace, until they recognize Israel’s right to exist, and until they join the modern world,” Walsh said. This is why the former congressman favors a U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, Syria, and the region-at-large.A part of the region Walsh doesn’t want to disengage from is Israel. He even used his devotion to Israel as his motivation for hating Obama. “I don’t believe Obama is a Muslim. And I continue to apologize for having ever said that. I constantly let my disgust with his policy toward Israel get the better of me,” he said last week. Walsh supports Trump’s moving of the U.S. embassy towards Jerusalem and has been even more critical of Israel critic Rep. Ilhan Omar than the commander-in-chief.One of the biggest policy differences between Trump and Walsh is on Russian-American relations. Calling Trump “unpatriotic,” after agreeing to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018, Walsh said “we know whose side he’s on.” Walsh theorized that “Putin must have something on Trump,” engaging in the same rampart conspiracy that has plagued the country for three years.It was Trump’s diplomatic outreach that permanently ostracized the rightwing radio host. “That’s it. That should be the final straw. It is for me.”“While Walsh’s Trump conversion appears to me to be sincere, he is poorly suited to make the argument that Never Trump is about the president’s temperament, vulgarity and overall fitness for office,” said James Antle, editor of The American Conservative.Joe Walsh has acknowledged as much. “To be sure, I’ve had my share of controversy. On more than one occasion, I questioned Mr. Obama’s truthfulness about his religion. At times, I expressed hate for my political opponents. We now see where this can lead. There’s no place in our politics for personal attacks like that, and I regret making them,” he wrote in his op-ed.“I think he seems to be sincere in his criticisms of Trump. I don’t think it comes across as just being a thing he’s doing for his own self-interest. I think he genuinely does think Trump is dangerous and maybe even a threat to the continued viability of the Republican Party,” Kabaservice said.Joe Walsh isn’t the only candidate seeking to challenge Trump. To his left is William Weld, who announced his campaign for the Republican nomination in February. Weld is the former governor of Massachusetts (1991–1997) and was the vice-presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party in 2016. Weld broke a pledge with the Libertarian Party by announcing his candidacy as a Republican.“If Walsh runs, he’ll do more harm to William Weld than to Trump. There just aren’t a lot of Never Trump votes to go around. What’s interesting is that Walsh and Weld both originally come from the pro-abortion, anti-second amendment, left of the GOP, but both have tried rebranding: Weld as a libertarian, Walsh as a Tea Party bandwaggoner,” said Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age. McCarthy is referring to Walsh’s original run for Congress in 1996, where he referred to himself as a moderate Republican.Walsh’s past improprieties have not gone unnoticed. “It negates one of the main reasons people dislike Trump in the first place, suggesting some of elite anti-Trump animus is really about his deviations from neoconservatism,” Antle told the National Interest.J. Arthur Bloom, deputy editor of The Daily Caller, believes Walsh’s bad behavior shines a light on the real motivations of the Never Trump movement. “The Joe Walsh thing puts the lie to all the NeverTrumper talk about civility and decency. It was never about that, it was that they didn’t get to be in charge with Trump, so they took their ball and went home,” he tweeted.“I think a lot of the people hoping for a primary challenge to Trump were hoping that the challenger would be more of a national figure. Someone like Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, for instance,” said Kabaservice. Hogan had previously considered a 2020 primary challenge, but decided against it. “[N]ot just because he seemed to be carrying the torch for an older and perhaps better Republican Party . . . but also because he was somebody who was one of the most popular governors of the United States right now and actually was governing at the present time. And I don’t think Walsh checks those boxes at this point.”There aren’t many boxes Joe Walsh does check. “True cons are truly cons, just not conservatives,” quipped McCarthy.Hunter DeRensis is a reporter at the National Interest.Image: Wikimedia Commons
August 24, 2019Read More
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