World powers today must coalesce their efforts, engineer a way to defuse the simmering LoC violence
HUB: This is with reference to Talat Masood’s article, “India’s dangerous belligerence” published in The Express Tribune on January 7. I agree with the writer’s opinion in every respect. Undoubtedly, India has spared no effort to debilitate Pakistan and in this regard, Afghanistan has been a very favourable land for India to wage a clandestine war against Pakistan since after the American invasion of Afghanistan.
India has incessantly been fanning insurgent activities in Pakistan. Besides this, reports also show that India spends millions on insurgent activities in Pakistan via Afghanistan. After the withdrawal of Nato forces, India has unfortunately lost its ally, Hamid Karzai, who played a monumental role in asserting Indian presence in Afghanistan.
With Karzai out of the picture, now India has only one way to destabilise Pakistan, and that is through Line of Control (LoC) violations. This explicitly exposes its brazenness. Unluckily, Pakistan’s goodwill gestures have never been reciprocated well by India. It is high time that India realised the importance of a balanced relationship between itself and Pakistan as any all-out war, or even a continued proxy war, will be a source of great concern for the international community as a whole. Pakistan and India must not shrug off the words of Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy. Once when asked about the casualties that may be the result of an all-out nuclear war between India and Pakistan, he had said that almost 13 per cent of the world’s population would die. This is indeed a staggering figure and should be a cause of much concern for both India and Pakistan, and also for international organisations which have been dilly-dallying in mediating on the sources of conflict between India and Pakistan for many years.
World powers today must coalesce their efforts, keep their vested interests aside and engineer a way to defuse the simmering LoC violence between the two nuclear-armed countries before it boils over and spills over into the lives of millions of people of the subcontinent. Neglecting this conflict at this point of time is just criminal.
Ayaz Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, January 9th, 2015.
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