Hold the line and hold steady

A midst a veritable torrent of vitriol from across the border Pakistan appears to have held its nerve in the current stand-off with India. America has now stepped on to the stage by reminding both India and Pakistan on September 29 that nuclear-armed states ought not to threaten, however obliquely, to use atomic weaponry no matter the nature of the conflict. The US has also said that it considered the 18th September attack on the Indian base at Uri an act of terrorism, and has urged restraint on both sides. The question of whether India carried out ‘surgical strikes’ as a response somewhat hangs in the air and rather depends on which definition of a surgical strike one applies.



With India claiming to have launched strikes inside Pakistan and the aforementioned vitriol emanating from New Delhi, Pakistan has rubbished much of what India has to say. Of immediate concern is that there has been a ringing silence in terms of the rest of the world, which has failed to condemn what India is admitting it has done which if true is a violation of sovereignty at least. How Pakistan is to respond to these provocations is presumably the subject of urgent discussion, none of which is likely to be in the public domain. The obvious need for restraint is not limited to the military sphere but extends to the media as well, both social and more widely the electronic. Ill-informed discussion in the Chatterverse serves nobody well and outright falsehoods propagated in a superheated Twitterverse raises the temperature on both sides of the border, anecdotally more on the Indian side than this. For now there appears to be a holding of tension at a plateau, which may provide the wiggle-room for the back-channels to operate. Whatever the endlessly argued rights and wrongs of what is essentially an unhealed wound inflicted by colonialism both sides have to bring restraint into play. Pakistan has and India needs to both quickly and explicitly, because brinkmanship can topple into chaos when played this close to the edge.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 1^st, 2016.

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