[Reader-list] Wake-up call (Henry Porter)

[Harsh Kapoor]

The Guardian
Wednesday May 29, 2002

Wake-up call

For the first time since the Cuban missile crisis, nuclear war is not 
a distant threat but a real possibility and the lives of 12 million 
people are at risk. But you may not have realised - perhaps because 
the rest of the world doesn't seem too bothered, or because India and 
Pakistan are a long way away. Or maybe you just don't want it to 
spoil your World Cup. Henry Porter says it's time to take notice

Henry Porter

We always knew it would be something like this - two peoples 
myopically locked in ancestral loathing and equipped with nuclear 
weapons rush to war before the rest of the world has time to prevent 
the disaster. Deterrence may just work this time. We must pray that 
it does but meanwhile it is imperative to realise how the world came 
to the point where a nuclear exchange became an admissible rather 
than an unthinkable possibility.

Since September 11 the world has changed dramatically and in ways 
that we have so far yet to understand. If India and Pakistan had come 
to this pass last summer there would have been a far greater 
diplomatic effort to bring the nations to their senses. UN Secretary 
General Kofi Annan would have been shuttling between Islamabad and 
Delhi or standing on the border in Kashmir (which incidentally is 
where I believe he should be now), and America would have been 
galvanised by the crisis, putting its full might into making sure 
that these two countries understood that the nuclear option is 
unacceptable to the whole of humanity.

But since 9/11 the processes of conflict resolution have been 
diminished and the norms of international behaviour have been 
degraded. Al-Qaida's attacks not only terrorised the west, they also 
coarsened us and narrowed our ability to engage in a pro bono 
diplomacy. While Pakistan and India were mobilising these past few 
days, the Bush administration has been completely diverted by the 
president's tour of Russia and Europe and the continuing agenda of 
how to respond to the threat of al-Qaida.

Every emergency and every event is now passed through a new and 
dangerously egotistical filter that was erected by the Americans last 
autumn and is designed to see events exclusively in the context of 
American security and peace of mind. We have, to some degree, been 
converted to this process, for American security does matter to us 
all even if we don't like to admit it - but it means that situations 
which do not appear to have an immediate bearing on US concerns fade 
from our attention. Kashmir, although just under 500 miles from the 
theatre of war in Afghanistan, has been almost completely neglected 
as an important issue because the US and Europe were primarily 
concerned about President Musharraf's assistance in toppling the 
Taliban.

In other words, the understanding of an entire region, its 
complexities and competing needs, has been swept aside in the pursuit 
of one western priority.

As important as this is, it is remarkable how little we have seen of 
Annan and how powerless and negligible his contributions have seemed 
in respect of the wars on Afghanistan and in the Middle East. In 
these times of crisis he has turned out not to be the statesman that 
we were all certain lay beneath that collected exterior of his, but a 
rather slight and inoffensive figure.

Admittedly his influence has been in part reduced by the sheer force 
of American unilateralist military action. The arguments for 
retaliation were compelling last year, at least to the US and British 
governments, and the UN more or less went along with them. But the UN 
has since failed to rise above the shock of September 11 and provide 
vision in this new era of disorder. For example, although the 
security council has voted 14-1 against possible military action in 
Iraq, there is no sense that this features in American calculations, 
no sense that Annan has any power to impress upon America the 
importance of the vote. If America's perception of the world's needs 
has been subsumed by its own powerful sense of injury and outrage, 
then it was for Annan to develop a rhetoric which goes beyond one 
nation's interests. That is what he and the UN are for.

As Malcolm Rifkind said on Monday's Newsnight, it is astonishing that 
the security council is not in permanent session. It is also 
remarkable that there is not a greater sense of international alarm 
at a situation which approaches the Cuban missile crisis in its 
gravity. Annan should be in the subcontinent conveying a compelling 
message to the Indian and Pakistani people which is that the world 
will not contemplate such vast destruction and pain. Instead he talks 
to the leaders by phone and issues weak statements from UN 
headquarters which nobody takes the slightest notice of. How 
different things would be if America had not got itself into a muddle 
with Pakistan - on one border an ally of US's war against terrorism 
and on another a sponsor of Islamist insurgency. It could then back 
Annan with all its conviction and might.

American intelligence estimates put the toll in the event of a full 
exchange of the two nuclear arsenals at 12 million dead with maybe 
seven million wounded - an instant slaughter unprecedented in the 
history of mankind. But despite the movement of missiles yesterday 
and the tests which took place in Pakistan over the weekend, the 
possibility of nuclear warfare still strikes the west as either 
remote or not really very important. British newspapers carried these 
figures on their inside pages, if at all, and the general impression 
is that India and Pakistan have got a nerve to distract us from the 
exciting run-up to the World Cup.

Possibly that is summarising things a bit flippantly but there is, I 
think, a failure to understand the scale of the threat . We admit 
this terrible possibility and allow the contemplation of the figures 
and the crossing of a threshold where this horror becomes part of our 
record. Why are we guilty of such drift, of such apathy? Have we 
forgotten how the second world war ended in Japan, or is there maybe 
something more sinister at work, a voice which is saying, "If there 
is a going to be nuclear war to remind us all of the utter horror, it 
might as well be in south Asia?" Or is it simply part of our 
collective nature to expect these large-scale exterminations once 
every couple of generations?

If similar hostilities menaced Europe the concern would be a great 
deal sharper. Few of us would be able to concentrate on our lives, 
let alone on the World Cup. But as it is this stand-off is taking 
place many thousands of miles away and one has to consider the 
possibility that there is a racist element in our thinking which 
quietly suggests the two countries could easily afford to suffer 19 
million casualties. I hope not, but how else do we explain our own 
disengagement?

One columnist, writing in the Daily Mail, raised the issue that it 
might be racist to have reservations about Indian and Pakistan 
controlling nuclear weapons because they cannot be trusted. This is 
to miss the point profoundly because the objections to these two 
countries developing weapons of mass destruction was because they 
have gone to war three times since partition in 1947 and their 
relations are characterised by congenital mistrust. The second and 
perhaps more subtle reason is the differential that exists between 
the capabilities and understanding of the Indian and Pakistani masses 
and the regimes which have acquired these weapons. It is plain, at 
least in Pakistan where up to two thirds of people are thought to be 
near illiterate, that there is very little understanding of the 
consequences of a nuclear exchange. In effect it would be the end of 
their nation. Clearly Musharraf and the Pakistani elite see that, but 
under a military dictatorship all that stands between the people of 
Pakistan and catastrophe is the balance of one man's mind. It is 
hardly racist to observe that neighbouring countries with convulsive 
politics and deep loathing should be discouraged from the development 
of these weapons.

This is important because there must be much greater international 
efforts against nuclear proliferation. It is all very well America 
and Russia agreeing over the weekend to reduce their arsenals, but 
their pact makes no difference whatsoever to the security of the very 
large amounts of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium that is 
available in Russia. In 1998, for example, Russia's federal security 
service foiled an attempt to steal 18 kilograms of HEU - nearly 
enough for a bomb - from a weapons laboratory in the Urals. In 2001, 
six grams of plutonium were found hidden in a ship in a Latvian port. 
In the past six years rods, pellets and plates of radioactive 
material have been smuggled out of the former Soviet Union. This 
requires our concentration and the focus of international effort. But 
what did the Bush administration do when it arrived in our lives? It 
proposed a cut in the non-proliferation budget of the energy 
department of $41m (£28m).

The fact is that material is out there, both illicitly and with 
legitimate regimes, and the west continues to endorse this situation 
by trading in components and conventional weapons. As Jack Straw 
pleads with both sides to see reason in Kashmir his case is eroded by 
the history of British arms sales to the subcontinent. We are 
anything but pure in this matter and some time soon we have to grasp 
that the trade in arms with these countries is no way to effect peace.

If the two sides withdraw and we are able to get on with life, the 
thing that we must take away from the situation was the failure of 
the international community, of American diplomacy and of Europe's 
cohesion. The dispute developed right under our noses, yet only this 
week was anything like a response produced, and that was well below 
par. I suppose in the end what we are talking about is lack of 
leadership and vision in the UN, US and Europe, but there has also 
been a failure of imagination. Opinion counts for something in these 
matters and we are at least equipped with the knowledge to form those 
opinions and express them. Our disengagement up to now has been 
regrettable.