[mobglob-discuss] Wake up call

[martin william fournier]

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

Wednesday May 29, 2002
The Guardian

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.



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