Admiral (Ret.) Ramu Ramdas

September 11, October 1, and December 13 are all significant dates in recent history. While the first ended in a war against terrorism in Afghanistan by the international coalition led by the United States, the latter two events almost resulted in a war between India and Pakistan.

The terrorist attacks on the United States and India have brought these two nations closer together in address-ing the common enemy of terrorism. India had been highlighting the dangers of terrorism to the international community since the early nineties, and had also identified its main source to be located in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Such warnings fell on deaf ears, and only the attacks of September 11 made the world community fully appreciate the scope of the threat.

At the same time, the United States is deeply indebted to Pakistan for General Musharraf 's courageous stand against the Taliban and the use of bases in Pakistan for its operations. Of course, greater U.S. presence in Central and South Asia as a sequel to the "war against terror" is not a positive development in terms of regional stability and peace. There are indications that U.S. presence in this region will be of a long duration, which could trigger the development of a second Cold War - with the United States and the West on one side, and China, Russia and India on the other.

Both India and Pakistan belong to the international coalition against terrorism - both signed the UN Security Council Resolutions 1368 and 1373 condemning the attacks of September 11 and reaffirmed their commitment to work together to eliminate the threat of terrorism. The attacks on India of October 1 and December 13 thus infu-riated India. India mounted a huge diplomatic offensive against Pakistan to cease cross-border terrorism and return the twenty terrorists that India claimed were on its wanted list.

This resulted in an eyeball to eyeball confrontation involving nearly a million armed forces of the two countries along their common border. Compounding the danger, both sides are capable of delivering nuclear weapons, yet have only rudimentary command, control, communi-cation and intelligence systems. The exchange time for a missile flight between the two countries is on the order of 2-3 minutes, which does not leave much time for understanding, analyzing, and reacting to perceived attacks.

Domestic compulsions both in India and Pakistan gave rise to much of the rhetoric exchanged between the two countries. In the case of Pakistan, its rhetoric helped manage its radical turn against the Taliban and fundamentalist Islamic groups, which Pakistan and the United States helped to create during the Cold War. In India, the public rhetoric was largely determined by the impending elections to the state assemblies in four states, including the largest, Uttar Pradesh.

General Musharraf 's courageous address of January 12, 2002 included the banning of two groups identified by India as responsible for attacks on its democratic institutions. The General's plan to contain fundamentalism and terrorism within Pakistan and also to stop their implementation of terrorist activities outside Pakistan, including in Jammu and Kashmir, was well received in both government and civil society circles in India and elsewhere. However, the Government of India still maintains that these commitments by General Musharraf have not been translated into action on the ground and therefore the dialogue is not a possibility at present.

General Musharraf followed this up with an offer to enter into a 'no-war' pact with India, and to discuss the denuclearization of South Asia. Unfortunately, this offer to discuss nuclear matters has also been rejected by India. India's test of the Agni II solid-fueled rocket in January 2002 was an inadvisable and unfortunate complication.

Despite all this apparent hostility between the two countries at official levels, peoples' groups and peace coalitions on both sides of the border made substantial efforts with their respective governments to avoid war and to resume a dialogue. Diplomatic interventions at the highest levels from various countries, such as those by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, supplemented these ongoing efforts by civil society groups to ensure restraint. The visit to the United States by General Musharraf in February reaffirmed the lowering of tensions.

As these events make clear, both India and Pakistan must do everything possible to return to normalcy. Despite three well-meant agreements between the two countries - namely, the Tashkent Declaration of 1965; the Simla Agreement of 1972; and the Lahore Declaration of 1998, wherein both countries had agreed to settle all their out-standing issues only by peaceful means - they failed to do so. This has been mainly due to the absence of a neutral monitoring and implementation authority, which should now be put in place to ensure that the next agreement, whenever it materializes, does not meet the same fate as those before it. Perhaps a few countries within the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) could perform this role.

In addition, for any nuclear disarmament to happen in South Asia, the major nuclear powers must also participate on an equal basis. As a starting point for such a process, I suggest that all nuclear weapons states should "de-alert" their weapons under the auspices of an international agency. De-alerting would require that the warheads be physically separated from the missile or other vector for delivering the warhead. Since this process would be under international supervision, no weapon could ever be used accidentally - or even intentionally - outside the purview of this international monitoring agency.

Unfortunately, recent steps taken by the five nuclear weapon states, and the United States in particular, have undercut the credibility of their calls for India and Pakistan to refrain from developing and deploying nuclear weapons. The decision by the Bush administration to unilaterally withdraw from the Anti-ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty is not helpful, nor are the administration's plans for the possible use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states, its research and development of new nuclear weapons, and the resumption of nuclear testing, all advanced recently in the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review. These decisions are likely to influence other countries' per-ceptions of the military utility of nuclear weapons and damage international and regional efforts toward nonpro-liferation and disarmament.

It is time, therefore, that the over 180 non-nuclear signatories to the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) demand that the United States, along with the remaining four nuclear weapon states, demonstrate their commitment to the legal obligations of complete and general disarmament under this treaty. The non-nuclear signatories also need to present a united opposition to nuclear weapon programs in India and Pakistan. The non-nuclear weapon states in South Asia - Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan - must especially unite in opposition to plans by India and Pakistan to develop and deploy nuclear weapons in the region. The use of these weapons by either India or Pakistan would have impacts beyond the boundaries of these nations and would threaten the survival of them all.

Admiral (ret.) Ramu Ramdas is former Chief of the Indian Navy. He and his wife, Lalita, are both active in international peace efforts, and they serve as national leaders of India's Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace. They presented a joint lecture at the Kroc Institute on February 28, 2002.

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