The Hindu : A dangerous doctrine

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Apr 07, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

A dangerous doctrine

THE VAJPAYEE GOVERNMENT is playing with fire by claiming the right to invoke the doctrine of pre-emption, as enunciated by George W. Bush. In the India-Pakistan context such tactics make little sense militarily, diplomatically or politically and are fraught with dangerous consequences, besides being self-defeating. "Every country has the right to pre-emption and the doctrine is not the prerogative of any one nation," Jaswant Singh, Finance Minister, said in Washington six months ago, setting off alarm bells in international capitals. Now comes the External Affairs Minister, Yashwant Sinha's statement, during an interview to a news agency, hinting of a "fresh thinking" in the Government on dealing with terrorism in the wake of the Nadimarg killings and, again invoking the Bush doctrine. The implication is clear: if acts of militant violence in this country are traced to, or even suspected to originate in, Pakistan and its intelligence agencies the Government has the right to take pre-emptive action. Less transparent is the attempt to inject the BJP's sectarian agenda into the country's foreign policy. It betrays a surprising blindness to the ground realities of the security situation. Such statements from Government, primarily BJP spokesmen, can no longer be treated as mere rhetoric and left unchallenged since their frequency of utterance lends them a veneer of accepted or even acceptable policy.

Diplomatically, such statements are unproductive and give the impression that New Delhi's halting pursuit of peace and good neighbourliness with Pakistan is not genuine. Mr. Sinha's claim that India had a better case for taking pre-emptive action than the U.S. has vis-a-vis Iraq also flies in the face of strategic logic, ignoring as it does the fact that when Pakistan went nuclear in 1998, India lost the advantage of its superiority in conventional forces. In the current situation of nuclear parity, therefore, all talk of preventive strikes must sound extremely irresponsible. They were and are no option at all. It is this realisation of the danger inherent in any pre-emptive action by New Delhi that has provoked a series of cautionary appeals for restraint from the U.S. and the U.K., besides France. This concern was fully reflected in the joint statement issued by the American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, on the sidelines of an Anglo-American meet on March 27. The statement was also a response to India's concerns following the Nadimarg killings and addressed the issue of cross-border terrorism, urging Pakistan to strictly respect the Line of Control. Its counterproductive refusal to resume the bilateral dialogue with Pakistan apart, there is little political sense in striking such belligerent postures, which will not be appreciated by the international community.

The Bush administration spokesman pointed out in Washington on Friday, obviously in answer to charges of double standards, that there are overwhelming differences between the issues of Iraq and Kashmir. These, however, have to do with the situation and the nations involved, not necessarily in the way the U.S. views things on the subcontinent. Pre-emption certainly can have no place in the relations between two nuclearised neighbours. Besides, as the debate over the Bush doctrine of pre-emption across the world reveals, there is a growing consensus that pre-emptive attacks would seriously undermine the basis of international peace. They would be a serious breach of international law, too, as a unanimous United Nations Security Council resolution viewed the dramatic Israeli air attack which destroyed one of Iraq's nuclear reactors. The American media had then called the action state-sponsored terrorism. The Bush doctrine notwithstanding, pre-emptive strikes as an instrument of State policy are dangerous and cannot be ever considered seriously.

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