What is the current status of the conflict between India and Pakistan? In your opinion, does this conflict have a distracting influence on Pakistan so that it is not sufficiently concentrating on sorting out the Taliban?
This question started in a thread:"Is China starting to occupy India?"
http://www.frihost.com/forums/vt-110952.html#923676
It was suggested that a conflict between China and India would distract India from the Pakistan/India conflict, sofficiently so that Pakistan would be able to concentrate 100% on its conflict with the Taliban.
Would you say that the "lion share" of Pakistan's focus is on its conflict with India, therefore distracting it from its focus on getting rid of the Taliban? Refer interview below ((quoted by Ocalhoun) with Zakaria, who is a foreign affairs analyst with CNN. Do you agree with what Zakaria is saying below?
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/05/01/zakaria.pakistan/index.html:
This question started in a thread:"Is China starting to occupy India?"
http://www.frihost.com/forums/vt-110952.html#923676
It was suggested that a conflict between China and India would distract India from the Pakistan/India conflict, sofficiently so that Pakistan would be able to concentrate 100% on its conflict with the Taliban.
Would you say that the "lion share" of Pakistan's focus is on its conflict with India, therefore distracting it from its focus on getting rid of the Taliban? Refer interview below ((quoted by Ocalhoun) with Zakaria, who is a foreign affairs analyst with CNN. Do you agree with what Zakaria is saying below?
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/05/01/zakaria.pakistan/index.html:
| Quote: |
| Zakaria: The Pakistani military has been in a state of denial. It spends most of its time, energy and resources planning for a war against India, a war on its eastern frontier. That's the war they know and are comfortable with -- a big conventional deployment. And for the last three decades, by seeing India as the enemy, the military could get big budgets -- they had a much larger enemy -- but also know that there is actually only a small possibility of a war.
Fighting the Taliban is a much more complicated guerrilla war against a complex insurgency. First of all, you actually have to fight this war, as opposed to the cold war with India. Secondly, if you fight it, you can lose. So, they have been trying their best not to deal with this. That's what the peace deals were all about, trying to finesse their way out of the situation. But this is now the moment of truth for the Pakistani military. CNN: Are they equipped to deal with the Taliban? Zakaria: If you mean, "Do they know how to do counterinsurgency?" No. Again, their whole training has been to fight a war against India. And they have not really wanted to embrace this role of counterinsurgency warfare. This is messy stuff, as we learned in Iraq. CNN: Anything we can do? Zakaria: Force the Pakistani military to reorient their basic strategy to recognize that these jihadi groups are the existential threat to their existence. We give the Pakistanis a huge amount of aid, both military and civilian. The military always wants more. Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "We need the U.S. to share modern technology in antiterrorist engagement. Pakistan needs night-vision equipment, jammers that can knock out FM radio transmissions by the terrorists, and a larger, modernized fleet of helicopter gunships for ground support in the massive sweeps that are necessary to contain, repel and destroy the enemy." He goes on to indicate the United States has not been helpful. "Yet Washington has been reluctant to share this modern equipment, and to train our military in anti-terrorism techniques, because of concerns that these systems could be used against India. Such concerns are misplaced. Pakistanis understand that the primary threat to our homeland today is not from our neighbor to the east but from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on our border with Afghanistan." |
