The U.S. Should Accept the Fact That Pakistan and India Both Have Nuclear Capability

By Khalid Hasan

It is increasingly assumed by America's media, the administration and its assorted security and South Asian experts that India, Pakistan and their governments are straining at the leash to go at each other with large, fire-breathing armies led by mad generals and backed up with nuclear weapons.

This doomsday scenario, now synonymous with accepted truth, makes it difficult to view the nuclear question in South Asia rationally. The factual basis of this perception is highly tenuous. Last spring in a meandering thriller-style piece in the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, who made a name for himself as one of America's ace investigative reporters 25 years ago, informed the world that in 1990, India and Pakistan would have blown each other sky high with nuclear bombs had it not been for the Americans.

The Hersh "exclusive" was reproduced around the world, and nowhere did it cause more astonishment than in the two countries which were supposed to have had such a close brush with extinction. This was the first of the defense commands of the two neighboring states, Asia. India and Pakistan are not out of their minds. Their use of nuclear capability is political, not military, a point that needs to be understood in Washington.

Pakistan's approach to the nuclear question is regional. It has proposed a nuclear-free zone in South Asia. India insists that the problem stretches beyond the subcontinent. A nuclear ban must include other countries, particularly China, which the Indian defense establishment views with suspicion. India also would like the major nuclear powers to join the arrangements they advocate for others.

It would be sensible for the United States to stop using every form of pressure to force Pakistan to cap and roll back its nuclear program and open it for outside inspection. No current or future Pakistani government, civil or military, can agree to this without being overthrown by street agitation. Such is the emotive power of this issue.

The U.S. should accept the fact that both countries have nuclear capability. It must also understand that they are not full-blown nuclear powers, and they are sensible enough not to attempt to settle scores by Jobbing nuclear bombs at each other, with most of the radiation wafting back to their own cities and towns. Once this psychological watershed has been reached in Washington, it will be possible to come to some sensible security arrangements in South Asia. The United States must also learn to be truly evenhanded when it comes to India and Pakistan. Pakistan may be smaller, but it does not see itself as either an appendage or a satellite of India.

Khalid Hasan is a U.S.-based correspondent for the Pakistani daily, The Nation and the Pakistan Television Corporation.