Why India must join the Western war on terror

For well over two decades now, India has fought terrorist-style violence in the disputed territory of Kashmir.The 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai have now globalized this fight.

As the world watched the 60-hour-long tragedy unfold on its TV screens, militants said to be associated with the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba ("Army of the Pure") targeted India's financial capital, its icons (the 104-year-old Taj Mahal Hotel) and citizens from 14 countries, including the U.S., Canada and Israel.

Also targeted, implicitly and directly, were India's middle and upper classes, the habitus of the areas that came under attack. And as these groups set the national agenda, it can be said that the Mumbai attacks have suddenly changed the rules of the game for New Delhi.

As the current national mood shows, these westernized classes are leading the calls for revenge against LET and its backers in Pakistan.They want India to reconsider its non-alignedmentality and join in earnest the global fight against the jihadist movement.

Many ask: when the West and India face the same enemy operating in this neighbourhood Pakistan's tribal areas and the mountains of Afghanistan why can't the two join hands to defeat it? It's a very good question.

Well positioned

It has been eight years since the al-Qaeda-engineered attacks on the U.S. and in that time the contours of this clash have only broadened.

Apart from a few spots in the Middle East and the Maghreb in North Africa, the main source of this jihadist movement can be traced to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown observed at the end of 2008, three-quarters of all the serious terror plots in Britain were hatched by men with links to Pakistan, as were the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

In the case of Lashkar-e-Taiba, it was created in the late 1980s, many say by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, to help oust India from Kashmir. But it has since graduated to become a global jihadist outfit, with tentacles spread right across Pakistan.

This presents problems for India, of course. But because of its historical interaction with this ideology, not to mention its geography and cultural affinities, India has a much deeper understanding of this menace and thus is well placed to be an invaluable ally to the West.

To do this, however, New Delhi needs much more Western support, or at least Western pressure on Pakistan, as LET has taken its fight to India 's mainland from deep within the Kashmir valley.

Above all, India needs Western help to acquire new skills and weaponry to defeat terrorism in its cities and also to hit LET at its source.

Two options

To meet the LET challenge, India basically has two options.

The first is to carry out Israeli-type strikes at the terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. But this option is the least likely to pursue as India does not have the same overwhelming military superiority over its neighbour as the Israelis do over Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The second and most likely option is to become a central part of the global fight against Islamic terrorism. But getting into this battle won't be easy either.

For one, India would likely face internal problems because of its huge though widely scattered Muslim population of about 150 million, many of whom are against any truck whatsoever with the U.S. and Israel.

New Delhi's predicament is also compounded by the fact that it needs the oil-producing nations of the Middle East fellow members of the Non-Aligned Movement to help it meet its energy needs.

The West, too, will have a problem in bringing India on board in a more determined way, though the Bush administration made a start by opening the door to more cooperation on nuclear energy.

Washington, however,is unlikely to want to rope in India at the expense of Pakistan because, absent Russia's help, the U.S. needs Pakistan's staging points and land routes to help supply its forces in Afghanistan.

The West also needs Pakistan's help, or at least its acquiescence, if Western forces are to attack the training camps in Kashmir or the Pakistani tribal areas, an action that would probably be easier to undertake if India, Pakistan's traditional enemy, was not seen as part of the attacking force.

About-face

Joining the big western powers in their fight against jihadist terrorism would be an about-face for New Delhi policy makers. But they have done this kind of thing before.

In 1991, when it was almost bankrupt and had to mortgage its gold savings with the Bank of England, India abandoned its socialist economic policies and embraced open markets. The results one of the fastest growing economies in the world are there for all to see.

But if that economic crisis proved to be a turning point for India's integration with the West, the Mumbai terror attacks should prove to be the same on the security and intelligence fronts.

The two sides have already takenimportant steps in deepening their strategic ties. Indian intelligence teams have been working with their Israeli counterparts for some time now to formulate counterterrorism actions and American advisers have joined in of late as well.

Also, India has recently signed some significant defence contracts with the U.S. and Israel for maritime reconnaissance aircraft and more modern surveillance systems, among other things.

But India and the West should lose no further time in making common cause against their joint enemy. Without abandoning its current, go-it-aloneoutlook and becoming a more formal part of the global war on terror, India has to realize that it will not be able to stop attacks on its soil.

India is emotionally attached to the Non-Aligned Movement because it was founded by its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru(along with the leaders of Egypt, Indonesia and Yugoslavia) to keep equal distance from the Soviet Union and the U.S. during the Cold War.

But the Cold War is long dead and India is living in a dangerous world today. Policies are formulated to serve nations, not vice versa.