Following the attack on America, my friend wrote to say that discussion of the event had "been heating up living rooms all over India. The country is rife with speculation." Unlike some Americans, he has no doubt that Pakistan is no friend of America. While the mainstream media and pundits continue to ridicule George Walker Bush as a dunce, back in June it was reported he intended to visit India early in 2002. As one of his advisors noted, "If we are going to discuss great powers of the future, then we have to discuss India," adding, "We have to get beyond patronizing stuff. We need to get into real substance now."

So, too, Americans should begin to address "real substance" because India has long been threatened by Pakistan on one side and by China on the other. (Imagine living with Canada and Mexico as a constant threat.) India is home to more than one billion people of whom 80% are Hindu and 14% are Moslem.

India has the fourth largest reserves of coal and is rich in iron, manganese, titanium, diamonds, and natural gas. It is heavily agricultural, but has a large textile industry, as well as those devoted to chemicals, mining, and steel. India produces huge amounts of spices, cotton, and sugar among other economically valuable crops. India is one of the oldest civilizations known to man. It goes back some 5,000 years, as old as the Egyptian civilization and one that outlasted it by millennia.

The British, busy creating an Empire, set their eyes upon this prize. Though it is fashionable to berate it for having been a colonial power, the British did much to modernize India when it ruled from 1757 to 1947. They gave India a constitution in1935, at which time Muhammad Ali Jinnah lobbied hard for a separate nation of Pakistan, exclusively for the Moslems. Eventually the British partitioned the nation into the dominions of India and Pakistan. After an independence movement led by a Hindu, Mohandas K. Gandhi, the British stood aside and India became a nation in January 1950. This occurred two years after a Moslem had assassinated Gandhi. What followed independence was a massive movement of twelve million Hindu and Moslem refugees crossing borders to avoid the kind of strife and hatred we now see focused on America.

"While in the near term," my Indian friend wrote following the attack, "the US government focuses on getting even with the Taliban, the real terrorists are escaping through the porous border with Pakistan. The terrorists are mostly Arabs and they began fleeing the moment they feared US retaliation." The important factor here to understand is that Pakistan has long been their safe haven. As we have seen on television, the man in the street in Pakistan has been protesting in the street against their government's decision to cooperate with the US. For Pakistanis, their real sympathy lies with the terrorists.

My Indian friend believes that, "In the long term, if the US is serious about ending terrorism, Pakistan would have to be taken to task. The United States would have to wage all-out war against Pakistan because, unless that happens, the terrorist training camps would continue to thrive." That said, it is more likely that US leaders will look first to neutralize Iraq with its weapons of mass destruction. And then maybe the US will turn its longer-term attention to Pakistan. "The picture is further complicated by Pakistan's possession of nuclear weapons, courtesy of China."

At this point, if reports can be trusted, the US is ignoring our shared interests India. Instead, Pakistan has already tried to dictate the composition of a military coalition to deal with Osama bin Laden's Al-Queda terrorist organization, seeking to exclude both Israel and India. Is it not time to stop complying with Moslem demands? Well, yes and no. Afghanistan is about the size of Texas and the armies of great nations have been defeated there. It is wiser to have bases of operation in Pakistan from which to fight.

India is neither governed, nor populated by saints. Part of its problem is that virtually all US aid India receives disappears down a huge rat hole. The Indian government hires, directly and indirectly, about twenty million people. That is more than the entire population of Australia and may well be a conservative figure. As a result, its need for foreign aid is constant. This is the typical Socialist answer to unemployment and India is essentially socialist, in addition to having a thriving Communist party as well. It has long established ties with Russia going back to the days of its Soviet government.

India's security is sorely challenged by both Pakistan and Red China. Writing in June, my friend noted that "China has been sponsoring terrorism in our border States on the east. To that end, they have been sponsoring a military junta government in Burma." Little wonder that India plans to spend $95 billion on weapons over the next fifteen years as the result of its very real, justified fears of China's bad intentions. India wants and probably needs the nuclear option in order to deter China's ambitions and to retaliate against Pakistan if attacked. This is why the US policy of non-proliferation makes little sense to the Indian government.

Pakistan is the other major security threat to India. Its defense expenditure is more than twice that of India's in terms of its gross domestic product (6.5%) though it has only one-fourth of India's landmass and one-sixth of its coastline. "Pakistan has been sponsoring a radical Islamic movement in the northern state of Kashmir," noted my friend. "More than a million people have left their homes in the past decade. All non-Mohammedan peoples have been eliminated from Kashmir. It is a genocide worse than Bosnia, but the media doesn't report it!"

India has a huge Muslim minority estimated to be at least 170 million. Pakistan has been reportedly spending lots of money to exploit dissatisfaction among this minority and most of it has come from the oil-rich nations of the Middle East. This minority threatens to destabilize India, which is a democracy based on the British model.

On September 16th, an Indian news agency reported "Pakistan is planning to extract maximum financial benefit from its decision to extend its full support to a US-led campaign against international terrorism." A former senior executive, based in New York with Citibank, was appointed Pakistan's finance minister after a military coup in 1999. Shaukat Azis reportedly has said "Clearly, as the relationship (with the US) grows, I am sure the economic ties will grow which could mean better market access, better treatment on debt rescheduling, and more money, both directly and through multilateral institution." In short, he described a shakedown that would make Tony Soprano proud!

Our relationship with Pakistan is odd at best. It had been under a number of US sanctions since 1990 when it became clear it was trying to develop a nuclear weapons capability. In 1998, it carried out a series of nuclear tests and the sanctions were expanded. Already, US sanctions against Pakistan have been lifted to make them more cooperative. Until the 1990's when the Cold War ended, Pakistan had been the third largest recipient of US aid, after Israel and Egypt. Egypt announced last week that its diplomatic ties to Iraq had been upgraded. So much for having "friends" among the Islamic states.

While Americans wait to see how our government will respond to the Islamic jihad being waged against our cities, our people and Western civilization, so too do the millions in India and elsewhere around the world. The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse are loose again in the world. The ancient battle between the forces of good and evil goes on.

Alan Caruba is founder of The National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about scare campaigns to influence public opinion and policy. The Center maintains an Internet site at www.anxietycenter.com.

Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2001
Published by permission.