POLITICS: As India-Israel Ties Grow, So Do Pakistan’s Worries

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Muddassir Rizvi

ISLAMABAD, Sep 23 2003 (IPS) - For Pakistan, the warming of relations between India and Israel is simply the creation of what it calls an ”axis of oppression” that will work to suppress the right of peoples fighting for self-determination in Kashmir and Palestine.

This phrase to refer to Indo-Israel ties was coined by Pakistani Ambassador to the United Nations Munir Akram. He used it while addressing the U.N. Security Council last week, after the U.S. veto of a Syrian resolution asking the world body to bar Israel from issuing threats of expelling Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

”The states which are suppressing the right of peoples to self-determination in the Middle East and South Asia are now joining together in what is advertised as an alliance against terrorism, but which is more likely to emerge as an axis of oppression,” said Akram.

His remarks mirror growing worries in Pakistan at the warming ties between India and Israel – one its arch rival and the other a country that it does not recognise as a legitimate state.

The two countries, Pakistani intelligence reports say, had plotted to destroy the nuclear research facilities in Kahuta, near the Pakistan capital, in the early eighties, just around the same time when Israel bombed similar installations in Iraq.

Pakistan feels that Indo-Israel relations, particularly their defence and military cooperation, will cause insecurity along its eastern border and an imbalance in conventional arms in South Asia.

Equally disturbing for Pakistan are their shared views on terrorism and whom they perceive as terrorists.

At the end of his four-day visit to India in earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Aerial Sharon declared, ”Terror is the enemy of freedom and democracy,” and Israel and India would ”combat this evil”.

Sharon’s visit and his declarations of a joint struggle against terrorism with India, has been seized upon by religious parties and conservative politicians here, who have already been capitalising on religion-based politics.

”India and Israel are facing popular insurgencies that are fully legitimate under the international law and the U.N. resolutions. Both countries have unleashed the worst degree of oppression to subjugate the popular will of people for self-determination,” said Ameerul Azeem, information secretary of the Jamaat-i-Islami, the country’s most organised religious party.

”It is these two countries who misused the international focus against terrorism in the follow-up to the events on September 11, 2001 to confuse the legitimate struggles of people for freedom with terrorism,” he told IPS.

”Their alignment and cooperation will have dangerous consequences for people’s rightful struggles. Their cooperation is clearly meant to attack Islam,” he argued.

The religious parties believe that the Indo-Israel relations are fully backed by the U.S. government, which they say is heavily dominated by pro-Israel lobbies.

”This axis of oppression is not confined to India and Israel, but is fully backed by the United States. What the Americans do not want to do for India themselves for various geo-strategic compulsions, they would now do it through Israel,” maintained Hafiz Hussain Ahmed of the Jamiat Ulema Islam, another strong religious party, in an interview.

Many members of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League party share similar sentiments, and are calling Indo-Israel ties are a challenge to the Muslim world.

”This is a serious development that merits an in-depth debate in the parliament with a view to evolving counter strategies to contain anti-Islam forces,” commented Mian Abdul Waheed, central vice president of the ruling party.

A more substantive result of Sharon’s visit – criticised by opposition parties in India as well – was the agreement between India and Israel on trade and transfer of military technology and cooperation.

Israel agreed in principle to supply a one billion U.S. dollar advanced airborne radar system and Arrow-2 anti-ballistic missiles, among others, to India, unnerving government and military strategists in Pakistan, who consider it a prelude to a new arms race in the subcontinent.

The Pakistani government promptly reacted that the Indo-Israeli defence cooperation that would enable New Delhi to acquire sophisticated weapons systems from Tel Aviv, and this would have a destabilising affect for the region.

”India’s purchase of anti-ballistic weaponry will disrupt the strategic balance in the region. We do not know what India will do with all these weapons. Where will it unleash them? Would it be in its immediate neighbourhood, because it has friendly relations with China and Russia?” said Masood Khan, spokesman for the country’s foreign office.

Independent analysts here also expressed their concerns. ”Indo-Israeli military cooperation will have a grave impact on the conventional balance of power between India and us, which our neighbour wants to tilt so decisively that we are left with limited options,” said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, an expert in international relations

”Those limited options including nuclear, in my view, would be gravely dangerous for regional stability and peace,” Rais wrote in the English-language daily ‘The News’ last week.

Its worries over India require Pakistan to maintain optimal conventional war fighting capability, sufficient to deny India a decisive victory in any future war, he added. ”That will serve as a deterrent along with our nuclear potential,” he wrote.

Indeed, Islamabad has been saying that it would acquire modern conventional weapons to restore the balance in the subregion.

”We will do whatever is required to make sure that the minimum credible balance (with India) is maintained. We have done that for 56 years,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Khusheed Mahmood Kasuri said in a press statement.

It was perhaps these concerns and a sense of insecurity that compelled Pakistani President Gen Pervez Musharraf to promise this weekend – just before his departure for the 58th session of the U.N. General Assembly – that he would raise the issue in his meetings with the foreign leaders.

Perhaps he also feels let down that his friends in Washington – with whom Pakistan’s friendship has deepened since becoming allies in the ‘war against terror’ after Sep. 11 – did not stop Israel from selling sophisticated weaponry to India.

Many see Musharraf’s pronouncements this summer, floating the possibility of Pakistan’s recognition of Israel, as being meant to pre-empt defence cooperation between India and Israel.

Although Tel Aviv welcomed Musharraf’s remarks at the time, it did not deem it necessary to review the extent of cooperation it had been contemplating with India. Sharon’s visit, as the Israeli leader himself put it, was the climax of this cooperation.