a position of strength

67 dead on the samjhauta express. sorry, on the what express? oh, the irony.

who's surprised? are you surprised? i'm not. there are a huge number of powerful people who stand to lose a great deal if peace breaks out on the subcontinent. this shit is going to continue, you can bet on it. start donating blood now.

what do you do with these 'militants'? the kashmir movement did definitely start with indigenous kashimiri involvement, even though it was largely a pakistani instigation and with pakistani funding. but today, it's little more than an excuse to keep temperatures high between india and pakistan. and provide political leverage to a dipshit nation who cannot hope to compete with us on anything.

it's actually pretty standard operating procedure for these guys. grant us concessions or terrorism will only shoot up. give us what we want or face the consequences. oh it won't be us doing the consequencing, it'll be the deprived and disaffected native population. they're freedom fighters. you have 300,000 troops in kashmir. make that 6 - no, 750,000. how about a million? nice round figure. and they're all oppressing away.

in the meantime, his royal highness pervez 'gola' musharraf issues invitations (on cnn and ndtv for chrissakes!) to the government of india. let's talk. let's reduce tension. let's forget that it was me who engineered kargil and almost brought nuclear war to the subcontinent. let's forget that i'm doing nothing to reduce terrorist organisations' operations in kashmir. gola (his childhood nickname) really, really wants to be friends. and if you're buying this, i've got big ben in my back pocket and i'm selling real cheap.

obviously the peaceniks are lapping it up. let's have talks. let's have bus services. let's have the samjhauta express. boom. urg. what's with dead people on the tv all the time? why aren't we talking peace? and so on.

look i'm not against talking peace at all. but what india has got to understand is that we are a fast-growing power whose attention and resources cannot be consumed by a backwater nothing-state when we've got china to worry about. we're in a position of strength as far as kashmir is concerned. the paramilitaries and the army are seriously weakening jihadi infiltration efforts. indigenous separatists are increasingly turning moderate and willing to talk. they've realised that if it was pakistan they were dealing with, they'd be dead by now. ask the nawab of bugti and his balochis. (you can't really, they killed him. he was in his 70's and living in a cave.)

pakistan is desparate. america's war on terror is getting too hot for comfort, and they're having to produce an 'al qaeda's no.3' every few months to keep the heat off. plus, they got hammered by illiterate tribesmen in the federally administered tribal agency (FATA). FATA today is more or less independent, and a total taliban/aq haven. can you believe it? it's like india not being able to control assam and practically granting it independence because the army got plastered there.

india is finally, after almost 60 years, in a position of strength. lets not waste it. demand to talk to a democratically elected leader. the thing about democracy is, you don't generally do something the vast majority of people don't want you to do. so if people in pakistan are really really interested in peace, then their leaders will talk.

the thing is, you can't talk to someone who's either uninterested or lying to save his ass. i.e., gola. let's see whether the pakistani public really wants peace. if they choose to kick out gola and elect someone on a platform of engagement, it's time to talk. until then, the army and the paramilitaries will continue to organise warm welcomes for unauthorised visitors from across the border.

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