Sainath's View of the War on Terror

There have been a lot of articles lately telling us to avoid a 9/11 kind of response. Not surprisingly, many of the same people also insist that the Mumbai attacks are not India's 9/11. I buy the part about the Mumbai attacks not being a new and entirely unexpected event but that still does not change the fact that the failed strategies of the past ought not to be repeated again to the same result. Which is what I seem to be seeing everywhere.

The latest in this series is P.Sainath recounting the horrors of the War on Terror (Many commentators seem to have concluded already that the US-led war on terror is lost. I am at a loss to understand the basis for this). His numbers on the Iraq Body Count are taken from the now discredited 2006 study published in Lancet (I might write a short post at some point on this). But the point is why Iraq is being invoked all the time especially when Pakistan is not Iraq. There are many differences between the two - Pakistan does not have the history of oppression that Iraq has nor does it have the fractured demography of that country. Finally, the state institutions are still very much functional in Pakistan which was not case when Paul Bremer's CPA demolished them soon after the invasion. The comparison may have some validity only if one assumes that objectives of an Indian attack will also involve an Iraq-style occupation and breaking and rebuilding of its institutions from scratch. That is a major and probably fallacious assumption - India has not done that anytime in the past and none of the military scenarios being currently deliberated even contemplate it which only suggest that Sainath's implied comparison is spurious.

As for Afghanistan, would Sainath have been happier living with a Taliban-ruled country with jihadis provided all the space and assistance to fulfil their global agenda? Would fewer people have died if horrendous attacks had been allowed to be planned and executed incessantly from that country? Sainath of course proposes no solutions to any problem. Only that he wants a vigorous response to the attacks. That is simply not good enough.