India and Pakistan. Will they? Won’t they? Will there be mushroom clouds over Peshawar or will it all amount to nothing more than sporadic mortar fire, vigourous fist-shaking and some spectacular face-pulling before all parties come grudgingly to the table to thresh out their differences? I couldn’t tell you because I just don’t know.
The preponderance of opinion, though, seems to be that it won’t go all the way. That both parties have far too much to lose from all-out, balls-out war and, consequently, the instinct of self-preservation, if not common humanity, will win the day. I don’t regard this as a misapprehension. After all, both India and Pakistan do have a lot to lose from all-out war, particularly if it escalates to the point where plutonium bhajias are being lobbed over the Line of Control, and I am sure that this is not lost on the polity of either protagonist. But just because war would be a disaster, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen anyway.
We in the West find it very difficult to contemplate true catastrophe so we tend to assume rather too glibly that such catastrophe is not possible because catastrophe leaves a vasy body-count in its wake, not to mention the damage it causes to many investment portfolios. But have we not been lulled into a false sense of guarded optimism by the 20th Century? The Century that saw the Nazis buried by the Allies in Word War II, the Soviet Union laid low by capitalism and France beaten by Senegal in the World Cup (Alright the last one happened in the 21st Century but I am just too pleased not to mention it).
In other words, our generation has become well used to seeing the world in terms of the rise of badness and madness being overwhelmed by the onward march of goodness and reason. Those of us born post-WWII have been particularly fortunate to have lived through an era of relative peace where ‘war’ is played out on TV and mostly consists of a bit of a fracas followed by a peace process. So many times have we seen these melodramas played out that they have become the topography of conflict. We assume that the men in uniforms will be free to do their thing for a short period before everyone calms down and the men in suits step in to press flesh and hammer out some sort of deal. But we may forget that this is a manifestation of our era and not an eternal truth and all eras have to come to an end sooner or later.
‘Jaw-jaw is better than war-war’ has been the axiom of our age. ‘There is no substitute for victory’ may be the axiom that replaces it.
