India and Pakistan - An immoral equivalence by the Western media

India has made it clear that it was seeking to strike Pakistan’s extensive terrorist infrastructure, not the Pakistani military.

The fog of war- or at least its outcome- appears to be lifting as it becomes increasingly clear that it was India's air strikes on Pakistan's air bases on the intervening night of May 9 -May 10 which forced our recalcitrant neighbour to sue for peace, with Pakistan's Director-General of Military Operations (DGMO) calling his Indian counterpart.

However, what needs to be lifted is the fog of moral equivalence between India and Pakistan which pervades Western media accounts. Thus, in the framing of stories there are constant demands that India provide 'proof' that Pakistan was behind the terrorist attack in Pahalgam on April 22, the implication being that India's air strikes on May 7 were launched without clinching evidence. Such moral equivalence is completely unjustified.

India has made it clear that it was seeking to strike Pakistan’s extensive terrorist infrastructure, not the Pakistani military. The subsequent attacks on Pakistan’s air defence systems and air bases were in response to their attack on Indian military installations.  India has no equivalent terrorist infrastructure that can be ‘targeted’.

It’s also not clear what sort of proof is being sought here. Most anti-terrorism operations are mounted based on intelligence inputs, which would not pass, for instance, the ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ criteria of criminal trials.

Drone strikes, assassinations by the US

More importantly, the US has not exactly been a slouch when it comes to intelligence-based lethal operations against those it perceives to be terrorists.

The US conducted approximately 430 drone attacks between June 2004 and July 2018 in Pakistan, resulting in between 2,500 to over 4,000 deaths and a few thousand injuries as per multiple media reports. The attacks were mostly in the tribal areas, targeting the Taliban, Al-Queda and terrorist outfits linked to them.

The Western media was not notably vociferous in demanding rigorous proof about the guilt of the targeted persons.

Famously during this period, in 2011, Osama Bin Laden was killed by US special forces during a raid on Abbottabad, his location indicating the long-standing affinity between the Pakistani establishment and terrorism.

Similarly, between 2003 and 2018, the US has carried out over 5,600 drone strikes in Iraq, and 900 strikes in Syria. Estimates of civilian deaths range from the hundreds to several thousands.

In all these instances--- Pakistan, Iraq, Syria--- there are disputes over whether those killed are 'militants', to borrow an international media formulation for the Pahalgam attackers, or civilians. In reality the casualties are likely to be a mixture of both.

In 2019 the US, during the first Trump administration, killed or assassinated -- the phraseology can vary according to political tastes -- Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards in early January 2020. Iran is designated by the US as a state sponsor of terrorism and Suleimani, the leading implementer of that policy.

This long track record of robust anti-terrorist actions by the US and other Western powers has not led to demands for granular evidence in each case.

Pakistan’s inglorious record

Further, such an equivalence narrative ignores the fact that Pakistan has form when it comes to harbouring an elaborate infrastructure of terror over decades

The examples, going back at least three decades, are too numerous to recount. The main accused in the 1993 blasts, Dawood Ibrahim, is likely to be in Pakistan.

The 1999 Kandahar hijacking was famously carried out to free three terrorists including Masood Azhar --- who remains at large and issued a statement after the May 7 attack which seems to have killed many of his relatives-- and Omar Saeed who was involved in the gruesome murder of Daniel Pearl.

The hijacking was followed by the 2001 attack on Parliament and the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, where the capture of Ajmal Kasab revealed that the terrorists were all Pakistani nationals. The 10 terrorists were carrying fake documents identifying them as Indian nationals. The cover was only blown because Kasab was captured alive.

Pakistan also has a record for lying. During the 1999 Kargil war, it was the interception of a call between General Pervez Musharaf and another senior officer by the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) which helped India bust Pakistan’s cover story that the infiltrators in Kargil were Kashmiri militants. They were regular Pakistani soldiers.

All of this is well known. But clearly recent coverage by some sections of the western media shows it’s a story India may need to tell again and again.