Avoiding Armageddon: America, India and Pakistan to the Brink and Back

CIA veteran and former presidential advisor Reidel presents two possible scenarios in South Asia, arguing that India and Pakistan will either anchor a prosperous, peaceful nexus or wage nuclear war. He urges the U.S. to get involved, as stakes are high: in seventeen years, India and Pakistan will create "40 percent of the world's GNP" and India will be the world's most populous nation. American failure to build lasting cooperation with or forge peace between the two results from approaching these giants as bit players, confusing local quarrels with our own regional maneuvers. During the Cold War, the U.S. created Pakistan's spy service, the ISI, whose resources now support terrorist network Lashkar-e-Tayyiba; the ISI's encouragement motivated by Pakistan's longstanding feud with India over control of Kashmir. Meanwhile, the ISI, LeT, and Al-Qaeda engineered the 2009 Mumbai bombing, hoping to ignite a nuclear war. Numerous U.S. efforts toward settling the question of Kashmir's status have fizzled or exploded; to ignore the problem, Riedel tells us, is to tip the game in Armageddon's favor. Mumbai has altered the landscape dramatically, possibly towards resolution, Riedel claims, by uniting India and the U.S. with a common enemy defined by the practical damage it wants to unleash. (Mar.)