Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Peter Friedrich.
He is a South Asian affairs analyst who lives in California.
And he is the co-author of Captivating the Simple Hearted, A Struggle for Human Dignity in the Indian Subcontinent.
And check out his website at peterfriedrich.net.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, Scott.
How are you today?
I'm doing real well.
And so I think this is the second or third piece of yours that we've run at antiwar.com.
I think the second.
Yeah, the second, I believe.
The last one was in 2004, right after the Iraq War started.
Oh, wow.
So yeah, I really should have gone back and read that.
I didn't realize it had been that long.
Yeah, it was actually Death and Democracy talking about kind of cost benefit analysis about how the U.S. used the justification of Saddam Hussein's atrocities to go and invade Iraq.
But at the same time, the figures coming out from Iraq in 2004, a year after the invasion, seems to really indicate that the invasion and occupation was causing actually more death than under Saddam Hussein.
Boy, got that right.
No question about it.
OK, so and now this one is great.
And I guess this is really your expertise here is your book is about India.
And so I think, you know, many people, you know, old or young in the audience may really not know the first thing about the conflict in Kashmir.
And I take responsibility for that.
I'm supposed to make sure that they know.
And I haven't focused enough on this story, nearly enough.
And so now here we are at a crisis where a suicide bomber has killed, I think, 40 something Indian infant army infantry.
And is that right?
So a suicide bomber drove an SUV into a convoy of buses that it wasn't actually Indian Army.
It was Indian security forces called the Central Reserve Police Force.
They're a paramilitary that's deployed all over the country and killed.
Yeah, about 40.
There have been differing figures, but the main one seems to be 40.
And then so there's a huge reaction over this.
But so we got to talk all about the crisis.
But first, we got to talk about what's Kashmir besides the Led Zeppelin song.
And what do people need to know about who's who here and why would anybody set off a suicide bomb?
Yeah, so Kashmir is in the northern tip of India and it borders on Pakistan.
And it's been a disputed territory between India and Pakistan since 1947, when both India, the same year that India and Pakistan were both actually formed.
It's a Muslim-majority region, but India is a Hindu-majority country and Pakistan is, of course, a Muslim-majority country.
And so in this conflict, religion has really entered into, is actually like one of the main factors that is coloring the conflict.
It's far more than just territorial dispute.
And India and Pakistan have actually gone to war four times since 1947 over Kashmir.
The last time was in 1999.
So as far as the underlying reason for the dispute, you know, Kashmir is an interesting area.
It doesn't have any real natural resources there.
It's a small area.
It's got about 13 million population.
And that's contrasted with Pakistan has 200 million people.
India's got 1.3 billion.
But there's no real reason for either country to really want it as part of their territory.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with the area.
It's just, it's not, you know, they don't have oil.
They don't have a lot of natural resources and a lot of minerals or anything like that.
The main contention for why they want it over the past 70 years of conflict is basically national pride.
I would, I would conjecture, and basically a religious conflict between Hinduism and Islam, between the Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.
You know, one time years ago when I was a cab driver, I had an Indian and a Pakistani riding together in my cab from their high tech job to the airport kind of thing.
And who knows exactly which sects they represented.
I know things can get a lot more specific than nationality.
But I asked them about this and they said that, yes, strictly just land greed is all it is.
And never mind the Kashmiris who would rather just be independent.
They're kind of their own people if you were to ask them, but nobody ever does.
But that the only real religious angle to them, it wasn't so much that, oh, God gave this land to us or this kind of, you know, perverted idea as much as just you have a Muslim population dominated by a Hindu dominated government.
And so there's that split, the difference between the occupier and the occupiee is, you know, accentuated there because it's the religious difference between who is who.
But not that they're fighting over what each other believe, but just that's who's on whose side.
Well, actually, if you look at the history of the region and the origin of the conflict, it began with religious dimensions.
So tracing back to 1947, the British were ruling India.
And then when India got independence from the British in 47, the British agreed to partition India and create Pakistan and create India, especially with a lot of pressure from the Muslim community who were uncomfortable with the idea of living in a Hindu dominated country like India.
So the British kind of compromised and acceded to their pressure and created Pakistan as a Muslim majority country.
And that led to mass migration, two-way migration as Muslims in, or as Hindus and Sikhs in what became Pakistan fled to India.
And then Muslims in India fled to what became Pakistan because neither one wanted to be caught in living in that country, which was dominated by the opposite religion.
And that was actually a little bit south, more along the Punjab region of Kashmir.
But Kashmir was among several hundred, what were called princely states, which were not technically part of the British Raj.
They were kind of controlled by the British Empire, but they weren't actually owned by the British Empire and they weren't directly occupied.
They had their own autonomy and they were operating their domestic affairs independently.
And Kashmir had a Hindu king, it was a kingdom, and it had a Hindu king with a Muslim majority population.
And they, the king, had the opportunity to decide to join Pakistan or to join India.
And he was kind of waffling on that and was leaning towards being independent.
And then some other factors began occurring within Kashmir.
There was an armed rebellion that broke out in his kingdom of Muslims who wanted to join Pakistan.
There was an invasion of tribal people who were armed by Pakistan who came into Kashmir territory.
And then that kind of caused him to lean towards India.
And he ended up signing an instrument of accession and ceding control of Kashmir to India.
And then India sent in troops.
But right before he did that, like a couple of weeks before he did that, the Maharaja, the king, partnered with a Hindu nationalist organization called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the RSS, which had been founded about 20 years before in a different area of India and had sprouted up all over India with branches throughout the country, throughout the region.
And so the king partnered with the RSS and organized basically a state-sanctioned, state-sponsored pogrom of Muslims in a particular area of Jammu and Kashmir, of this northern region.
And between them, over a period of about a month, couple of weeks or a month, they massacred, numbers differ, but probably about 100,000 Muslims, ethically cleansed the region of Muslims.
And then, right around then, then he ceded control of the region to India.
And then around then, India and Pakistan went to war for their first war over Kashmir, and all that happened.
But the roots of the conflict really trace back to this religious dimension and especially to involvement of these Hindu nationalist groups, particularly this RSS, which is a paramilitary organization, which actually has extensive, extensive influence in India's government today.
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Well, now, so in the four wars, did the lines move at all, or these were just, how big were these wars?
These wars were a couple thousand people, a couple thousand people died on either side over the years in each war.
No, the lines haven't moved significantly, to my knowledge, but the region remains disputed.
And it's like nothing has really happened.
So nothing has really happened as far as like a resolution for the conflict.
But what did really change was in 1989.
So India and Pakistan, they went to war.
They went to war in 47.
They went to war in 71, and blanking on when the third war was, the fourth war was in 99.
In 1989, an insurgency started in Kashmir, and the government was dissolved.
The Indian constitution allows the Indian central government to institute, to impose something that's called president's rule, where if a state government is determined to not be functional, then even though it's democratically elected, the central government can go in and dissolve it, and then institute, implement direct rule from Delhi.
And 1989, an insurgency breaks out.
1990, this president's rule is established.
In the same year, this new law is imposed called the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, AFSPA, AFSPA, which has also been used in multiple other regions of the country, which is—and I know you've had guests on, like Eric Margulies talking about this.
It's a holdover from colonial Britain.
It's basically a direct replica of laws from the colonial times, of a law that was designed to squash and suppress dissent.
And it allows impunity for security forces in the particular region where it's imposed.
It allows them to shoot on suspicion, to search and seize without a warrant, to, I believe, to detain people indefinitely, and so on and so forth.
But especially it allows them impunity.
And that actually—a couple of years ago, 2016, I believe, the Supreme Court overturned the impunity clause of that particular law, although it remains in place in Kashmir, as well as a couple of other regions of India at the moment, I believe, including Manipur.
But they stripped away that impunity clause, but the law still allows Indian security forces in the regions where it's imposed to do just about anything and get away with it.
All right.
So now, you know, it's just this simmering conflict that's been going on.
And, you know, as you say, with all this oppression and so—but over the years, there have been attacks, I guess, primarily by the Lashkar-e-Taiba, right, the L-E-T.
Is that who's behind this attack or is there something else?
And I guess, also, I might as well ask at the same time, is the ISI behind it or not?
Well, that's always an answer, a solution floated by India.
You know, I have no idea.
God only knows.
Maybe ISI is behind it.
Maybe Jaish is behind it, which is the group specifically that has been accused in this.
I think it's Jaish-e-Mohammad or something like that.
Maybe Lashkar is behind it.
One thing I do know is the timing is very, very dubious.
Nobody benefits from the attack that just happened, from the timing of it right now, except for potentially the current ruling party, the BJP, which is a Hindu nationalist party, which is basically directly controlled by this paramilitary RSS, and which is working for re-election over the next few months.
I believe April, May is the general elections for India.
They've been in power since 2014.
It's five years are up, and nobody benefits.
The militants don't benefit.
Pakistan doesn't benefit.
The only people that benefit and they are aware of it is the BJP.
The militants might.
I mean, they have their own motives for stuff, but I see what you mean, though.
Yeah, yeah.
So the day after the attack occurred, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the BJP, he was in the most populous state in India, Uttar Pradesh, and he was saying that people should vote for the BJP because it will bring a strong government at the center, which will bring glory for India on an international stage.
And then since then, actually, I believe in the past day, the RSS, and Modi is an RSS member.
So let me back up just briefly.
Modi is an RSS member.
He's the prime minister of India.
But he got his start in 1971 as a member of this RSS paramilitary.
He became what's called a pacharak, which is a full-time worker for the organization.
And from 71 to 85, he was working with the organization.
In 1985, the RSS deputed him or assigned him to work within the BJP.
So from 71 to 85, he's in the RSS.
In 85, RSS assigned him to work in the BJP.
And then from 85 until 2001, he holds no political office until in Gujarat, the state of Gujarat in 2001, the state government is declared to be inefficient or unworkable.
The chief minister, who's like the governor of the state, is removed, and Modi is appointed in his stead.
And so he's been elected since, and he was elected to that office since.
But when he got into his first political office, after getting his start in politics with the RSS, he was appointed.
He was not elected.
And then like four months after that, exactly four months after that, actually, his administration was directly implicated in a pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat, in the new state that he had just assumed the executive office of.
So anyways— That was a real important one.
In fact, there's another anecdote about that, that Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit pointed out, was that one of bin Laden's constant narratives was that the Americans claim to care so much about human rights, but they don't do anything when Muslims are killed, which is kind of funny since Bill Clinton backed the Mujahideen in Bosnia.
But anyway, they were saying that, and then right after September 11th was when this pogrom happened.
And I guess that was one of his last podcasts that he put out for a while, said, you see, the Americans have nothing to say when the Hindus massacre, I guess it was 2,000 or 3,000 people in this pogrom.
And that helped to really kind of, you know, it was a real boost for him.
America's silence on that was a real boost for the terrorist forces right when they need it to show that they were still right about us, even after the atrocity they'd committed against us.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that pogrom, well, I mean, one thing, so what's happening right now in India after the attack in Pulwama, in Kashmir, this suicide bombing, what's happening throughout India right now is actually kind of reminiscent, not in scale, but in spirit, of what happened in Gujarat in that pogrom that was, where Modi actually is implicated in orchestrating the pogrom.
Which is that throughout the country of India right now, Kashmiris are being attacked.
They're being attacked by mobs.
There's been several notable incidents in one area, in a city called Dehradun, which is close to Rishikesh, which is a hippie hotspot.
The Beatles are known for it.
They wrote a song about Rishikesh.
You're talking about Kashmiris who are in India or in Kashmir?
I'm talking about Kashmiris who are in mainland India, throughout India.
Right, okay.
So in the city of Dehradun, at this one university, there's a lot of Kashmiri students.
Kashmiri students have been posting on social media, and it's being widely reported in Indian mainstream media, about how they're being besieged in their dormitories by mobs of people who are apparently being fielded by these internationalist organizations, who are coming and shouting things like, shoot the traitors.
And then these students are saying that they are reaching out to police for help, and that the police are responding to them that, well, no, you should go out and apologize to the mob.
Apologize that the Kashmiri students or university students in a totally different area of mainland India should go out and apologize to these mobs of internationalists for the suicide bombing that occurred hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles away in Kashmir.
There was a student, or not a student, there was a young man who was in his home.
He had posted something on social media, I think on Facebook, that was discovered and that people were saying was anti-national.
I don't know exactly what it was.
But a mob went to his home, went in, filmed the whole thing on Facebook Live, dragged him out of his home into the street, paraded him around the street half-naked, and then draped an Indian flag over his naked torso, and then filmed him while they made him say, Bharat Mata Ki Jai, which means Hail Mother India, and filmed it.
There was, I think, a teacher that had a mob come to her at night in her home, and they surrounded her home, filmed the whole thing on Facebook Live, and were braiding her.
In this case, if I recall correctly, because she had posted things on Facebook talking about how there are human rights issues in Kashmir that need to be addressed in relation to the suicide bombing that had just occurred.
So, widely throughout India, there are these attacks on totally innocent Kashmiris who are being accused of being anti-patriotic, anti-national, or just being targeted because they raise issues of human rights in Kashmir.
Yeah.
But talk about the reaction on the national level, because there are threats of war going back and forth, right?
There are threats of war going back and forth.
India has hiked up tariffs on Pakistani goods by 200 percent.
India stripped Pakistan of most favored nation status.
Just in the past day, India announced a treaty that they have over water rights that they're going to—supposedly they've reexamined it, and they don't—based on the treaty, they don't have any obligation to actually give any of the water that the treaty covers to Pakistan.
So, they're just going to cut all of it off now.
And there are a lot of talks about war by mainstream Indian television personalities, Arnab Goswami is one in particular.
And there is nothing official yet, but there are talks about that.
The RSS, just in the past day, has said they—the RSS has traditionally been—and actually, according to one WikiLeaks document that came out in 2008, 2009 or something like that from the U.S. embassy in Delhi, the RSS, in their words, has traditionally been the foot soldiers of the BJP.
They're known for leading the on-the-ground campaigning of the BJP, the political party.
And the head of the RSS just came out in the past 24 hours saying they are going to reorient their campaign strategy for the BJP to focus on anti-terrorism in the wake of this Pulwama Kashmir suicide bombing.
Previously, their focus had been—their primary plank, their primary campaign plank had been on the building of a temple to the Hindu god Ram in a disputed religious site in the state of Uttar Pradesh, which is another thing that—I mean, if you want to talk about Americans being ignorant of Indian politics, most Americans probably have no idea that a central aspect of campaign promises by this ruling political party in India right now, the BJP, is promising to build a temple for the Hindu god Ram on a site that actually used to be occupied by a mosque.
And then in 1992, that mosque was torn down by a mob that was incited by the president of the BJP at the time.
It is a religious nationalist-controlled government right now in India, which is yet another thing that makes the whole issue—I mean, aside from the talks of war, aside from the threat of nuclear conflagration.
And Eric Margulies has been on your show talking repeatedly about the potential catastrophic fallout that could occur in a nuclear conflict.
So aside from all that, there is the issue of, yeah, Pakistan's a Muslim state, but India is de facto a Hindu state, and it's even more so at the moment because it's controlled by an openly, blatantly Hindu religious nationalist political party, which is controlled by this RSS paramilitary.
And if you trace back to the founding of the RSS, why it was founded in 1925, and then what its founders were saying from the 1930s, 1940s to 1960s, it was saying that Muslims especially, but also all non-Hindus in India, are a threat to India and are, in so many words, traitors.
And especially that anybody that converts from Hinduism to a non-Hindu religion like Islam or Christianity is guilty of leaving Hinduism for the enemy camp and basically being anti-national.
And so from the beginning, this RSS, which it is no over-exaggeration to say that they virtually control the government today— Well, but India is still one of the biggest Muslim countries in the world.
It's such a big population.
As you said, one point whatever billion that there's still, I think, even, what, 100 million or more Muslims live there.
Well, I think it's like, don't quote me on this.
I'll quote you before I quote me.
Go ahead.
150, 200 million Muslims, something like that.
It's about 19% of the population.
Yeah.
It's a massive Muslim country.
I mean, it has a massive Muslim population.
Right.
Yeah.
One of the biggest in the world.
So now, yeah, obviously there's a lot of reason why cooler heads should prevail.
I'm really dismayed to hear what you say about the Indian reaction being shutting down all of these trade relationships and this kind of thing, because if you could at least just keep those— Sorry to interrupt, but immediately what came to mind for me when I heard that is the economic adage that when goods cease to cross borders, the troops soon will.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I mean, you would think if you could just kind of put those on hold at least that those would be the basis for rebuilding the relationship as soon as possible.
But getting rid of those makes that that much more difficult.
What's especially important as far as the cooler heads prevailing is, I mean, you asked about like who's implicated, you know, is it ISI?
And like I said, I mean, God only knows.
But according to the official reports, which are acknowledged by India, the actual attacker was a Kashmiri man from the local area who had reportedly, according to his parents and other sources, he had become a militant.
After a couple of years ago, he was in Kashmir.
He was profiled by Indian security forces.
He was beaten.
Supposedly he was stopped in the street, like forced to like actually actively rub his nose on the ground.
And that just like was a straw that broke the camel's back for him and he became a militant.
So officially, the guy that actually did the bombing, who knows where he got the explosives from, but he was a Kashmiri.
Yeah.
So as you were saying before, no one really knows who was behind it, if anyone was behind it.
No.
And I guess probably somebody else was, as you say, he had to get the bomb from somewhere, but still.
Exactly.
It'd be unfortunate to see a war break out over something that's still a mystery, essentially.
And what's happening right now is India still has at least 500,000 troops in Kashmir, possibly up to 700,000.
And Kashmir is an area with 13 million people.
So it's a massive, massive troop presence.
It's under constant curfew.
It's under constant internet curfew.
The internet gets cut off there all the time, sometimes for months at a time.
It's like ongoing protests and ongoing protests for years.
And the Kashmiris aren't happy.
So whatever the case is, as far as – and I'm no apologist for Pakistan.
Pakistan is a major violator of human rights in the world today.
But India is a country – India is the country with the 500,000 troops, half a million troops in Kashmir.
Kashmiris are the ones who are being occupied by India right now.
And they are deeply, deeply unhappy.
They are deeply, deeply oppressed.
And many – I mean tens of thousands of them have died.
Actually, I was especially reminded of one thing that people – as far as Kolar Hedge prevailing, one thing that I would hope that Kolar Hedge would keep in mind is the bigger context of the Kashmir issue.
That this is not a – this is not an isolated incident, this latest suicide bombing.
And the conflict has been going on there for decades and decades.
And the tens and tens of thousands of Kashmiris have been killed by the Indian security forces, including human rights defenders.
One guy in particular was named Jaleel Andrabi.
He was a Kashmiri human rights lawyer.
And in 1996, just after he'd been reaching out to the UN and just before he was scheduled to go and visit the UN in Geneva, I believe, for the second time, he was picked up while he was with his wife by Indian army forces and disappeared.
And then for a couple weeks the Indian army denied they had him in custody.
And then his body washed up in a river, tied up in a sack, hands tied behind his back, eyes gouged out, facial bones broken, and with a gunshot to the back of his head.
And he was saying, before he was murdered, that in 1996, five, six years into this Kashmiri insurgency, that India had probably killed about 40,000 people, including men, women, and children.
And once again, as far as cooler heads prevailing, as far as, like, bigger context, that at the time wasn't even isolated to Kashmir.
There was also an ongoing insurgency in Punjab, to the south of Kashmir, where Sikhs were agitating for an independent state.
And they were also under de facto occupation by the Indian army.
And tens of thousands of them were also being disappeared.
And this guy, this Kashmiri human rights lawyer who was murdered, he was murdered in 1996.
About six months before that, in Punjab, a Kashmiri human rights activist named Jiswant Singh Kalra, he was reaching out to international communities.
He'd actually just gotten back from Canada, where he'd been reaching out to the Canadian parliament, and reaching out for them to pay attention to evidence that he'd uncovered, which has since been widely proven, that the Indian security forces were picking up Sikh youth and killing them in custody, and then cremating their bodies to dispose of the evidence.
And this guy, Kalra, in Punjab, in September 1995, six months before the Kashmiri guys murdered, he's picked up by Indian police.
He has disappeared for a couple of months.
His case was actually widely talked about in U.S. Congress at the time.
And then later it came out that he was tortured and killed in custody, and his body was dumped, I believe, in a canal.
And then since then, cases were filed, and that was 1995.
In 2011, like 16 years later, I think six police officers were convicted and sentenced to life for the crime.
And so it's like totally on record that this guy was murdered by the Indian security apparatus.
And then his evidences of—he actually documented about 25,000 Sikhs in Punjab in the late 80s, early 90s, had been disappeared, murdered by Indian security forces.
And that's at the same time that this guy, this Kashmiri human rights attorney, Andhravi, is documenting 40,000 Kashmiris being disappeared and murdered by Indian security forces.
So as far as Kholer Hedge prevailing, there's bigger context as far as the 70 years of history of unrest and dispute in Kashmir.
There's also bigger context as far as the decades of human rights abuses, atrocities, of mass murder of tens and tens of thousands of people, undisputed mass murder of innocent civilians as well as insurgents.
I'm sorry.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, y'all, I was talking with Derek Sher from Listen and Think Audiobooks, and he agrees with me that it's so important that the Trump White House hears from large numbers of Americans who support his efforts to end the wars in Syrian Afghanistan, especially from combat veterans like himself.
The president must hear voices of support from out here in the real world to counteract the cries of the war party in D.C. and on TV.
Now the phone lines are jammed, but they have a pretty good email system there at whitehouse.gov.
Email me, scott at scotthorton.org when you do, and Derek Sher if at Listen and Think Audiobooks will give you two free ones for your effort.
All right.
Well, so the thing is, though, at least there hasn't been a war between India and Pakistan since before they got nukes, but now they've got nukes.
And you know what?
For 20 years, at least you could say, I don't know if you'd be right, that they've kept the peace.
There hasn't been a war since they've tested their nukes.
Yes.
But, you know, I talked with Con Hallinan about this, and he was saying there's a real problem with the disparity in the nukes right now where the Pakistanis only have shorter range delivery systems and much smaller, you know, more light tactical sized nukes, battlefield nukes for use of defense against Indian armor, essentially, where they to try to invade.
I don't know where the soft underbelly is around there, if there is one, if there's a gap they can roll through, but that would be their thing.
You know, at the same time, though, the Indians only have H-bombs or at least, I don't know, only, but have focused much more on strategic nuclear weapons.
And so the danger is that you could have the Pakistanis overwhelmed by conventional might on the ground and so resort to lower yield atom bombs, which would provoke full scale H-bomb genocide obliteration by the Indians.
And as Con was explaining, the Pakistanis, at least at that point, I don't know the current status of it, but the Pakistanis had devolved battlefield authority over the nukes down to the colonels in the field.
And that these guys could use a nuke and I don't know exactly what all authority they would have to go through in order to do it, but it would be up to them essentially to decide.
And so this is the kind of thing, you know, you talked about, you know, nuclear winter and that kind of deal.
That's what they say, that if you had, you know, at least medium or full scale nuclear war between India and Pakistan, even if China did not get involved, even if no one else got involved, that that could still lead to the death of maybe even billions of people and the failure of crops all around the world.
And for a very long time, that's the danger that these kooks, and of course, they all talk tough, just like they're in a fist fight.
I read a quote from one of the Pakistani generals today, we're ready to fight.
We don't care what they say, we're not going to start one, but we're more than happy to brawl if that's what it comes down to.
And this kind of thing, which, you know, I don't know exactly what they're supposed to say, maybe nothing and just get on the telephone.
If you've ever seen the daily closing of the border along Pakistan.
Oh yeah, where they all do their little goose steps and stuff.
Yeah, it's crazy.
It's absolutely insane.
And that's why, to really pinpoint the issue, like I said, it's much more than just a territorial dispute.
There's so much as far as religious nationalist dimensions to this.
But why this conflict over Kashmir?
Kashmir doesn't have natural resources, it doesn't have anything particularly worth claiming it as one country or the other, demanding that they must have it.
Really what it strikes me as being about is just about pride and just about like they want that feather in their cap and they don't want to admit defeat or compromise, or they view any compromise as admitting defeat.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the thing, right?
Because the middle ground would be to just let them have independence and be their own little nation state.
And yet that would require Indian withdrawal.
So what do the Pakistanis have to give up then?
You know, this kind of thing.
I can see how difficult this is.
By the way, you know, it's also worth mentioning that if America has a legitimate global role, the U.S. government, I mean, assuming its constitutional existence, I guess, for the sake of argument, if they have a role in international affairs at all, it should simply be in hosting peace conferences over things like this.
And that doesn't mean making promises like Camp David or whatever and paying each side billions of dollars to not fight anything crazy.
And it's in our interest to prevent even one atom bomb from ever going off at this volatile border here.
As far as that, if the U.S. has any role to play in this at all, then it should be in hosting peace talks and it should be in advocating for peace and for freedom.
And that's the beginning and end of it.
The be all of it.
But what we have right now in the U.S. as far as this relationship with India is that there's been a major shift where the U.S. is pulling strings and playing this great game and trying to balance powers against powers in the world.
And has shifted from—it actually used to be rather pro-Pakistan, now it's shifted to be pro-India.
I don't believe it should be either.
But it's shifted to be pro-India at the moment, and it's seeing India as kind of a balance against China.
And it's drastically increased its strategic alliances, its military alliances with India.
And at the same time, a lot of that is really, really, really strongly motivated by an India lobby in the U.S.
Which—India lobby is actually not necessarily the correct word because it's more a Hindu nationalist lobby.
It's deeply affiliated with the BJP and deeply sympathetic to the BJP and is primarily backed by U.S.-based affiliates of the RSS and other Hindu nationalist outfits.
And they have, for years, worked very hard and they have a very strong incentive to prevent the U.S. from even mentioning that there might be human rights issues in India.
They have specifically worked against a couple of different resolutions in U.S. Congress.
The last one was in 2013-14.
Worked to kill them, despite those resolutions being bipartisan-supported.
And they've worked—they've protested any time—the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, for instance, has had a couple of hearings.
They've come out and protested against that.
Well, the Americans have helped them with their nuclear program in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which they're not members of.
And we are.
And forbidden, therefore, from including them.
They're outside of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and all that, but so-called Elisa Rice cut this deal to just go around all of that.
It's bizarre, too, because if you look at all this saber-rattling from the U.S. against Iran, and Iran, whether or not they should have nuclear weapons, they've actually signed the NPT.
India has not signed the NPT.
In fact, they actually haven't signed a large number of other nuclear—a large number of other U.N. international treaties, including the convention on—or the Hague Convention for the International Criminal Court.
They also haven't—they've signed, but they've never ratified the Convention Against Torture.
And torture still is basically—torture is basically legal in India, and it's widely practiced.
Someone ought to tell them they can just do like the Americans and sign it and ignore it.
But go with the public relations and then adopt the Kubark manual.
Anyway, listen, they sure got an enemy in you.
Very interesting stuff here.
A lot to be concerned about.
Let me stop you right there.
I love India.
I love Indians.
My closest, closest friends are Indian people.
Absolutely, my most intimate friends are Indian people.
And I love India.
But I'm not a big supporter of the Indian state violating human rights, or Pakistan, or any state in the world.
I'm not a supporter of the U.S. violating human rights and waging war all over the world and creating an empire.
And I'm definitely not a supporter of religious nationalism, which is a huge issue in India today.
So I would say I am an enemy of tyranny and totalitarianism and religious nationalism.
Yeah, well, and good for you for it, too.
And I would raise my flag for liberty.
And I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you.
I would raise my flag for liberty and peace.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, right on.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time and for your great article here.
I learned a lot.
Thank you, Scott.
Thank you, guys.
That is Peter Friedrich.
And he wrote this thing.
It's at Antiwar.com.
It's called Pulwama, a present moment in the long Kashmir story.
I guess I forgot to say the name of it at the beginning.
Sorry about that.
Pulwama, a present moment in the long Kashmir story.
It's running today or yesterday at Antiwar.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
You can find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
