Pakistan: Now or Never?

Time to relax India’s gun control laws, to fight militants?

Should India ease up on its tight gun control laws to arm citizens so that they can put up a fight next time they are attacked in their hotels, train stations and even a hospital as it happened in Mumbai last month?

Some people are arguing that if the people, or at least some of them such as hotel security staff and police at a railway terminal, had been properly armed there would have been some form of resistance to the Mumbai attackers instead of the spectacle of them moving around a city of 18 million as if they owned it.

You wouldn’t have had a situation where the gunmen killed at will and with such deliberation, shooting up a popular cafe, and then joining their comrades at the Taj hotel.

 Or the other pair that marched up and down the train station emptying their machine guns into commuters, hopping over to a hospital to kill some more in the vicinity. And all this while the police, armed with only batons, watched cowering in the shadows.

There was plenty of heroism, to be sure. Like the policeman who local media said took bullets, so that one of the gunmen could be captured alive. He is really now the key to the Indian position that this was an attack launched and controlled from Pakistan. Or the hotel staff  who stepped in front to take bullets instead of the guests.

[Taj Hotel,Mumbai,Reuters pic by Arko Datta]

But if they could take bullets, why couldn’t they return them? None of the security staff at the Trident-Oberoi had weapons thanks to India’s tight gun laws that make it virtually impossible to get permits, said chairman P.R. S. Oberoi.

Is Pakistan’s sovereignty under threat?

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has said non-state actors may have been behind the attacks in Mumbai and therefore big nations shouldn’t allow themselves to be held hostage to their actions

But what is the world to do if such actors operate from the territory of a state and the state is unable or unwilling to act against them, especially because they were created by its intelligence agencies in the first place, asks leading U.S. scholar Robert Kagan at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visiting the region to try and limit the fallout said even if non-state actors carried out the attacks, it would still be the Pakistani government’s responsibility to take “direct and tough action.”                                                                         

[U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with Pakistan PM Yousaf Raza Gilani. Reuters photo by Mian Khursheed]

But Kagan isn’t sure the government in Islamabad could act and certainly not Zardari, who keeps saying he himself is a victim of terrorism, and therefore recommends foreign intervention.

The international community, he argues in a rather extraordinary piece for the Washington Post, must take matters into its own hands in such a situation and re-define the whole issue of sovereignty of a nation.