Pakistan: Now or Never?
Perspectives on Pakistan
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.
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.
