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O Untimely Death:

The Fourth Indo-Pakistani War, 1996-98

 

By Chris Oakley

Part 8

 

inspired by the story "Hell’s Door Opened" by David Atwell

Summary: In the previous seven episodes of this series we looked at the circumstances leading to the outbreak of the 4th Indo-Pakistani War; the first engagements of the war itself; the early effects of the war on China’s relationship to the combatant nations; the bold Indian gambit to expedite the war’s end by capturing the Pakistani capital Islamabad; the Indian armed forces’ post-Operation Amritsar struggles to crush the Kargil insurgency; the war’s impact on the 1996 U.S. presidential elections; the mass protest rallies held in Pakistan’s major cities after the collapse of the Pakistani army’s August 1997 Punjab offensive; the escalation of hostilities into regional nuclear war; the global diplomatic effort to prevent the regional holocaust from mushrooming into global nuclear conflict; and the Melbourne peace accords that finally ended the war in early 1998. In this chapter we’ll review the first stages of the postwar recovery efforts in India and Pakistan and the political troubles which started to overtake the Clinton Administration following the end of the 4th Indo-Pakistani War..

 

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In early February of 1998 the U.N. General Assembly convened in special session to consider a problem which the world hadn’t faced since Hiroshima and Nagasaki-- how to help the survivors of nuclear warfare in rebuilding their lives and their homes. In some respects the situation facing Indians and Pakistanis who’d lived through the mini-holocaust that their countries had inflicted on each other the previous fall was even graver than the one Japan was confronted with after the atom bomb strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mainly for the simple reason that the warheads India and Pakistan had used in their nuclear showdown were much more destructive and radioactive than the devices the Americans had detonated in August of 1945.

Security at U.N. headquarters in New York was tighter than it had been at any other time since the Cuban missile crisis. Then-New York State governor George Pataki was sufficiently concerned about the possibility of civil unrest among the Indian and Pakistani immigrant demonstrators gathered outside the U.N. building that he dispatched a battalion of New York State National Guard troops to assist the NYPD in maintaining crowd control. His concerns were well-founded; in the immediate aftermath of the 4th Indo-Pakistani War tensions between the Indian and Pakistani communities in the Big Apple were at an all-time high, with the NYPD homicide squad investigating at least two dozen murders known or suspected to have been ethnically motivated. And the FBI’s Manhattan office was reporting that there’d been a spike in hate crimes against both Indians and Pakistanis over the last six months.

NYPD riot squads had been on full alert from the minute the General Assembly meeting was announced, and nothing the troopers saw on the streets outside the U.N. Building gave them any reason to doubt their services would be needed. At least six people had been arrested for disorderly conduct before the meeting even started. The number of demonstrators detained on such charges would only continue to mount as the meeting went on; by the time it finally adjourned some five and a half hours after it had first been called to order, nearly 120 people were behind bars on these counts and other, more serious charges. The FBI collared an additional 55 suspects on similar counts and took out fugitive warrants on 13 other people for fleeing the scene of a crime.

Inside the halls of the U.N. itself the atmosphere was barely any less confrontational. The Indian and Pakistani ambassadors to the U.N. traded accusations while General Assembly president Didier Opetti tried to maintain order among the delegates. Clinton’s ambassador to the U.N., Madeleine Albright, had a rather difficult time convincing her Pakistani colleague not to storm out of the session in protest in response to the Indian ambassador’s accusations that Pakistani special forces units had helped Kargil guerrilla fighters commit mass murder against Indian women and children at the gruesome peak of the Kargil insurgency. The Russian U.N. ambassador, for his part, nearly talked himself hoarse in his efforts to prevent his Indian counterpart from walking out of the session in a fit of pique.

Eventually, the General Assembly did managed to keep things on track long enough to approve multi-million dollar aid programs for India and Pakistan to at least start their recovery from the nuclear holocaust which had marked much of the final months of the 4th Indo- Pakistani War. The chief priority of the UN recovery teams, aside from finding homes for the refugees displaced by the nuclear exchange, was providing food supplies to replace those which had been lost either by direct destruction in the attacks themselves or through contamination from post-attack radioactive fallout.

There were also a great many medical crises to be addressed by the relief teams. Not the least of these was the endemic incidence of radiation poisoning cases that had been an inevitable consequence of the belligerents’ usage of nuclear weapons; there had also been a dramatic increase in the number of cases of cancer and leukemia in both India and Pakistan as a result of the fallout those weapons had generated. Furthermore, with the Indian and Pakistani national health infrastructures all but smashed to pieces by the war even before the first nuclear warhead had been detonated, infectious diseases had run rampant and there seemed to be no end in sight to the vast numbers of corpses being shoveled into mass graves in a desperate attempt to try and halt the spread of these diseases.

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By the time the first contingents of U.N. medical relief personnel arrived in India, the Clinton Administration was knee-deep in political crisis. Between ever-intensifying Congressional inquiries into Whitewater and Interngate and widespread voter disgust over the President’s perceived failure to avert regional nuclear war in South Asia, it looked like Clinton’s policies as a whole and his foreign affairs program in particular were about to suffer a major repudiation at the polls in the November midterm Congressional elections. And his efforts to maintain credibility as a world leader certainly weren’t helped by the abrupt resignation of his Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, on March 13th following a turbulent National Security Council meeting in which the President’s military and foreign policy advisors hurled recriminations at each other over where the main responsibility lay for the failure of U.S efforts to stop the nuclear madness before it started.

Clinton’s “brand”, to use a popular modern phrase, had been so gravely damaged by the cataclysmic events in India and Pakistan and the multiple scandals besetting him at home that Democrats running for public office that year-- with rare exceptions --were shying away from him as if he were radioactive. At least one Senate candidate actually went so far as to change his party affiliation in order to avoid being tainted by association with a man whose name was becoming political poison. Even his most passionate defenders conceded that it might be better for him to stay in the background given the controversy which surrounded his actions in relation to Interngate and the Fourth Indo- Pakistani War.

And it wasn’t just Clinton himself whose political fortunes were taking a steep nosedive; Vice-President Al Gore, who at one time had seemed like the heavy favorite to win the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination, started to find himself an outsider in his own party. With independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s probe of Interngate picking up steam Gore was being increasingly deserted by his longtime political allies; with a handful of conspicuous exceptions(one of them being the Massachusetts Congressional delegation), the Vice-President’s fellow Democrats were more and more seeking to distance themselves from him just like they were trying to disassociate their political identities from Clinton’s. Not even First Lady Hillary Clinton’s world-renowned damage control skills could salvage Gore’s fading hopes that he might one day succeed his current boss in the White House.

Some of Gore’s fellow Democrats actually began actively fighting to keep him out of the 2000 presidential race. The more left-leaning among them sought to draft then-Vermont governor Howard Dean for a run at the White House, believing he represented the party’s best hope for Republican hands for the next four years. While some analysts thought Dean might be too liberal even by Vermont standards to have a shot at the Oval Office, those who supported the “Draft Dean” movement felt he could defy conventional wisdom and win the nomination-- possibly even win the general election if the political waves broke the right way. Dean himself admitted in a Rolling Stone interview in May of 1998 that
he’d occasionally pondered the possibility of seeking the presidency when his tenure as Vermont governor was done.

While Gore had no public reaction to such comments, they couldn’t have done anything to help his state of mind as he tried to shore up his crumbling political position. The sharks were circling the Clinton White House and looking very hungry for fresh meat. And it was only a matter of time before one of those sharks succeeded in taking a huge bite out of the administration. With Cohen already gone, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher leaving three weeks after Dean’s interview in Rolling Stone was published, Clinton’s prospects of finishing his second term were growing slimmer every day. For that matter Clinton’s marriage wasn’t exactly looking rock-steady either; in early June of 1998 the National Enquirer published an exclusive article in which an anonymous White House source claimed the President and the First Lady had nearly come to blows during an argument over Clinton’s handling of the Cohen resignation.

The burgeoning conservative media world had a field day with Clinton’s misfortunes; when they weren’t figuratively reading him the riot act for(in their eyes) nearly causing World War III, right-wing radio hosts and magazine commentators were taking him to task for his attempts to conceal his infidelities or making fun of his domestic political missteps. One conservative publication, American Spectator, was particularly fond of using the commander-in-chief as its piñata; for much of 1998 the greatest part of Spectator’s article content was made up of investigative reports regarding the president’s conduct in office or satirical pieces mocking his character issues and his 1960s ideological mindset.

******

Nor, for that matter, was the Clinton Administration getting very much love from the more established liberal media. Newspaper editorial boards who just two years before had been enthusiastically touting the Comeback Kid’s re-election campaign were now strongly hinting that he should resign from office. And some of them did more than just hint at it: in a July 1998 feature printed just before the 4th of July holiday, the Boston Globe bluntly called Clinton’s second term “a disaster for the country” and said he should leave the Oval Office for the good of
America’s future and of world peace. For those people well acquainted with the Globe’s longtime pro-Clinton editorial stance, this was like the BBC advocating the Queen’s abdication: if one of the most liberal media outlets in one of America’s most left-leaning cities was telling the President he should go, that spoke volumes about his standing-- or more accurately lack thereof --among his fellow Democrats, never mind the rest of the country...

To Be Continued


From the July 2nd, 1998 Boston Globe editorial “Time For Change At The White House”.

 

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