World | India
Hawks step up calls for military to target terror networks in Pakistan
India's government is coming under growing pressure from foreign-policy hawks to take military action against Pakistan and the terrorist network based there.
- By Amy Kazmin, Financial Times
- Published: 22:40 December 20, 2008
New Delhi: India's government is coming under growing pressure from foreign-policy hawks to take military action against Pakistan and the terrorist network based there.
Vikram Sood, a former Indian intelligence chief, said that without such action the country would face more attacks like the recent commando-style assault on Mumbai.
Sood, who served for two-and-a-half years as the head of the Research and Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency, said New Delhi should consider tougher action, such as air strikes or covert measures, against the backers of the audacious Mumbai attack. "It's the Pakistani army that must pay the price," Sood said at a conference on India's future. "Unless we do that, we will continue to have this problem with us. We are not making a virtue of our restraint."
Arundhati Ghose, a former Indian ambassador to the United Nations, expressed similar views: "You have a commando-style attack on our country, they kill our people, and we are supposed to show restraint? Which other country does that? If there is another attack, we should go in and bomb the daylights out of them."
The comments reflect a deep anger in India's military, intelligence and foreign-policy establishment against the country from which the Mumbai attack was reportedly launched, and frustration at the failure of India's diplomatic offensive to bring about any serious crackdown on militants.
India has blamed a Pakistani militant Islamist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, for last month's attack on Mumbai targets.
Pradeep Kaushiva, a retired vice-admiral, said the hawkish stance represented the views of the military. "I am sure [that] 100 per cent of people in the uniform of the armed forces feel just as any other citizen in the country - that the country has been attacked and someone must pay for it."
In a statement, Pranab Mukherjee, India's foreign minister who initially seemed to rule out force, said on Saturday that India would "consider the entire range of options" if Pakistan failed to curb terrorist groups within its borders.
Sood, who is now the vice-president of a New Delhi policy think-tank, accused Pakistan's army of being on a quest to "cut India to size".
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