How America can help India inflict pain on Pakistan
For Pakistan's army, the terrorists it breeds are expendable. India's surgical strike last week killed scores of jihadis assembled at launch pads in the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK).
The strike caused the Pakistani army international humiliation. But till Pakistan's top generals feel the pain, they will not change. Terrorism against India will not stop.
There is now a new path to inflict that pain. The US Congress has just passed into law the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA).
The Act will allow relatives of American victims of the 9/11 terror attack 15 years ago to directly sue Saudi Arabia for any role it may have played in the 9/11 plot.
President Barack Obama had vetoed the Bill, arguing that it would jeopardise the US government for the acts of its military or intelligence personnel accused of war crimes abroad.
For the first time in Obama's eight-year presidency, both the Senate and the House of Representatives voted to override the presidential veto.
Snubbing
The snub was unprecedented and for Obama personally galling because it was bipartisan: Virtually every Democrat and Republican voted to override the presidential veto.
In the Senate, the vote was 97-1; in the House of Representatives, it was 348-77. The new law, among other strictures, allows US courts to seize the assets of a terrorist-sponsoring nation.
US lawmakers have given their citizens a powerful legal weapon to hold to account a sovereign nation like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan that is complicit in terrorism and other war crimes.
The law may well be tweaked during the "lame duck" session of Congress in November (when the transition from Obama to the new president-designate begins) to introduce safeguards against prosecution of US interests abroad.
But the basic law and its uncompromising clauses against terror-sponsoring entities (including sovereign nations) and individuals will stand.
The Saudis have reacted with fury to JASTA. For months they lobbied with US lawmakers against the Act.
But the intense campaign by the relatives of American citizens who died in the 9/11 terror attack prevailed over the Saudis' clout.
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| Former Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf. (Photo credit: AP) |
The development represents a dramatic change from what transpired in December 2012. Relatives of US citizens killed in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack in November 2008 had sued general Shuja Pasha, then head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), in a federal court in New York.
The US administration, however, told the court that Pasha had immunity from prosecution for the Mumbai attack because "the ISI was part of a foreign state within the meaning of the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act (FSIA)."
There was outrage at this decision among the kin of US citizens who died in the Mumbai attack. But the UPA government did not file a protest with the US government and the ISI's Pasha escaped prosecution.
Not for much longer. Depending on the interpretation of the newly-legislated JASTA, Pasha, Gen Parvez Kayani and even Gen Pervez Musharraf, who were all allegedly complicit in planning the Mumbai attack from 2006 onwards, could face prosecution.
There are other precedents for prosecuting political and military leaders for war crimes - and state-sponsored terrorism against citizens of another country qualifies as a war crime.
In March 2016, the Serbian strongman Radovan Karadzic was found guilty of war crimes in Srebrencia by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and sentenced to 40 years in prison.
Earlier Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia, was prosecuted by the ICTY and kept in a prison cell in the Hague. He died in March 2006 before a verdict could be reached in his trial for war crimes and genocide in the Balkans.
Genocide
The Pakistani army and the ISI have been responsible for waging an undeclared war on India through proxy terrorism for decades. They have been accused of genocide in Balochistan.
Surgical strikes and other measures are necessary to impose a cost for such acts of state terrorism.
But the generals in Rawalpindi who mastermind the terror war on India do not pay a price. And unless they do, proxy terrorism from Pakistan will not end. It may pause, but not stop.
A first step in prosecuting Pakistan's top generals - including Musharraf, Kayani, Pasha and Raheel Sharif - is for the Indian government to implead itself in a fresh case in the US under the new Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act along with the relatives of US citizens killed in the November 2008 Mumbai terror attack.
Sanctions
The case in the US should include a call for imposition of travel sanctions on the prosecuted generals and freezing of their illegal foreign bank accounts.
Pakistan's army generals have built personal fortunes over the years. The army is one of Pakistan's biggest landowners.
The military's top brass owns up to a third of Pakistan's business corporations directly or through a maze of benami firms.
To impose a cost on Pakistan for terrorism, the strategic response we have seen in recent days is necessary but not sufficient.
The real culprits responsible for the death of thousands of Indian soldiers and citizens over the years are at the top of Pakistan's military food chain.
Only when they experience the pain of prosecution for war crimes under the new US JASTA and are slapped with punitive travel and financial sanctions even as they stand trial, as Milosevic and Karadzic did, will the battle against terrorism be won.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)
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