Merchants of war

With the current tensions between Pakistan and India on a high, focus has again shifted to the arms race in South Asia. Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the UN Tehmina Janjua raised the concern once again in a meeting of the UN’s Disarmament Committee last week. Pakistan has insisted that it is following India’s lead on the arms race. We turn to the Western world as potential allies and ask them to use their good sense to force India to curb the expansion of its military force. India responds to questions asks about its military expenditure by raising the Pakistan card. The Western powers look at us and politely agree with both before doing nothing about it. And they are hardly serious about disarmament. What would it do to the billions of dollars in arms trade that keep their economies flowing? No one seriously wants disarmament. Given the complicity of most Western powers in the arms trade, we would instead suggest a change of focus and tone. We need to begin to talk about who benefits from the arms race in South Asia. It is not the population of these countries. And, in the long run, it is also not their armed forces. The arms sold are never enough to fight back against the countries who sold them. They are merely enough to create regional instability. It is easy to forget that the global weapons trade fuels the many violent conflicts raging across the world, from the Middle East to Africa, South Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. And we are not talking even talking about the illegal arms trade. It is the biggest global peaceniks, such as the US, France and England, that compete for major arms deals with big spending countries.

The military-industrial complex, first named by US President Dwight Eisenhower back in 1961, is now more global than ever. Even as the Middle East descends into chaos, major Western countries continue to supply arms to any and all countries willing to buy. Alliances are formed and broken on the basis of agreements to purchase arms. The Western powers remain the biggest arms suppliers to Afghanistan while Russia remains the biggest arms supplier to the Syrian state. The most obvious contradiction between the stated desire of global peace and the reality is that the countries that say they desire peace more are the ones selling the most weapons. The Pakistani permanent representative to the UN spoke of the risk of unending war provoked by an imbalance in conventional weapons. This has been correctly identified. But what has not been pointed out yet is the source of these weapons. How the West manages to still retain its moralising streak despite knowing the weaponry it is funding will be used in crimes against civilians is one of the greatest mysteries of the world. These same arms are not only provided to governments but, in the fog of war, invariably end up in the hands of groups like the Islamic State. But the merchants of war care little for that so long as their coffers keep getting filled.