Why Pakistan violates ceasefire shelling Kashmir

The conventional wisdom is the Pakistan Army is whipping up India-border-paranoia to divert attention from its own terrorism troubles.  But let us take a little cockeyed look.

• The most out-dated explanation is the Pakistani’s are feeling frustrated.  Like a child throwing a tantrum, they resort to firing across the border.
• The media have cottoned on to another explanation that they fire to distract our attention, while they attempt to push terrorists across the border.
• Some of my shipmates used to speculate with a wink and smile, that they are expending their ‘expired’ ammunitions. 
• All those bullets, mortar, and cannon shells do have an ‘expiry’ or ‘use-by’ dates, which vary between 5 to 20 years.  The developed countries, who are also the weapons manufacturers, have a well established procedure to decommission and recycle those ammunition.  Pakistan is an arms importer and has no economical way of dismantling or recycling them.  So, the reasoning is they are destroying the ‘expired’ ammunition in the most economical, and at the safest place (for them) to do so – by lobbing them across the border.
• Of late, as the capabilities of an audit to expose corruption became apparent, the next step of awareness is being brandished.  The Pakistan Army is actually fudging its ammunition inventory, by claiming to have fired far more than they have actually done.
• The Generals are feathering their nests, by placing orders – on paper – for huge number of ammos, but what actually comes in is very little.  To makeup for the shortfall, they routinely create a big tamasha on the border, and account for all the ‘missing’ ammo as fired across the border.  If at all there is an audit, they can well tell the bean-counters to go and count the shells on the Indian side!

Seeing the way Pakistan is run, I can well believe it.  I only hope they have better control of their nukes.  Else the reality of this Mike Keefe cartoon of 2002 is chilling.



(image courtesy Mike Keefe)

IceRocket Tags: pakistan,cross-border-firing,terrorism

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