Some leadership it is!

The US kept mum over the latest spell of Indian atrocities in Indian-occupied Kashmir (IoK). However, it is concerned over the latest round of cross-border firing on the Line of Control (LoC), but only wants both countries to reach a "negotiated" settlement whereas the UN Secretary General has offered his services to mediate between India and Pakistan.
India will never "negotiate" over IoK; it only wants Pakistan to forego its demand for implementing the UN Security Council resolutions that require India to facilitate a plebiscite in IoK under UN supervision. Shouldn't the US - permanent member of the UN Security Council - force India to comply with UN resolutions? And amazingly, the US is also ignoring the unfolding worrisome realities.
This US attitude is the after-effect of the Obama-led US entering into "the defining partnership of the 21st century" with India. The US foreign policy is often blissfully self-centred, over-confident, over-aggressive and, above all, biased; it projects issues purely from self-serving angles that avoid embarrassing friendly countries, no matter how despotic they may be.
After 9/11, Stern-Intel - a Canada-based information service - revealed that, before 9/11, a memo circulated among the US intelligence agencies warned about an impending Israeli terrorist attack on the US mainland to shift global focus from Israeli brutalities on the Palestinians because, to Israelis, inflaming US public opinion to a point where the US reacted by invading a Muslim state offered welcome prospects.
India too is using "cooked-up" attacks on its Pathankot airbase and a military base in Uri to justify surgical strikes on Pakistan, although talking to an Indian TV channel a soldier from Pathankot revealed that no one was killed in that attack. That's not all; a Muslim Indian officer investigating this attack was killed after he filed a report nullifying allegations of Pakistan's involvement in that attack.
Unfolding truths about the allegedly Pakistan-sponsored attack on the military base in Uri has exposed their falsehood. Yet, since September 29, India is conducting "surgical strikes" against Pakistan along the LoC, and in first of these attacks, according to India, "4 Indian helicopters killed 38 Pakistani soldiers" - twice the Indian soldiers killed (in reality, none) in the attack on Uri base.
What the US can't see is that Narendra Modi-led India (that the US expects will unite South Asia to confront China) is seriously endangering the unity of the region; Indian-sponsored disruption of the Saarc moot scheduled to be held in Pakistan next month is an indication thereof. But more important is recalling India's divisive track record in the region.
The US overlooks India's propping up of the Tamil Tigers (oddly, at the bidding of the then Soviet Union to forestall America's getting a naval base in Sri Lanka after its unceremonious exit from Vietnam) - a wound that continued to bleed Sri Lanka for decades. Nor does the US remember economic exploitation of a land-locked Nepal by India in recent years.
The US foreign policy defines state-sponsored terrorism in unclear terms. In the past seven decades, state-backed terrorism by US-friendly South American regimes was either ignored or labelled "self-defence"; that policy continues, and now US-installed proxies in resource-rich under-developed and developing countries indulge in state-sponsored terrorism in the name of self-defence.
What is no less surprising is the fact that the recent escalation in India-Pakistan tensions began after the Panama Leaks began posing serious threats to Pakistan's Prime Minister, his family, and his regime. The tensions fuelled by make-believe attacks on India by Pakistan (mere coincidence, or designed to over-burden Pakistan's armed forces?) are also compounding the threat Pakistan confronts on its Western borders.
Security threats to Pakistan posed by India's promised "surgical strikes" for avenging the (cooked-up) Pakistan-sponsored attacks on its defence installations had diluted public pressure on the Pakistani Prime Minister for accountability over the alleged financial misdemeanours exposed by the Panama Leaks, but it is building up again, and becoming more threatening.
After Pakistan exposed the truth about India's "surgical strikes" (incidents of mere cross-border firing), Pakistanis are confused about the "real" aim of these strikes. Why are these dramas being staged, and for whose benefit? After wrapping-up Iran's nuclear programme, are India's "counter-attacks" for Pakistan's "terrorist attacks" supposed to build global pressure for winding-up Pakistan's nuclear capabilities as well?
Modi was right in advocating a crusade against poverty in South Asia, but will creating tensions between India and Pakistan help increase regional trade, optimise the benefit of lowest transport cost, and encourage entering into joint ventures that materialise the benefits of comparative advantages in containing poverty, or to fuel the fear of a self-destructive Indo-Pak nuclear war?
And, can depriving Pakistan of its water resources help contain poverty in the region? India's threat to cancel the over five decades old Indus Water Treaty with Pakistan to deprive Pakistan of its agreed share of the Himalayan waters would be the worst kind of terrorism that India has threatened to perpetrate after entering into "the defining partnership of the 21st century" with the US.
The vast majority of Indians doesn't believe in religious segregation; it believes in secularism because that's how India, with its diverse population, can remain 'one' country. That's why the religious and racist chaos triggered by BJP is worrying the Indians because the neo-Nazism being practised by India's Modi-led extremist minority - BJP, RSS and Shiv Sena - is destabilising India.
This scenario makes you wonder whether this was the time for the US to enter into "the defining partnership of the 21st century" with India. President Obama will be remembered for long on account of the "Arab Sprig" unleashed during his tenure that destabilised the Middle East region; destabilising the South Asia region could become another thorn in his crown.
Given its diverse nationalities and their differing political aspirations (especially in the South and North East), and the population's rising poverty level, India faces grave challenges. The ever-cunning West knows that, but for the present, it is propping-up India as a buffer against China, not because of the much-publicised US love for India, but for serving the US interests, which a clever-by-half Modi can't see.
While pressure is finally building up on India to opt for rationality (not surgical strikes on Pakistan), Pakistan's political front portrays a huge rationality deficit manifested by how the Prime Minister and all relevant state institutions dilly-dallied the investigation of the Panama Leaks thereby making it a state-threatening affair.
How the Nawaz Sharif-led regime reacts to PTI's threatened freezing of the federal capital (because all relevant state institutions virtually refused to investigate the Panama Leaks), is a huge, bloody revolution-fuelling failure of the state. What a leadership the US, India and Pakistan have been blessed with!