Is anyone listening to our screams for help now? After the September 11 tragic events in USA at World Trade Center and Pentagon where so many innocent lives were snuffed out in fraction of a second, we do hope someone is listening now. We, the Kashmiri Hindus that have been persecuted for centuries by the Islamists in Kashmir, India, have left no stone unturned for the rest of the world to know our plight. We were hounded out of our homeland by terrorists from the same groups and camps as Bin Laden’s other outfits. However for over a decade, the US among other countries has ignored this saga of terrorism which has claimed more than 35,000 lives. This saga is ignored today as well, when US officials relegate fighting terrorism in Kashmir to a “second phase” of the so-called global war. Commentators and analysts still shirk from calling Pakistan a terrorist state. If 7,000 lives in Washington and New York equal terrorism, why don’t 35,000 lives in India amount to the same?

Now that America has decided to 'stamp out terrorism from the rest of the world' and 'it is a fight between good and evil' as indicated by President Bush, one wonders how sincere he will be in following up with this promise. Are these statements meant for public consumption only or is he really going to stamp out this evil disease from the world? If he is sincere, then he needs to go after the Pakistani military, its government officials, its notorious intelligence agency, ISI, its dozens of terrorist groups, and its thousands of terrorist camps. These Pakistani institutions have been used not only to prop up the Taliban and their guest Al Qaida, but have been instrumental in sustaining, inspiring and supplying the terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir state of India.

Is President Bush honest enough to point a finger to a new-found friend, an old cold-war ally Pakistan? Is he prepared to sift through volumes of intelligence handed over to him by India, a country that has been crying foul for such a long time? Is he prepared to listen to the facts produced before him that no country other than Pakistan and the ISI is the orchestrator and facilitator of numerous Islamic insurgencies around the world in collaboration with Al Qaida? Is he willing to freeze the assets of ISI personnel, the partial funding for their activities coming from sale of Afghanistan-grown opium? Is he willing to demand that the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, which has been used to threaten India into submitting to a decade of submission to terrorism, should be dismantled? Does he realize the implications of continued existence of this nuclear arsenal in a country that hosts dangerous anti-US terrorist groups and tens of thousands of madrassas (so-called religious schools) that turn out droves of graduates with the kind of fundamentalist fervor seen on September 11?

Only time will tell which route President Bush takes. Is he going to act like a true Texan and take the terrorist bull by its horns, or is he going to be as squeamish as the Indian government which has been bullied by the Pakistani nuclear threat for so long and has not raised a finger to defend its own Kashmiri Hindu population?