The Preacher and the Naïve
Lt Gen PC Katoch, PVSM, UYSM, AVSM, SC (Retd)*
The continuing clamour by some US scholars and think tanks, Stimson Centre included, that India should go full hog for top-down diplomatic engagement and a big push for cross-border trade and investment with Pakistan is amusing to say the least, for is this not what India has been trying for several decades. Surely the US think tanks are not naïve enough not to perceive this. But despite India’s constant overtures to Pakistan, what has been the reciprocation – terror and all out Pakistani effort to up the internal security ante in India? Compare this to the US invasion of Iraq on false pretext of nuclear weapons and the present assumption that Bashar Assad on the verge of using chemical weapons. If it were not the vetoes of China and Russia, Syria would have been invaded long back. Where was the top-down diplomatic engagement? It is apparent that US will still achieve what it wants in Syria by arming the rebels more and more disregarding whether the already 60,000 civilian casualties are doubled or trebled. The next country on the menu is obviously Iran.
The western sermon of “let bygones be bygones and look ahead” (parroted also by their mascot Musharraf) has led India granting following concessions to Pakistan: India declared a unilateral ceasefire in J&K in 1948 when Pakistani forces were on the run and Pakistan still illegally held one third of Kashmir. As per UN resolution of 1948, Pakistani security forces were to clear out from POK. Not only did Pakistan counter the UN mandate by reinforcing her security forces in POK, she has deliberately altered the demography of POK; India did not pursue delineation of Cease Fire Line (CFL) between India-Pakistan under the Karachi Agreement of 1949 beyond NJ 9842 – “northwards” to the Wakhan Corridor bordering China and Afghanistan; India did not go to UN when Pakistan transferred the Shaksgam Valley of J&K to China; India is giving 80 percent of water to Pakistan under the Indus Water Treaty – far in excess to global norms related with size of the river basin; captured strategic Haji Pir Pass was returned to Pakistan in 1965; India treated 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of the 1971 prisoners with respect and returned them relying on verbal promise of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto during the Shimla Accord to resolve the Kashmir issue - a promise Bhutto reneged later; with a heart filled with friendship, Prime Minister Vajpayee took the bus to Lahore while Musharraf prepared to stab us in Kargil; Indian intelligence ceased operations in Pakistan on orders of Prime Minister IK Gujral; Indian Army gave formal religious burials to Pakistani soldiers unclaimed and abandoned by Pakistan during the Kargil Conflict while Pakistani Army brutally tortured, maimed and killed Captain Saurabh Kalia, five other Indian soldiers and Squadron Leader Ajay Ahuja; india granted MFN status to Pakistan years ago; and India has given investment opportunities in India to Pakistan. The reciprocation from Pakistan has been: breeding terrorism in India; infiltrating terrorists in Jammu & Kashmir; creating an armed terrorist architecture pan-India since early 1990’s; engineering endless terrorist attacks / acts in Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, Gujarat, other parts of India including IC-814 hijack, attack on Parliament, 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attack etc; refusing to act against Pakistani perpetrators of 26/11; nurturing, patronizing and masterminding LeT acts against India; using the Haqqani network to target Indians and Indian interests in Afghanistan; pumping drugs and fake currency (minted in Pakistani government facilities) into India; open rallies in Pakistan professing balkanization of India, collection of funds and recruitment for jihad against India under the very nose of the administration and with open support of military veterans in connivance the ISI and military; refusal to acknowledge continuation of the ‘Karachi Project’ and other Pakistani complicity as disclosed by Abu Jundal; virus arracks on Indian networks; uploading morphed images of death and destruction through cyclones and earthquakes as alleged atrocities committed on Muslims through MMS and video clips to our North-East population, inciting communal tensions and generating large exodus from Bangalore and other cities, to name a few. Pakistan has yet to grant India the MFN status and wants India out from Afghanistan totally – including from Afghan markets. General Kiyani himself has been vocal about it. One wonders if, US think tanks have studied the India-Pakistan relationship in above backdrop.
The acronym GWOT was misnomer. It should have actually been USWOT (US War on Terror) for the sole target was Al Qaeda. US clout on Pakistan was obvious with latter forced to join as frontline GWOT ally (which it never was) under threat of being “bombed into stone age”. The AfPak policy itself was flawed and based on the CENTCOM-PACOM boundary drawn along the India-Pakistan border. GWOT deliberately ignored the fast radicalizing Pakistan, Pakistan’s continued export of terror, and the China-Pakistan nexus in using terror against the NATO led ISAF and India and even the advice of US military commanders in Afghanistan that the womb of terror within Pakistan needed to be tackled, drone attacks being peripheral. Ironically, US did realize the folly of not having an AfPak-India policy but giving this entire region to CENTCOM or PACOM was not done – not because of the façade of hands of these individual commands being already full but because many startling and unpalatable facts would have emerged at the time of handing/taking over that could not be risked to go public, as admitted by serving and veteran US Military officials. Therefore, status quo continued and Pakistan was permitted to spawn and nurture other terrorist organizations. The Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) expanded from and anti-India terrorist organization into an international level terrorist organization with tentacles in the US, Canada, Europe, Iraq, West and Southeast Asia, Australia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and India that turned to Global Jihad in concert and in conjunction Al Qaeda, which has led Ashley Tellis calling on the US to go for permanent evisceration of the LeT with our without Pakistani support. US scholars and think tanks would also do well to study how much and what pace is radicalization spreading courtesy the policies of GWOT and Regime Change. The results may be startling. On face value, one may gloat over reducing the life span of the terrorist but ignoring the multiplying hydra in the process can modestly be termed stupid.
As to the internal situation in Pakistan, it is Pakistan’s own doing and despite the coloured vision on account of military to military US-Pakistan ties, it is Pakistan’s Military which is party to it. The estimated US$ 20.7 billion Pakistan-Military-corporate-industrial empire of 2007 vintage has expanded further. In the words of their own scholars and military analysts, Pakistani politicians will remain a puppet of the military, as they have been since 1977 and terrorism will remain a tool of foreign policy. Pakistani media admits the military-judiciary combine has taken the polity and bureaucracy hostage in Pakistan. Radicalism is being preached not in the madrassas in wild areas but institutionalized in both public and private schools. The emergence and support of the Pakistan-born Canadian Muslim Tahir-ul-Qadri to clean up the Pakistani establishment was no Pakistani Arab Spring but a well orchestrated Pakistan Military-ISI move to overthrow Asif Ali Zardari. There is no way that Pakistani Army is going to let go of its power and money to control Pakistan. Peace with India and Afghanistan implies the Pakistani Army gets back to barracks, which will hardly be permitted. Undoubtedly, the strife within Pakistan will cause periodic implosions with the military-ISI riding the terror tiger, efforts to crush independence movements like in Baluchistan with brute force, organized periodic massacres of Shias, forced demographic changes in Baluchistan, Baltistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, and façade of military operations in FATA. So let us not get carried away that there is change of heart in the Pakistani Military establishment. On the contrary, it is getting more radicalized and appears enjoying balancing US and China and extracting support from both simultaneously.
It is strange to receive a western sermon that if Indian policy is dismissive of and disinterested in Pakistan, or resigned to Pakistan's demise, India is dead in the water and what India is waiting for. To start with, India was never disinterested in Pakistan, nor presently is. But there is a limit to which the olive branch can be extended when the reciprocation has savagely hostile. India is not contributing to the demise of Pakistan and never will but cannot ‘force’ trade on Pakistan. Whatever trade is happening between the two countries is certainly not stifling India. The more pertinent part is the question of “Demise” of Pakistan. That will most certainly not happen albeit there maybe breakaways. But why should India be then “Dead in Water”. Such a breakup in case of Pakistan, were it to happen, would not be the first time and if India has good relations with Bangladesh, any reasons why it will it not have equally good relations with any new nations. So why should India be dead in case there is further breakup of Pakistan? Let us now examine the question of “What is India waiting for”. In the first place, India is not inactive in trying to improve relations in the region but why India, the whole world is keenly watching how the US game plan will play out. The recent CSIS report talks of a all direct spending US cost of Afghan War (2002-2013) to the incredible amount of $641.7 billion, bulk of the expenditure incurred 2009 onwards but significantly little spent on development projects. The implications being that the US was never interested in the security situation in Afghanistan post 2014 aside from fortifying Northern Afghanistan as a bulwark against Taliban forays into the CARs. That is the precise reason Barry Cooper of Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute recently said, “Most important are our own interests: we are willing to let Pakistan (and even Iran) establish spheres of influence in Afghanistan because at the end of the day, we really don’t care how Afghans govern themselves”. So, will Robert Blackwill’s plan to divide Afghanistan come into effect inadvertently?
Afghans query that if US launched GWOT, why did they not invade Pakistan, the very source of global terror? The answer is that the US did not want to fight the Pakistani Military, nukes notwithstanding. There was certainly a better way – let Pakistan implode. Whether this was by design or inadvertent on the part of US cab be speculated upon but ignoring happenings within Pakistan during the so called GWOT (as mentioned earlier) certainly helped bring Pakistan to the present state. To say that the US would not benefit from such an implosion would be ignoring the obvious. A Baluchistan and a Syria like situation in neighboring Iran would surely serve US national interests. Orchestration of ‘soft war’ in Iran is perhaps just one-two years away. A Pashtunistan may well be logger heads with Pakistan, with accruing favorable fallouts. How this will affect Chinese plans for Gwadar and Chabahar is surely wargamed as part of US plans. Fits perfectly with the emerging new US doctrine in which US doesn’t take primary responsibility for events, but which allows regional crises to play out until a new regional balance is reached. But this does not imply the US while not taking primary responsibility for those events will remain inactive and not manipulate such events from the shadows to further its own national interests. Additionally, the US is surely aware that the safety of the mainland against terrorist threats is diminishing by the day with increase in homegrown radicals (Al Qaeda head in US is already a US National?) actively supported and nurtured from the mother Al Qaeda and allied establishment within Pakistan. For all the blood of Americans shed while Pakistan ran with the hares and hunted with the hounds all these years, what better opportunity than post 2014? Now if you cannot read the pattern would it not be the height of naiveté? The bogey of a nuclear war in South Asia and even that of conventional India-Pakistan war needs to be set aside. India-Pakistan bilateral relations are and will progress at their own pace. What the western think tanks could perhaps look at is how to take the US-India strategic partnership to the next level rather than trying to prop up Pakistan including by orchestrating issues like Indian withdrawal from Siachen to obfuscate implosions in Pakistan. Surely, if the US sees India as friend in Asia Pivot then cooperation cannot be restricted to the sea alone. How about recognizing ‘one India’ and denouncing spurious Chinese claims to Arunachal Pradesh for starters?
*Prakash Katoch is a former Lieutenant General and a Council Member of USI.
(Article uploaded on Mar. 05, 2013).
Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the organisation that he belongs to or of the USI.