by Bruce Riedel
Today the amount of direct trade between the two is relatively small. The total trade between Pakistan and India in 2011 was $2.6 billion. In 2010 India exported about $2 billion to Pakistan and imported about $300 million. That is twice the amount in 2006 and almost ten times the amount in 2001, but it is still fairly small. The Economist estimates that bilateral trade would grow tenfold, to $25 billion a year, if all trade barriers were removed.11 Indirect trade (usually via Dubai or Singapore) is much greater, but it is very hard to quantify. Direct flights between the cities of India and Pakistan are rare; it is usually easier to travel via a third nation like the United Arab Emirates. Both governments’ intelligence and security services scrutinize visitors from the other side on the assumption that they are up to no good and should be watched carefully—or better yet, kept out. Nonetheless, modest but important progress has been made in the last decade. Most recently, on September 8, 2012, the two countries signed an agreement to ease visa requirements; children under twelve years of age and adults over sixty-five will no longer need a visa. But Prime Minister Singh made clear that the Mumbai masterminds must be brought to justice for a greater loosening of travel requirements to occur.12
There is certainly much interest in India in more trade and transit. Successive Indian governments, both of the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party, have talked about more economic interaction and freer trade. Once, in a public speech, Prime Minister Singh famously dreamed about a day when he could breakfast in New Delhi, lunch in Lahore, and dine in Kabul. In August 2012, India unilaterally decided to allow direct foreign investment in India from Pakistan, which one expert has called a “huge psychological blow to elements hostile to improved ties.”13 There is much less interest in Pakistan, but it is growing. Pakistan’s finance minister, Abdul Hafeez Shaikh, told a Brookings Institution audience in June 2012 that in the past when he was asked how to improve Pakistan’s economic prospects, he facetiously advocated moving the whole country to the Alps and becoming part of the European Union. Now, he said, he realizes that the Himalayas are really the better venue since Pakistan is superbly positioned next to the two fastest-growing economies in the world, India and China.
But Shaikh is in the minority in Pakistan; the majority still fears India as a partner. Some fear that the larger Indian economy will swamp Pakistan with cheap products; others fear that it will make Pakistan dependent on India. Those who are the most hawkish on India, of course, oppose more trade as dealing with the enemy. The army has traditionally been very skeptical of improved trade, transit, and communications. In 2012 Lashkar-e-Tayyiba founder Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the mastermind of the Mumbai massacre, organized massive demonstrations in Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad against trade with India and relations with the United States. Efforts to encourage free trade usually get bogged down in bureaucratic red tape. While talk about a South Asia free trade zone is a perennial staple of regional summits, in reality there is little trade between the subcontinent’s two biggest countries.
South Asia does have a regional organization, the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), which has its headquarters in Kathmandu, Nepal. But unlike the European Union or the Association for Southeast Asian Nations, the SAARC is largely a hollow shell; although it aspires to be more, its member states are unwilling to give it much authority. Pakistan and the smaller states like Nepal and Bangladesh fear that it will be dominated by India and become an instrument for Indian hegemony. A visit to SAARC headquarters quickly leaves one with the sense that it is a Potemkin village, not a South Asian version of EU headquarters in Brussels. Nonetheless, the bureaucrats who work at SAARC can quickly come up with mountains of data on why increased trade and transit would benefit all South Asians.
However, as mentioned, increased trade and transit can also be seen as part of hegemonic ambitions and so fuel mistrust and conspiracy theories. Indian-Afghan cooperation since 9/11 is a case in point. Since 2002, India has helped to reduce Afghanistan’s historical dependency on Pakistan as an outlet for trade by building a highway, Route 606, connecting the Afghan ring highway to an Iranian highway that goes on to the Arabian Sea at Chabahar, Iran. The road was constructed by India as an economic assistance project for Afghanistan; costing $136 million, it runs just over 200 kilometers across the Baluchistan desert. India turned the finished project over to Afghanistan in January 2009. Now India is considering adding a railroad line that would link the Afghan mineral mines around Hajigak to Chabahar to provide a transit route for exports. These projects are good for Afghanistan; they help to improve its economy and reduce its overdependence on Pakistan, especially on Karachi’s harbor. But they also fuel Pakistani paranoia and fear of encirclement by India. If you are an officer in the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate of the Pakistani army, it is not hard to see the India-Afghan-Iran economic pact as part of a plot to weaken Pakistan. As the United States and NATO draw down their forces in Afghanistan in 2014, turning the war over to the Afghans, the competition between India and Pakistan for influence there is all but certain to grow. A new “great game” will be fought in Afghanistan between New Delhi and Islamabad.14 So any economic approach to resolving South Asia’s problems also requires a political approach to resolving the disputes that keep Pakistan’s borders unresolved.
Global and U.S. diplomacy should therefore focus on these two critical issues: Pakistan’s relations with Afghanistan and its relations with India. The Afghan-Pakistan border, 1,610 miles long, runs through the heart of al Qaeda’s sanctuary in South Asia. This border, the so-called Durand Line, divides the Pashtun and Baluchi peoples, and it has never been accepted by any Afghan government because it was unilaterally imposed by the British colonial government in 1893. Kabul governments have always been reluctant to formally give up their claim to a larger “Pashtunistan”; even the pro-Pakistan Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under the Taliban did not accept the Durand Line. It is unlikely that the government of President Hamid Karzai could accept the line formally and finally any more than its predecessors could. But the United States and NATO should work with Kabul and Islamabad to accept publicly that the line cannot be modified or altered without the consent of both governments. Such acceptance of the de facto permanence of the border should also set the stage for greater willingness on both sides to police the line and to regard it as a real international frontier. It clearly would not stop smuggling and infiltration over-night—or even over several years—but it would provide a basis for long-term cooperation between Kabul and Islamabad, something lacking in the past.
Since the United States has so much at stake in the stabilization of this border area and in preventing it from remaining an al Qaeda safe haven, the United States, the United Nations, and the International Security Assistance Force should be prepared to endorse an agreement between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pakistan, in turn, would need to address the insecurity of its badlands in the north and responsibly administer them like any other part of the country. Ronald Neuman, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, has rightly characterized the current situation as “borderline insanity” and suggested that resolving its ambiguity is part of the “big think” solution to the threat posed by the badlands.15 India also could endorse the border to remove any suspicions that it wants to help Afghanistan take over Pakistani territory in Baluchistan or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. That alone would not eliminate Pakistani fears of an Afghan-Indian plot to carve up their country, but it would be a good start. A broad regional agreement on the permanence of the Durand Line and Afghan neutrality in the Indo-Pakistani rivalry would help undermine conspiracy theorists in Pakistan who feed on the border dispute.
To effectively promote and encourage border stabilization, the United States and NATO have to stay in Afghanistan and continue to lead the International Security Assistance Force there. Americans are rightly frustrated that this has become the longest war in U.S. history, with no end in sight. Obama inherited a disaster there from Bush, and he
has spent four years trying to build an Afghan army that can cope with the Taliban without foreign combat troops. Obama has developed a strategy to dramatically draw down the NATO force in Afghanistan by 2014; however, he has also signed a long-term strategic agreement with Kabul to maintain an American military presence in Afghanistan to back up the Afghan army for at least another ten years, until 2025, and to use Afghan bases for counterterrorism missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So the United States is planning to be in Afghanistan for the long haul. What actually transpires in Afghanistan over the next few years could, of course, be very different from what the United States has planned. It needs Afghanistan to be able continue the drone war against al Qaeda for the indefinite future; it also needs access to Afghan bases for SEAL raids like the one in which bin Laden was killed. If that operation had been launched from an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea, it would have failed as disastrously as the 1980 mission to rescue the Iran hostages. Geography matters.
But it is unclear whether the Afghan government and army will be able to withstand the pressure of the Taliban and the ISI when American and other NATO forces leave. It is a gamble. If the government succeeds, it will have a stabilizing impact. If it fails, the region will be further destabilized and the most extreme Islamists will have achieved a great victory. Yet America and NATO cannot and should not stay indefinitely. It is time to see whether the Afghans can manage—with extensive help, but without thousands of foreign boots on the ground. The best solution would be a political process that brings at least some of the Taliban into an accommodation with the legitimate government in Kabul. The Pashtun community needs to be better represented in the Kabul process, and perhaps some Taliban are ready for a cease-fire and talks. Greater devolution of political power to the provinces would be a mechanism for a political endgame to what is now a thirty-five-year-old civil war. Holbrooke’s successor, Ambassador Mark Grossman, tried during 2010–12 to engage the Taliban. At first there was some hope for guarded optimism when the Taliban met with various foreign powers, including Germany, and signaled interest in some dialogue with NATO, although not with Karzai. The Taliban agreed to open an office in Qatar to serve as a venue for discussions, starting with a possible prisoner swap. Hamid Gul, a former head of ISI and a well-known supporter of the Taliban and al Qaeda, expressed interest through intermediaries in starting a dialogue with America, allegedly on behalf of Mullah Omar. Then, in September 2011, an assassin killed the Afghan lead negotiator in Kabul, Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former president of Afghanistan. In March 2012 the Taliban suspended all talks of a political deal and halted work on their Doha office. They claimed that the American side had failed to live up to its promise to release prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The political process has since lain dormant.
It could revive if the Taliban decided that it would be better to talk than to continue to hope for a military victory. Pakistan, with its huge influence on the Taliban and its control of much of the leadership, including Mullah Omar and the Haqqani family (all of whom live in Pakistan), could help considerably. A political process in Afghanistan would be good for Afghans, and it could open the door to improved relations between Washington and Islamabad. So far that has not tempted Pakistan. The generals who run Pakistan are convinced that military victory is still possible in Afghanistan and that the NATO alliance will not have the stomach to fight on. They read the polls in America and Europe that show growing dissatisfaction with the war, and they conclude time is on the Taliban’s side. They may be right.
But power abhors a vacuum, and if America and NATO abandon Kabul and the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Shia (a majority of Afghans), others will step in to support them. That is what happened in the 1990s. When the first CIA team went into Afghanistan in 2001 after 9/11, the Iranian intelligence service was already there, helping the Tajiks and Shia.16 The Russians, Indians, and Central Asians were also still backing Ahmad Shah Massoud. In the future, their capacity to help an anti-Taliban coalition will be greater than ever. Pakistan will create its own worst nightmare, an Afghan state allied with India on its western border. The generals in Rawalpindi seem oblivious to the self-fulfilling nature of their paranoia.
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
The other and far more critical issue for American diplomacy to address is the underlying problem that drives Pakistan’s relationship with terrorism: India and Kashmir. This is the real potential game changer. The Pakistani state and its army have been obsessed with India since its creation in 1947. The ISI created much of the modern jihadist infrastructure in South Asia to fight India asymmetrically, either directly in Kashmir or indirectly in Afghanistan, in order to defend Pakistan’s strategic depth.
What was the princely state of Kashmir and Jammu before 1947 was roughly the size of Minnesota. Today the area includes several regions, the most famous being the Valley of Kashmir, in the Indian province of Jammu and Kashmir, whose capital is Srinagar. Although the valley is part of India, its 4.7 million inhabitants are almost entirely Muslim; most Hindus have fled the violence that has existed there since 1990. South of the valley is Jammu, whose 4.5 million inhabitants are primarily Hindu. To the east, on the border with China, is Ladakh, also a part of Jammu and Kashmir, which has only 200,000 people, largely Buddhists; a Shia Muslim minority resides around Kargil. Pakistan-controlled Kashmir is divided between the Northern Areas, above Kargil, and Azad Kashmir, west of the Valley of Kashmir and almost adjacent to Islamabad; Azad Kashmir includes just over 3 million Muslims. The Northern Areas is a large but sparsely populated region that is physically cut off from Azad Kashmir by mountains and linked directly to Pakistan. Its roughly 1 million inhabitants are also almost entirely Muslim. To its east is the territory ceded to China by Ayub Khan in 1963. China also occupies an area called Aksai Chin, part of Indian-claimed territory east of Ladakh.17 Both are largely uninhabited.
From the Pakistani perspective, an optimal resolution of Kashmir would lead to the unification of the province, or at least the Muslim-dominated Valley of Kashmir and Srinagar, with Pakistan. With Kashmir “reunited” with Pakistan, the requirement for nuclear weapons would be reduced, if not eliminated, and the need for a jihadist option to compel Indian withdrawal from the valley would be gone. That is precisely the outcome that Pakistani leaders have in mind when they urge American and other world leaders to devote diplomatic and political energy to the Kashmir issue. It is, of course, a completely unrealistic scenario. India has made it clear that it will not withdraw from Kashmir. On the contrary, India argues it has already made a major concession by its de facto acceptance of the partition of the state among itself, Pakistan, and China. India is probably prepared to accept the line of control, in effect the cease-fire line of 1948, as the ultimate border with Pakistan, but it is not willing to accept a fundamental redrawing of borders to put the valley under Pakistan’s sovereignty.
India is right to argue that it should not be asked to give up Kashmir. But India needs also to recognize that its hopes and aspirations for a bright shining future are unlikely to materialize if its neighbor to the west is a failing state or worse, a jihadist state with a new Zia ul-Haq in charge, armed with more than 200 nuclear weapons and taking advice from Hafiz Saeed. As the stronger power in the equation, with a far more stable and predictable political system, India is also much better equipped to make the kind of diplomatic moves needed to break the logjam in South Asia that has prevented a breakthrough to real regional peace since 1947. Because it is strong, it can take action. It can reduce the size of its military footprint in Kashmir and encourage more dialogue about the future; it also can and must take greater action to prevent human rights abuses. As Spiderman says, “With great power comes great responsibility.” That applies to great countries as well as comic book superheroes.
There is a way to resolve the Kashmir problem along the lines of Indian thinking. It is similar if not identical to the proposal that John Kenneth Galbraith made back in 1962, not for
a territorial compromise but for a broader deal that makes Kashmir a zone of peace and prosperity between India and Pakistan, like the Saar region between France and Germany. The basis for such an approach would be the Indo-Pakistani bilateral dialogue. That dialogue has already produced a series of confidence-building measures between the two countries by reopening a few transportation links, setting up hotlines between military commands, and engaging in periodic discussions at the foreign secretary–level on all the issues that divide the two. Unfortunately, the dialogue has not seriously addressed the Kashmir issue because of the significant gulf between the two parties and India’s understandable refusal to negotiate while it is still a target of terrorist attacks planned and organized in Pakistan. And since Musharraf exited the scene, the two countries have not gone very far in their back-channel talks on how to resolve Kashmir.
The United States has long been reluctant to engage more actively in the Kashmir dispute in light of the Indian posture that outside intervention is unwarranted and that Kashmir is a purely bilateral issue. Faced with the likelihood of Indian rejection of outside intervention, American diplomacy has put the Kashmir problem in the “too-hard” category and left it to simmer. The results have been all too predictable. The Kashmir issue periodically boils over and the United States and the international community have to step in to try to prevent a full-scale war. That was the case during the Kargil crisis in 1999, after the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001, and again in 2002, when India mobilized its army for war along the Pakistani border. The specter of war was again in the air in 2008.