And yet India has doggedly pursued peace. Within six months of 26/11 the prime minister travelled to Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt to meet with the Pakistani prime minister, where his conciliatory language in the joint statement that followed got him into a huge amount of political hot water back home, because he was perceived as offering the hand of peace at a time when Pakistan had done nothing to merit it. In any democracy, there are always limits as to how far a government can go in advance of its own public opinion. Subsequent moves have been undertaken a little more gingerly, but ‘cricket diplomacy’ (the invitation to Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani to watch the World Cup semi-final between the two countries in Mohali, India), ‘designer diplomacy’ (the visit of the elegantly and expensively accoutred Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar to New Delhi, both in 2011) and ‘dargah diplomacy’ (a lunch invitation to President Zardari from Prime Minister Singh when the former sought to make a ‘spiritual visit’ to a Sufishrine in Ajmer in April 2012) have all been attempted to take the process of dialogue, however haltingly, forward. The resultant thaw, while involving no substantive policy decisions, has demonstrated Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s determination to change the narrative of Indo-Pak relations, and seize control of a process mired in stalemate.
Some Indian critics are less than enthused. New Delhi had justifiably suspended talks with Islamabad after the horrific Mumbai attacks of 26/11. By talking again at such a high level, even though there has been no significant progress in Pakistan bringing the perpetrators to book, India, they feel, has in effect surrendered to Pakistani intransigence. The new wide-ranging and comprehensive talks agreed to by the two sides, the critics point out, are the old ‘composite dialogue’ under another label, the very dialogue New Delhi had righteously called off since there was no point talking to people whose territory and institutions were being used to attack and kill Indians.
The fear in India remains that the government has run out of ideas in dealing with Pakistan—or at least that New Delhi has no good options, between a counterproductive military attack on the sources of terrorism and a stagnant silence. Our position, first articulated by our prime minister in Parliament in 2009, is that we can have a meaningful dialogue with Pakistan only if they fulfil their commitment, in letter and spirit, not to allow their territory to be used in any manner for terrorist activities against India. And yet it is also clear that ‘not talking’ is not much of a policy. Pakistan can deny our shared history but India cannot change its geography. Pakistan is next door and can no more be ignored than a thorn pierced into India’s side.
India’s refusal to talk worked for a while as a source of pressure on Pakistan. It contributed, together with Western (especially American) diplomatic efforts, to some of Islamabad’s initial cooperation, including the arrest of Lashkar-e-Taiba operative Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi and six of his co-conspirators. But it has long passed its use-by date. The refusal to resume dialogue has stopped producing any fresh results; the only argument that justifies it—that it is a source of leverage—gives some in India the illusion of influence over events that New Delhi does not in fact possess.
Instead, it was ironically India—the victims of 26/11—who had come to seem intransigent and unaccommodative, rather than Pakistan, from whose soil the terrorist attacks were dispatched, financed and directed. The transcendent reality of life on the subcontinent is that it has always been India that wishes to live in peace. India is, at bottom, a status quo power that would like to be left alone to concentrate on its economic development; Indians see Pakistan as the troublesome rebel, needling and bleeding its neighbour in an effort to change the power balance and wrest control of a part of Indian territory (Kashmir). Refusing to talk doesn’t change any of that, but it brought India no rewards and in fact imposed a cost. When Pakistan was allowed to sound reasonable and conciliatory while India seemed truculent and unreasonable, New Delhi’s international image as a constructive force for peace took a beating.
The thaw engendered by the two prime ministers at the cricket World Cup in March 2011—meeting at a major sporting event, devoid of rancour, which Pakistan lost fair and square to the eventual world champions—recognized that talking can achieve constructive results. It can identify and narrow the differences between the two countries on those issues between them that can be addressed. As Prime Minister Singh has realized, just talking about them can make clear what India’s bottom lines are and the minimal standards of civilized conduct India expects from its neighbour. And should it prove necessary, dialogue can also be used to send a few tough signals.
‘Cricket diplomacy’ is not new on the subcontinent. It was tried twice before, each time with Pakistani military rulers travelling to watch cricket in India. General Zia-ul-Haq’s visit to a match in Jaipur in 1986 was an exercise in cynicism, since it was aimed at defusing tensions stoked by his own policy of fomenting and aiding Sikh militant secessionism in India. General Pervez Musharraf’s visit to a cricket stadium in Delhi in 2005 came at a better time in the two countries’ relations, but foreshadowed a decline in the progress the two nations were making up to that point. Watching cricket does not necessarily lead to improved dialogue (especially when the other side’s wickets are falling). But when two countries are genuinely prepared to engage, a grand sporting occasion can be a useful instrument to signal the change. That is what the ‘spirit of Mohali’ has brought about. Talks have since resumed; but a year later, it is still too early to pronounce oneself definitively on whether and how that spirit is translating into genuine progress on the ground.
The argument against dialogue with Pakistan is strongly held and passionately argued by many I respect. And yet I believe these critics are wrong. Not just because, as I have explained above, it is clear that we are doing the right thing, but also because it is time the critics too understood that we do have other options.
We are doing the right thing, because to say that we will not talk as long as there is terror is essentially to give the terrorists a veto over our own diplomatic choices. For talking can achieve constructive results. It can identify and narrow the differences between our two countries on those issues that can be dealt with, while keeping the spirit of dialogue (and implicitly of compromise) alive. At the same time, what is needed is sustained pressure—especially through US military and intelligence sources upon their Pakistani counterparts—to rein in the merchants of terror.
And yet, the extent of possible US pressure remains constrained by Afghanistan. For a while after 26/11 I had hoped that this time the terrorists had gone too far. The murderers of Mumbai had, after all, made powerful enemies by killing American, French and Israeli citizens as well as Indian ones. While previous bomb blasts took only Indian lives, it was easier for the rest of the world to regard terrorism in India as an Indian problem. Mumbai, I reasoned, had internationalized the issue. As they dominated the world’s media for three gruesome days, the killers achieved a startling success for their cause, one that must have shaken anti-terrorist experts around the world, who now realize how easy it would be for ten men unafraid of death to hold any city in the world hostage. After all, how many hotels, schools, airports, markets or cinema theatres can you turn into fortifications everywhere in the world? But they also ensured that India will no longer be alone in its efforts to stamp out this scourge.
Or so I thought. But it became clear soon enough that as long as the war in Afghanistan continued, the world needed Pakistan more than Pakistan needed the world—and Pakistan knew it.
Afghanistan is where the tyranny of geography gives Pakistan an indispensable role in fulfilling the logistics needs for tens of thousands of US soldiers, who must be supplied, rationed and redeployed through Pak territory. (In my UN peacekeeping days I was told, by a grizzled American officer, the adage that amateurs discuss strategy, rank amateurs focus on tactics and true professionals concentrate on logistics.) It is no accident that at one point in 2009 reports began to surface that the United States was developing
an alternative route through Central Asia to supply its forces in Afghanistan; but the mere fact that we were reading about it in the newspapers suggested that it was still more an idea than a reality, and the news was meant to serve as an unsubtle warning to the Pakistani military that if they thought that logistics had given them a stranglehold on the United States’ options, other options could still be developed. Bluntly, they haven’t been; the Central Asian route is much more expensive and, though the overwhelming dependence on Pakistan has been reduced with a smaller percentage of NATO supplies coming through that country than before, Islamabad remains logistically indispensable.
There is little doubt that the increase in terrorist actions in Afghanistan is directly linked to the support and sanctuaries available in the contiguous areas of Pakistan. This is why the United States unveiled an ‘Af-Pak’ strategy in March 2009: there was no viable way of dealing with Afghanistan without taking into account the role and responsibilities of Pakistan in sustaining the conflict there.
Islamabad’s objectives in Afghanistan have had nothing to do with the well-being of that war-torn land. It has ruthlessly undermined its neighbour’s security and stability in an effort to establish that Afghanistan is little more than Pakistan’s backyard, a place whose only importance lies in providing Pakistani GHQ with ‘strategic depth’ against India. This objective was impossible to realize for the first five decades after independence, when successive governments in Kabul enjoyed better relations with New Delhi than with their Pakistani neighbours. It was only the creation (by Benazir Bhutto’s government in the mid-1990s) of the Taliban and its ascent to power in Afghanistan that finally gave Pakistan a Kabul regime that functioned as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Rawalpindi military establishment. It didn’t last long enough for Pakistan: 9/11, and the obligation to choose between a powerful and wealthy patron in the United States and an irresponsible and reviled client in Kabul, obliged Islamabad reluctantly to jettison its Afghan asset.
But Islamabad does not give up easily. Even while ostensibly allied to the United States in its Afghan war effort, Pakistan preserved its links with several of the extremist elements it had nurtured in Afghanistan, provided refuge to Mullah Omar and his ilk in Quetta, and—as we learned belatedly in 2011—shielded Osama bin Laden and his inner circle in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad. (More recently we have learned that the prolific bin Laden lived, procreated and raised children in Peshawar, Swat and Haripur as well.) The strategy made sense to the devious minds in Rawalpindi: the Americans were bound to tire of their Afghan engagement one day, and when they left Pakistan would need to have the resources and assets in place to reassert the primacy they had enjoyed in Afghanistan before 9/11. The appearance of cooperation in fighting terror was essential to continue receiving generous American military aid, most of which could be used to shore up the Pakistani Army’s overall strengths against India, but the fight had to be carefully waged only against select enemies, while shielding those terrorists who could be counted upon to serve Pakistan’s interests in the longer term. (As the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid puts it, the Pakistani Army ‘seeks to ensure that a balance of terror and power is maintained with respect to India, and the jihadis are seen as part of this strategy’.) The Pakistani military also understood the importance of seeming to look for bin Laden but never finding him, and appearing to fight the ‘war on terror’ but never actually winning it, in order to maintain the continuing flow of American money for the very purposes its beneficiaries were seeking to subvert.
But while US pressure on Pakistan to end this duplicity is vital, it is not enough. International pressure will require serious attention to China’s and Saudi Arabia’s roles as allies of Pakistan, both bilaterally (as munificent donors of aid) and in multilateral institutions (notably the UN Security Council and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, respectively). China and Saudi Arabia have the capacity to reinforce the pressure on Pakistan or to provide Islamabad an escape valve from it; on the whole, it is not clear at this stage which way they will incline. China’s importance to Pakistan is increasing with the gradual American disengagement from Pakistan, and what Beijing calls its ‘all-weather friendship’ shields Pakistan against the negative global fallout from its anti-Indian actions. Nonetheless China is concerned about encouragement given to Islamic militancy in its own western provinces by elements on Pakistani soil, which offers India a point of mutual interest. Engaging China thus becomes indispensable, even if its direct benefits might be minor, given China’s own strategic interest in supporting Pakistan to balance India.
Saudi Arabia’s indispensability to Pakistan comes from its financial assistance as well as its role as the custodian of global Islamic legitimacy. The Saudis have shown in recent years a desire to engage with India, not at the expense of Pakistan, but as a recognition of our country’s international value in its own right. Giving the Saudi–Indian dialogue a security dimension is necessary for both sides, but particularly for an India that needs to sensitize its Saudi interlocutors to the threats and opportunities emerging from Pakistan. Going beyond Saudi Arabia, the role of international aid for development should not be underestimated, since Pakistan’s economy is virtually bankrupt. This could mean that the influence of the United States in the IMF, and the European Union in providing development assistance, could prove considerable, should it be exercised in the direction of promoting more responsible conduct by the Pakistani state. This is more than a pious hope: as David Malone puts it, ‘Pakistan’s weapons suppliers and financiers are hard to sideline, their intelligence findings hard to duck, and the incentives—positive and negative—that they can offer [could prove] impossible for Pakistan to ignore.’
In other words, the world is not bereft of options; we do not have to reconcile ourselves to slipping back to business as usual in Pakistan. For the fact is that, on Pakistan’s reluctance to take decisive action against the terrorism operating on its soil, we do have some credible options. The most significant of these lies in the United Nations, whose Security Council resolutions against terror were adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and are binding on all member states, including Pakistan. The UN has established thirteen international conventions against terror, but years of negotiations on a draft pushed by India and the United States to adopt a comprehensive convention on terrorism have foundered on the objections of Islamic states, which have wanted to include strictures against ‘state terrorism’ and exemptions for ‘national liberation movements’.
However, legal instruments are of limited utility against those who have contempt for international law. More effective could be two mechanisms created by the Security Council. One, the Sanctions Committee established under resolution 1267, has already been pressed into service in December 2008 to proscribe Jamaat-ud-Dawa, with scant impact on Pakistan. The other is resolution 1373, adopted immediately after 9/11, which imposes, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter (which governs enforcement measures), binding requirements on all member states to take a whole range of actions against suspected terror organizations. These include freezing financial transfers and interdicting arms supplies, reporting on the movements of suspected terrorists and upgrading national legislation to bring it into conformity with international requirements. In the event of continued inaction by Islamabad, the possibility of moving the Security Council to hold Pakistan in breach of resolution 1373, and threatening sanctions against the Pakistani state if compliance does not follow, is well worth pursuing. (It might even prompt someone in Pakistan to encash the $10 million reward the US is offering for the arrest of Hafeez Saeed.)
These resolutions require compliance from all states on controlling the activities of terrorists. Member states are required under resolution 1373 to report regularly to the Counter-Terrorism Committee about their actions to bring their national legislation into conformity with international requirements, to monitor the movements of suspected terrorists, arms transfers and financial flows to terrorist o
rganizations. Resolution 1624 obliges states to pass laws forbidding incitement to commit acts of terror and to report such incitement to the committee. As it happens, since 1 January 2011, it is India that chairs the Counter-Terrorism Committee, for two years. The possibilities of using more fully the mechanisms afforded by the United Nations remain to be explored.
New Delhi could make it plain to Islamabad that, unless there is genuine and sustained cooperation on bringing the 26/11 plotters to book, we will not hesitate to use the international mechanisms available to us to ask Pakistan awkward questions, and to bring the weight of the international community to bear on the issue of Pakistan’s failure to meet its international obligations. There are fair questions to be asked about the prosecution of suspected terrorists under custody and the lack of efforts to apprehend their remaining comrades; the failure to take any steps whatsoever to trace the handlers of the 26/11 killers, especially the chilling voice recorded on tape that exhorted the terrorists to kill their hostages; the open incitement to terror preached by the likes of Hafiz Saeed in open defiance of resolution 1624; and the survival, indeed flourishing, on Pakistani soil of proscribed organizations like the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, with burgeoning bank accounts receiving and disbursing funds. Should the answers not prove satisfactory, the next step to consider would be whether to hold Pakistan in non-compliance with the relevant Security Council resolutions, which in turn would lay the ground for selective sanctions—for example on the foreign travel of specific military leaders—in a bid to exact compliance.
Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century Page 7