The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  The official figure of 40 percent voter participation was far above the generally agreed 25 percent.27 In the 342-strong National Assembly, the PML (Q) garnered 103 seats, the PPP 80, the MMA 59, with the rest going to small factions and independents.28 The entry of the Islamist MMA, which demanded the application of the Sharia Islamic canon and ran a vigorously anti-American campaign, into the political mainstream was a new development. This worried Washington as much as Delhi. In its election campaign the MMA attributed the 9/11 attacks to the machinations of the CIA and the Israeli foreign espionage agency Mossad, and equated “war on terrorism” with “war on Islam.” Intriguingly, Musharraf had turned a blind eye to the MMA’s violation of the ban on street meetings and loudspeakers.

  It took Musharraf’s military overseers nearly six weeks to cobble together a coalition of 170 members with Jamali as the prime minister. He reiterated continued good relations with Washington while bemoaning the fact that Delhi had not responded positively to Islamabad’s offers of talks.

  This was as well. The Vajpayee government had noted that within a year of their proscription in January 2002, the five extremist Pakistani organizations were back in business under different names. Lashkar-e Taiba (LeT) reemerged as the Pasban-e Ahl-e Hadith and Jaish-e-Muhammad as Al Furqan. Moreover, the shadowy ISI paid substantial sums to such jihadist leaders as Hafiz Muhammad Saeed of the LeT and Maulana Masoud Azhar of the JeM to persuade them to keep a low profile for an unspecified period.29 With many of their cadres released from prison within months, there was only a minor dip in the activities of these and other jihadist factions.

  All this was very much part of the Pakistani military’s unchanging doctrine: India is the foremost enemy of Pakistan. So it is incumbent on Islamabad to balance Delhi’s superiority in conventional defense by following a dual strategy: build up Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and encourage periodic terrorist acts against targets in India as well as the Delhi-friendly government in Kabul. To offset any advantage that India might gain in Afghanistan after the ultimate withdrawal of the US-led NATO forces from that country, Islamabad must sustain and bolster the Afghan Taliban as its proxy.

  The downside of this two-track strategy was that Pakistan remained a very risky country for Western corporate investment, which its fragile economy needed desperately. This realization started to seep into the Musharraf administration as the standing of its finance minister since the coup, Shaukat Aziz, a former Citibank executive, started to rise. With that, a glimmer of normalization of Indo-Pakistan relations appeared. In May 2003 the two neighbors restored full diplomatic ties after a break of eighteen months.

  Feeling the economic pain of maintaining its forces across the LoC on high alert, Pakistan saw salvation in easing tensions in Kashmir. In his speech at the UN General Assembly in New York on September 24, Musharraf invited India to join Pakistan in “a sustained dialogue” aimed at resolving the Kashmir issue. Musharraf proposed that both countries should announce a cessation of violence in Kashmir, involving “reciprocal obligations and restraints on Indian forces and on the Kashmiri freedom fighters,” he proposed.30 Vajpayee let Musharraf’s offer lapse.

  Two months later, however, India and Pakistan agreed to a comprehensive cease-fire, covering the international border and Kashmir. This coincided with the start of the Eid al Fitr, which marks the end of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan. And on December 1 the two neighbors restored air links that had been cut off two years earlier.

  Meanwhile, Musharraf’s active involvement in Washington’s campaign against Al Qaida and the Taliban had led him to deploy large forces in the semiautonomous Federally Administered Tribal Agencies along the Afghan-Pakistan border. This had alienated the traditional tribal leaders, some of whom were reportedly harboring the deputy leader of Al Qaida, Ayman Zawahiri, and Taliban’s Mullah Muhammad Omar. In turn, Al Qaida leadership made Musharraf their number one target. Its first attempt to kill him in Karachi in April 2003 failed.

  On December 14, Musharraf narrowly escaped a well-planned assassination attempt, when five bombs exploded under a bridge in Rawalpindi soon after his black Mercedes had passed over it. “When I came back from my tour of Sindh and as I was going home [in Islamabad] from Chaklala [airbase near Rawalpindi] and we crossed the Ammar Chowk Bridge, there was an explosion just half a minute or one minute after we crossed,” he told PTV. “I felt the explosion in my car. That is all that I know, except of course that it was certainly a terrorist act and certainly it was me who was targeted.”31 He was saved by a CIA-supplied radio-jamming device to block all wireless communications within a radius of 650 feet fitted into his car. That blocked the use of a remote-controlled device to detonate the explosives while his car was on the bridge.

  But that was not the end. A second attempt to kill him came on Christmas Day at 1:20 pm. Two suicide bombers in cars targeted him just 650 feet from the site of an earlier attempt on his life. In a TV speech Musharraf, visibly shaken, referred to one suicide bomber driving out of a gas station toward his car and a policeman attempting to stop him when a bomb exploded. “We increased the speed but another bomb exploded at another petrol pump a few yards ahead of the first explosion,” he continued. He assured his audience that these blasts had given “new strength” to his resolve to eliminate terrorists and extremists from the country.32 It transpired later that these attacks were masterminded by Al Qaida’s Amjad Farooqi and Abu Faraj al Libbi. Farooqi, who was also involved in sheltering 9/11 plotter Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, would be killed by Pakistani security forces during a raid in 2004. And al Libbi would end up in American custody.33

  Between these two survivals, on December 17 Musharraf said his government was prepared to drop its long-standing demands for the implementation of UN resolutions on Kashmir in order to end the fifty-six-year-old dispute. This required both sides to be flexible, he added.34

  Predictably, this was welcomed by Kashmir’s chief minister Mufti Sayeed. And it was savaged by the leader of the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference, Maulavi Abbas Ansari, who said that Pakistan had no right to drop the vital issue for which the UN had conferred the right of self-determination to the people of Kashmir.35

  In Islamabad, backed by Finance Minister Aziz, Musharraf had convinced his military high command that only by pursuing a peace process with India could Pakistan achieve political stability and badly needed economic expansion by attracting foreign investment.

  Back to Dialogue

  This was the background over which Vajpayee rolled into Islamabad, whose administrative heart had been turned into a fortress, to attend the twelfth South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit from January 4 to 6, 2004.

  On January 5 he paid a “courtesy call” on Musharraf. It lasted an hour. The following day the two leaders issued a joint statement stating that their foreign secretaries would meet the following month to kick-start the stalled Indo-Pakistan talks on all outstanding issues. At the subsequent press conference, Musharraf referred to the key linkages in the joint communiqué: the continuation of the normalization process, the start of a dialogue that included Kashmir, and Pakistan’s commitment to preventing the use of its territory by terrorist groups. He was effusive in his praise for Vajpayee. “I would like to give total credit to his vision, to his statesmanship, which contributed so significantly towards settlement, for coming to this joint statement,” he said. To be even-handed he stated that “I would like to commend the flexibility of the negotiators on both sides.”36

  Vajpayee, who as foreign minister had inaugurated the Indian chancery in Islamabad in 1979, laid the foundation stone for its extension over a ten-acre site. “A quarter of a century has passed in a jiffy, and every year has thrown up new questions for which new answers are being sought,” he said. “Our dialogue with Pakistan must continue and we must strive together to find solutions by understanding each other’s concerns and difficulties.”37

  In practical terms
what mattered far more were the “significant meetings” that his national security adviser, Mishra, had with high Pakistani officials, away from the prying eyes of the media. The most important was his talk with ISI chief Lieutenant General Haq. Instructed by their principals, they agreed to revive a back channel on Kashmir that Vajpayee had established with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif five years earlier.38

  After their talks in Islamabad, Shashank and Riaz Khokar, respective foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan, announced on February 18 the modalities and timeframe for discussing all subjects included in the composite dialogue. They agreed to meet in May and June for talks on peace and security, including confidence-building measures, and Jammu and Kashmir. Negotiations on the Siachen Glacier, Wullar Barrage, Sir Creek, terrorism and drug trafficking, economic and commercial cooperation, and promotion of friendly exchanges in various fields were scheduled for July.

  But before these meetings could be held, there was a change of government in Delhi. In the general election held between April 20 and May 10, the center-right, BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (134 seats) lost to the Congress Party–led United Progressive Alliance (226 seats). As a result, Congress leader Manmohan Singh, a seventy-two-year-old Sikh and economist turned politician, with a well-groomed, salt-and-pepper beard and a trademark sky-blue turban, became the prime minister.

  On the eve of the vote, however, India’s military high command, charged with refining the concept of surgical destruction of targets inside Pakistan, finalized its new strategy of blitzkrieg, called “Cold Start.”

  The Cold Start doctrine envisioned the formation of eight division-size Integrated Battle Groups (IBGs), each consisting of infantry, artillery, armor, and air support, which were able to operate independently on the battlefield. In the case of terrorist attack from or by a Pakistan-based group, the IBGs would rapidly penetrate Pakistan at unexpected points and advance no more than thirty miles beyond the border, disrupting the command and control networks of its military while staying away from the locations likely to trigger nuclear retaliation. The overall aim was to launch a conventional strike swiftly but to inflict only limited damage in order to deny Pakistan justification for a nuclear response.39

  The effectiveness of this strategy was based on the dodgy assumption that the thirty-odd-mile penetration by India would not lead the Pakistani high command to launch nuclear attacks on Indian targets. In any case, the existence of this plan was sufficient to keep alive the fear and loathing of India by Pakistan’s people and their civilian and military leaders.

  17: Manmohan Singh’s

  Changing Interlocutors

  The return of the secular, center-left Congress Party as the leader of the United Progressive Alliance, headed by Manmohan Singh, augured well for ending the Kashmir deadlock. To further the objectives of the February 1999 Lahore Declaration, foreign and defense secretaries of India and Pakistan met in mid-June 2004 to discuss nuclear crisis management, strategic stability, and risk reduction. Both neighbors decided to continue their moratorium on nuclear weapons testing, which had been maintained since June 1998.

  A preliminary understanding reached in mid-2001, requiring both countries to give advanced notification of missile tests, had failed to graduate to a formal concord because of the December 2001 terrorist attack on India’s Parliament House. During the latest session the two sides agreed to stay with the original undertaking. Further progress was inhibited for two main reasons: India and Pakistan had only limited command and control structures in place, and neither possessed the technology to recall a nuclear-tipped missile fired by mistake. Meanwhile, in a far simpler context, they decided to install a new telephone hotline between the most senior officials in Delhi and Islamabad and upgrade the existing secure hotline between their senior military commanders to alert each other to potential nuclear risks.1

  Manmohan Singh–Musharraf Rapport

  The two subsequent rounds of talks between the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers—Kunwar Natwar Singh and Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri—in Delhi and Islamabad in July and early September 2004 paved the way for a one-on-one session between Prime Minister Singh and President General Pervez Musharraf at the United Nations in New York on September 24. After their parley Singh declared that any proposal to resolve the Kashmir dispute would be acceptable so long as it was not based on religious division or the altering of India’s boundaries. Remarkably, the first condition reflected the view of Congress Party leaders before independence. And the second condition was the reiteration of the position Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had publicly adopted in 1955.2

  Unknown to the rest of the world, Singh and Musharraf agreed to encourage the secret talks that had been initiated between their respective national security advisers—Tariq Aziz and Jyotindra Nath Dixit—with a mandate to hammer out a detailed document on Kashmir. Aziz and Dixit started meeting secretly in hotels in Dubai, London, and Bangkok almost every other month.

  In October the Singh government allowed a group of Pakistani journalists to visit Indian Kashmir. To their astonishment, they were free to interview anybody they wished. In June 2005 Delhi would permit a delegation of the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference to travel to Pakistani-administered Kashmir.

  On October 25, in an informal address at a breaking-the-fast dinner during Ramadan, Musharraf invited debate on the alternatives to the plebiscite in Kashmir. He saw the need for it because Pakistan was unprepared to accept India’s proposal to transform the Line of Control (LoC) into the international border, and India saw no need for a plebiscite as envisaged by UN Security Council Resolution 47 in April 1948. He argued that Jammu and Kashmir consisted of seven regions with different languages and sects, with two—Azad Kashmir and the Northern Areas—being with Pakistan and five with India.3 He proposed that the linguistic, ethnic, religious, geographic, political, and other aspects of these regions be reviewed to find a peaceful solution to the Kashmir problem.4 A tidal wave of protest rose in Pakistan. Musharraf back-pedaled. He explained that his statement was not a substitute for the official position about holding a plebiscite, which—in reality—he had abandoned almost a year earlier.

  However, Musharraf’s public retraction did not derail Aziz’s clandestine talks with Dixit. Following the death of Dixit in January 2005, his job went to Satinder Lambah, India’s former high commissioner in Pakistan.

  On March 10, 2005, Singh informed the lower house of Parliament that he had invited Musharraf to Delhi to watch a cricket match the following month. “I must say that nothing brings the people of our subcontinent together than our love for cricket and Bollywood cinema,” he said.5 Singh was referring to the One Day International (ODI) between India and Pakistan on April 17. Musharraf agreed.

  After the ODI at the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium in Delhi on April 17, Singh declared that that the “peace process [between India and Pakistan] can no longer be reversed.” Musharraf outlined the agreed-on guidelines for the process: “India’s insistence that no boundaries can be redrawn; Pakistan’s refusal to accept the Line of Control; and the two countries’ agreement that borders must become less important.” In pursuit of the last option, he referred to the bus service that had been started between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad, capital of Azad Kashmir, ten days earlier. Following his parley with Singh, the two of them agreed to increase the frequency of the bus service and also let trucks ply the route in order to boost trade. The news was warmly welcomed by Kashmiri families on both sides of the LoC.6

  On October 8, a 7.6 Richter scale earthquake, with its epicenter near Muzaffarabad, wreaked havoc in the region. It killed as many as seventy-nine thousand people, including at least three thousand in Indian Kashmir, and rendered two million homeless. Following an appeal by the Azad Kashmir government for cooperation with India to improve relief, Musharraf agreed to open the LoC temporarily. India reciprocated. This was the first instance of Delhi and Islamabad cooperating actively in disputed Kashmir.


  In an unprecedented move, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, based in Pugwash in Nova Scotia, Canada, sponsored a seminar, “Prospects for Self-Governance in Jammu and Kashmir, and Present Status of Cooperation and Communications Across the LOC,” in Islamabad in March 2006. It was attended by serving and former officials of Azad Kashmir and several leading Pakistani journalists, as well as officials of assorted political parties and organizations from Indian Kashmir.

  Inaugurating the seminar, Musharraf proposed step-by-step demilitarization combined with self-governance as a practical solution to the Kashmir dispute. This, he argued, would make the LoC irrelevant—and with it any redrawing of borders. Demilitarization would be a huge confidence-building measure and, by providing relief to Kashmiris, would help undercut support for militants.7 His proposal failed to get off the ground primarily because the policy makers in Delhi figured that the reduction of security forces in Indian Kashmir would allow the separatists to broaden their popular base.

  In any case, Singh knew as well as Musharraf that hard-knuckle bargaining was going on in the secret meetings between Lambah and Aziz in five-star hotels far from Kashmir.

  In his book In the Line of Fire: A Memoir, published in September 2006, Musharraf formalized his ideas into a four-point program. One, identify the regions of Kashmir that need resolution. Two, demilitarize the identified region or regions and curb all militant aspects of the struggle for freedom. Three, introduce self-governance in the identified region or regions. Four, most importantly, have a joint management mechanism with Pakistani, Indian, and Kashmiri members to oversee self-governance and deal with residual subjects common to all identified regions as well as those beyond the scope of self-governance. Describing this plan as “purely personal,” he recognized the need for selling it to the public by all the involved parties.8