EDITS | Thursday, June 25, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Make Pakistan sweat it out
G Parthasarathy
On December 22, 2000, Pakistan-based terrorists of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba staged a dramatic attack on the Red Fort, exposing serious shortcomings in the security arrangements of the national capital. In a public meeting a few days later, the Amir of the Lashkar, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, proudly proclaimed that he had “unfurled the green flag of Islam” in Delhi, with luminaries like Qazi Hussain Ahmed of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the ‘Ideological Father’ of the Taliban, Maulana Fazlur Rahman of the Deobandi Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam expressing admiration for his “feat”.
It was no secret that Saeed and the LeT were protégés of the ISI enjoying the patronage of the Pakistani state apparatus. Rather than expressing strong displeasure and retaliating appropriately, New Delhi took a perilous route to direct summit diplomacy with no prior preparation. Gen Pervez Musharraf was invited to Agra for a meeting which ended in a diplomatic fiasco. Buoyed by what the Pakistani military establishment saw as Indian weakness and ineptitude, yet another protégé of the ISI, the Jaish-e-Mohammed, attacked Parliament House complex on December 13, 2001, which took the two countries close to conflict.
Similarly, ignoring the involvement of the LeT in the terrorist bombings in Mumbai on July 11, 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh went into a summit meeting with Gen Pervez Musharraf in Havana on September 16, 2006, in the belief that the India-Pakistan ‘composite dialogue’ was ‘irreversible’. Astonishing statements emanated from Havana, equating India and Pakistan as “victims of terrorism” and even giving the ISI an alibi by asserting that “we must draw a distinction between terrorist elements in Pakistan and the Government of Pakistan”. What followed was a decision to establish a ‘Joint Terror Mechanism’.
Even ardent supporters of this ill-conceived ‘Joint Terror Mechanism’ now agree that it has been a diplomatic embarrassment, giving Islamabad the means to stall, obfuscate and plead that like India, Pakistan is also a “victim of terrorism”. If the Agra summit led to the attack on Parliament House complex, the Havana summit was the prelude to the attacks on our Embassy in Kabul and to the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist outrage, with both attacks executed by ISI proxies.
It is heartening that Mr Manmohan Singh candidly told Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari: “I have a limited mandate to tell you that Pakistan should not be used for terrorism against India.” While the decision now is to focus only on deliberate Pakistani inaction against the perpetrators and masterminds of the 26/11 outrage in forthcoming talks between the Foreign Secretaries, it is imperative that the entire emphasis and structure of the dialogue is changed, when circumstances permit its resumption.
Certain hard realities cannot be ignored. There will be no representative of Pakistan’s real rulers, the armed forces, on the dialogue table. It is not without significance that virtually every foreign visitor of consequence to Islamabad calls on Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and not his direct boss, Defence Minister Ahmed Mukhtar. Moreover, there are serious differences between Mr Zardari on the one hand and Gen Kayani and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on the other on issues ranging from trade and economic ties with India to transit trade with Afghanistan and the issue of Jammu & Kashmir.
In these circumstances, the entire ‘composite dialogue’ process with Pakistan should be drastically restructured. The India-Pakistan ministerial-level Joint Commission should be revived (when Pakistan acts credibly against terrorism) to promote trade and economic cooperation, people-to-people contacts and confidence-building measures. The ill-advised ‘Joint Terror Mechanism’ should be scrapped and special envoys, together with the chiefs of the ISI and R&AW, could meet away from the glare of publicity for candid discussions on terrorism.
If India concludes, based on an analysis of the ground situation, that Pakistan presently has no intention of winding up its infrastructure of terrorism, the necessary conclusions should be drawn, internal security further reviewed, and a more pro-active policy adopted for exploiting Pakistan’s growing sectarian, linguistic and ethnic fault lines. Finally, our establishment should stop shedding tears about Pakistan ‘also’ being a ‘victim’ of terrorism. Pakistan is merely facing the inevitable consequences of supporting terrorism.
Mr Steve Coll of the New America Foundation has revealed that the broad contours of a ‘Kashmir settlement’ finalised in back channel negotiations between India and Pakistan over 2005-2007 were based on extensive autonomy for the region, which would lead to local residents moving freely and conducting trade on both sides of the ‘territorial boundary’. Over time, the border would become ‘irrelevant’, and declining violence would allow a gradual withdrawal of troops that now face one another.
Mr Manmohan Singh and former Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri have, in turn, acknowledged that they were close to reaching a solution in 2007. It is time for the Prime Minister to disclose in Parliament what precisely transpired during the back channel dialogue on Jammu & Kashmir and, after taking the people of India into confidence, insist that any future dialogue with Pakistan would have to move forward from where it ended in 2007. If Pakistan decides to disown what has transpired, as Gen Kayani and Mr Gilani are advocating, then India should dig its heels in.
Unlike his predecessor, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram appears prepared to realistically and more innovatively deal with Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. There is ample political space now after the recent elections in Jammu & Kashmir to take imaginative measures to deal with Pakistan-sponsored terrorism by moving towards a paradigm shift in the role of the Army, paramilitary and local police in dealing with insurgency. The politically marginalised separatist outfits should not be pampered, but dealt with firmly and realistically.
Defence procurement procedures, which are now afflicted by the ‘Bofors Syndrome’ and have resulted in the Army’s artillery being rendered woefully obsolete, have to be drastically changed; excessive procrastination and delays in virtually all major defence deals have to be done away with. The Air Force is severely under strength and the armed forces as a whole are ill-equipped.
India’s neighbours will take it seriously only if its defence forces are prepared and equipped to meet existing challenges. Never again should we be unprepared, or our defence forces inadequately equipped to respond appropriately, if terrorist attacks like the 26/11 outrage are carried out on our soil by groups based across our border.
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