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Pakistan Won't Cooperate with India

Pakistan Won't Cooperate with India

Author: Sumit Ganguly
Publication: Wall Street Journal
Date: December 5, 2008
URL: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122841737710879917.html

Upon her arrival in New Delhi this week, United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she expected the Pakistani regime to "cooperate fully and transparently" with India to try and bring the perpetrators of last week's terrorist outrage in Mumbai to justice. Ms. Rice's position -- though seemingly sensible -- is actually off the mark. The regime of President Asif Ali Zardari has no incentive whatsoever to cooperate with India to ensure that the terrorists who were responsible for the Mumbai attacks are actually apprehended.

Pakistan has pursued a successful strategy of asymmetric warfare through jihadists since the outbreak of an ethno-religious insurgency in Kashmir in 1989. Part of Islamabad's strategy is to appear cooperative. After members of two jihadi groups, Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Lashkar-e-Taiba, attacked the Indian parliament on Dec. 13, 2001, for instance, then-President Pervez Musharraf nominally banned both entities. He placed their leaders under house arrest and had many of the terror groups' members arrested. On Jan. 12, 2002, he declared he would not allow Pakistani territory to be used for acts of terror.

Thanks to persistent American prodding, the two sides embarked on a peace process in 2004. The two sides agreed on a cease-fire along the Line of Control, the de facto international border in Kashmir, expanded people-to-people contacts and loosened travel restrictions.

Yet even in those times of apparent peace, Pakistan did not wholly abandon the jihadi option. As the inaugural bus service between Srinagar in Indian-controlled Kashmir and Muzzafarbad in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir was about to depart in April 2005, terrorists attacked the tourist reception center. The military regime in Islamabad issued a predictable communiqué condemning the attack while suggesting that it was the work of miscreants intent on undermining the nascent peace process.

Pakistan's standing in the Indian public eye has waned in recent months -- even before the Mumbai attacks. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency was linked to an attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul on July 7 this year. The suicide bombing, which leveled significant portions of the embassy, resulted in the deaths of several Indian Embassy personnel, including India's defense attaché. In the aftermath of the attack India raised the matter in the next round of the diplomatic dialogue between the two sides, to little effect.

Now in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, when a substantial corpus of circumstantial evidence is confirming a Pakistani connection, Mr. Zardari is recycling old, familiar tactics. He immediately rebuffed Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee's request to extradite some 20 suspects to India. And he insists that India proffer evidence of Pakistani complicity before the country takes any steps to bring the culprits to book. Moreover, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed and Maulana Masood Azar, the heads of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, continue to operate openly in the Pakistani cities of Lahore and Quetta.

This puts India in a tough spot. The Congress Party-led government in New Delhi cannot reveal the sources and methods of its intelligence intercepts -- especially at a moment as politically fraught as the present. Indian policy makers also cannot be seen to do nothing. It is a dangerous impasse.

Given these circumstances, if the U.S. wishes to bolster its growing relationship with India and demonstrate its seriousness in combating the global jihadi menace, it needs to call Pakistan's bluff. Only sustained American pressure designed to induce Pakistan to dismantle what Indian security analysts refer to as "the infrastructure of terror" will produce the right outcome.

Without this U.S. pressure, Pakistan and India will continue the same diplomatic dance that they've been doing for years, to little effect. The victims of the Mumbai bombings, and the city's terrified residents, deserve better.

- Mr. Ganguly is a professor of political science and the director of research of the Center on American and Global Security at Indiana University, Bloomington.


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