INTELLIGENCE QUOTIENT
K.P. Nayar
The Telegraph
June 16, 1999
Title: INTELLIGENCE QUOTIENT
Author: K.P. Nayar
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: June 16, 1999
One of the lesser known aspects of the visit to New Delhi of the
Pakistani foreign minister, Sartaj Aziz, last week was that Islamabad
made the most of his one day stay in India. The minister brought along
with him - and sent to New Delhi ahead of him - an assortment of
people from different walks of life with wide and varied personal
contacts in the capital. While Aziz was engaged by the Indian external
affairs minister, Jaswant Singh, in talks which were doomed to end in
a stalemate, his compatriots spread across New Delhi and engaged in
chores which were ostensibly social. They renewed old contacts,
dropped in on friends or professional associates of long standing and
were wined or dined by their hospitable Indian hosts. But the
objective of all this social interaction was just one.
With a single-mindedness rarely associated with the south Asian
character, all those who came from Pakistan to New Delhi - officially,
unofficially, professionally - set about finding out whatever they
could about how India obtained tapes of two conversations between
Pakistan's chief of army staff and chief of general staff when the
former was away in Beijing.
If anyone in India had any doubts about the veracity of what those
tapes contained, all that was needed was to talk to some of those who
were in New Delhi from Pakistan during the weekend.
Nothing this columnist has seen in the long years he has dealt with
Pakistanis professionally has quite matched the Pakistani reaction to
the release of the transcripts of General Pervez Musharraf's telephone
conversation with General Mohammed Aziz. In the past too, India has
had many intelligence coups via a vis Pakistan. The P.V. Narasimha Rao
government, for instance, obtained documents from Islamabad which
conclusively proved Pakistan's involvement in the Mumbai serial bomb
blasts in 1993. On the basis of written evidence that Nawaz Sharif -
then prime minister as well - personally cleared the Mumbai blasts,
Rao subsequently tackled Sharif when the two met in Dhaka at a South
Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit.
Similarly, India has not only tracked visits by the father of
Pakistan's nuclear bomb, A.Q. Khan, to certain sensitive countries, it
has also obtained transcripts of what Khan said at some of his
meetings in those countries. Some of these tapes are worth a million
times their weight in gold.
The Pakistanis have come to know about some of these intelligence
coups, more often than not, from India's "friends" with whom
intelligence data were shared, perhaps unwisely. Yet nothing India has
done vis a vis Pakistan has rattled Islamabad so badly as the tapes
released by Jaswant Singh on Friday.
There is more to this Pakistani nervousness than the contents of just
two tapes released by Singh. It is Islamabad's worry that if India
released these two tapes, then intelligence agencies in New Delhi must
be in possession of a lot more sensitive information on what is going
on in Pakistan.
These fears have been reinforced by the uncomfortable realisation at
the army general headquarters in Rawalpindi that the tapes released by
Singh are not complete. They were edited to remove some sensitive
information: the Indian government has told the public only what it
wants the public to know.
Such discretion has made the Pakistanis realise that India's idea in
making the conversation public was not a desire to sensationalise the
issue of civilian control - or lack of it - over Rawalpindi. Nor was
it trying to gloat over its intelligence coup. If this had been the
case, the tapes would not have been edited at all.
The Indian reaction to the mutilation of its captured soldiers also
made Islamabad realise that New Delhi was not trying to make capital
out of the tragedy along the line of control. If India wanted to do so
or to whip up war hysteria within the country all that was required
was to release photographs of the mutilated bodies or at least be more
descriptive about Pakistan's barbarism.
In the aftermath of the Aziz visit, what Pakistan fears, therefore, is
India's restraint, its discretion and its determination to play by the
rules. It contrasts sharply with what the world now knows about
Pakistan's aggression across the LoC and its militant support for the
taliban-type mujahedin, who are perched on the hills in Drass, Batalik
and Mashkoh. Pakistan fears India's restraint and discretion all the
more because it believes that these are dictated by a full and
complete knowledge of what is going on across the LoC, especially in
Rawalpindi and Islamabad.
This is why the Pervez Musharraf-Mohammed Aziz tapes are important.
They have given India the kind of psychological superiority over
Pakistan which - to talk cynically - only a complete flattening of
Lahore or Islamabad through aerial bombing could have achieved.
Even without the tapes, the Pakistanis are aware the Bharatiya Janata
Party led government knows far too much about the present equations in
the Pakistani government to feel comfortable. Such knowledge gives
India much more power over its adversary in the Kargil conflict than
at any time in recent years.
Rawalpindi knows, for instance, that at their very first meeting in
Colombo last year, the Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, made it
clear to his Indian counterpart, Atal Behari Vajpayee, that he was
tired of having his foreign policy captive to the personal whims and
obsessions of his then foreign minister, Gohar Ayub Khan.
The occasion arose when Vajpayee proposed, as soon as the two
delegations met, that the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers should
talk alone. Sharif was happy to rid the meeting of Khan and said so.
None of the newspersons from New Delhi who went with Vajpayee to
Colombo believed perceptive Indian officials who told them after the
Vajpayee-Sharif meeting that Khan would be moved out of the foreign
ministry in weeks. But this was precisely what happened.
In Colombo, Khan was the darling of the army. Moreover, his brother in
law was then in the line of succession for the job which eventually
went to Musharraf.
The army could have forgiven Sharif for getting rid of Jehangir
Karamat, Musharraf's predecessor. He represented the present, almost
fading into the past. Khan and his brother in law, on the other hand,
represented the future, a future which was also tied to Kashmir
because of Khan's role as foreign minister and his deepseated
anti-Indianism.
Even without the tactical and military reasons which demanded that the
Aziz mission was a failure from the Pakistan army's standpoint,
Rawalpindi would have wanted a deadlock in the India-Pakistan
diplomatic engagement. The stalling of the "composite talks" between
India and Pakistan was the price the army had sought for the way
Sharif endorsed Vajpayee's decision in Colombo to throw Khan out of
his first interaction with Pakistan as the BJP led coalition's prime
minister.
For Rawalpindi, Kargil is merely a logical extension of the decision
taken by Pakistan's three service chiefs on the eve of Vajpayee's
arrival at the Wagah border to boycott his welcome ceremony.
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