Author: Prem Shankar Jha, Senior Journalist
Publication: Tehelka
Date: March 13, 2010
URL: http://www.tehelka.com/story_main44.asp?filename=Op130310opinion.asp
Introduction: Everyone has miscalculated their
role in Afghanistan. This might explain why Pakistan's army has lost its taste
for peace with India
Last Week, relations between India and Pakistan
touched a nadir not seen since Operation Parakram, launched eight years ago
following the attack on Parliament. The eagerly awaited Foreign Secretaries'
talks turned out to be a dialogue of the deaf. And the meeting itself was
bracketed by two hideous terrorist attacks, in Pune and Kabul, that broke
14 months of absolute calm in mainland India.
Is the resumption of targeted attacks on Indian
civilians accidental, or does it herald a change for the worse in Indo- Pak
relations? The first can be ruled out, because the break in the pattern is
too abrupt to be a product of chance. But if there is a design in the recent
attacks, it is by no means an obvious one.
The timing of the last two attacks - one just
before and the other a day after the Foreign Secretary- level talks in Delhi
- points to Al Qaeda-linked orga nisations in Pakistan. The Al Qaeda stamp
is clearly visible in the deliberate choice of targets with the intention
of killing foreigners. These attacks bear a marked resemblance to the 26/11
attacks in Mumbai, where the Taj and Oberoi hotels and Café Leopold
in Colaba were chosen because they are popular with foreigners.
The latest attacks therefore bear witness
to the growing ties between Al Qaeda and terrorist organisations like the
Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad and the Lashkar-e- Jhangvi. This explains
Islamabad's growing exasperation at New Delhi's refusal to normalise relations
with Pakistan till it punishes the architects of the 26/11 attack, and its
repeated threats of instant retaliation if there is another 26/11-type attack
in the near future. The only effect these tactics will have, they say, is
to turn both countries into hostages of Al Qaeda and its cohorts in Pakistan.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's categorical
assertion that India will not break off talks despite the Pune and Kabul attacks
shows that he is fully aware of the danger and is determined to avert it.
But carrying the peace process forward may no longer be as easy as it would
have been even six months ago. Some features of the recent attacks raise the
troubling possibility that Pakistan's army, if not its civilian government,
has lost its taste for peace with India and may once again be considering
using jihadi organisations as instruments of foreign policy.
There have been several straws in the wind.
Hafiz Saeed, head of the Lashkar and the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, virtually announced
the attack on Pune in a public statement four days before it occurred. The
justification he gave for his 'jihad' was that India was holding back Punjab
river waters and starving Pakistani farmers of water. Not only did Islamabad
not pull him in for questioning when the attack took place, but it made no
attempt to distance itself from Saeed's claim that India was starving Pakistani
farmers by stealing their water. Not surprisingly, on Saturday February 27,
an emboldened Saeed threatened again to unleash "war" on India,
this time to force it to start talking to Pakistan about Kashmir. Again, Islamabad
has not uttered a single word of censure.
Although the Indian-favoured guest house in
Kabul attacked on February 27 was only one of three foreigner haunts, its
choice was significant because the Pakistan army has made no secret of its
extreme allergy to the Indian presence in Afghanistan, and because the ISI
has been conclusively linked to the first attack, on the Indian embassy in
July 2008.
The attack on the guest house came only three
weeks after Pakistan army chief General Parvez Kayani's explicit declaration
on February 1, at a press conference for foreign correspondents in Islamabad
from which Indian journalists were excluded, that India remained Pakistan's
main enemy. Pakistan therefore needed "a friendly Afghanistan" behind
it in order to acquire "defence in depth". Pakistan, he told the
west, could deliver a "win-win situation" in Afghanistan to the
US. But it could only do so if it was given full control of the recruitment
and the training of the Afghan National Army. Only that would ensure that
Pakistan had a friendly army to its rear.
Ensuring this required that India cease its
involvement in Afghan affairs, and especially have nothing to do with training
its army. The attack on the guest house could therefore presage a return to
the policy of using jihadi organisations as proxies in foreign policy.
Which of these is the correct interpretation
of recent events? This is a question that New Delhi has been debating for
the last 15 months. The sharp differences of opinion between those who believe
that the Pakistan army is caught in a time warp and cannot see anything beyond
its enmity with India, and those who advocate a frank dialogue to allay the
suspicions of the Pakistani establishment and pave the way for a joint approach
to terrorism and Afghanistan has paralysed the government and precluded any
new initiative. But the time for developing a common approach has all but
run out.
Kayani would not have been able to wave both
the stick and the carrot quite so openly had he not been reasonably sure that
the Obama administration would fall in line because it had run out of options.
With the US having set a date for starting to withdraw from Afghanistan, Pakistan
too has run out of options. For seven years after the US invasion of Afghanistan,
the Pakistan army did all it could to minimise its involvement in America's
war. It turned a Nelson's eye to the rise of the Taliban in tribal areas and
continued to stoke a low-intensity conflict in Kashmir to justify not moving
its huge army from the Indian border.
It only woke up to the cost of this strategy
when the Taliban overran Swat in 2008. It then discovered that the Taliban
had swallowed a tenth of Pakistan and captured the imagination of half the
unemployed youth of Punjab - and that a section of it was intent on capturing
the Pakistani state itself.
ONLY THEN did it join battle against the Al
Qaedalinked Taliban in earnest. But within months of doing so, its worst nightmare
came to pass when the US announced that it was ready to pull up its stakes
and leave. Since then, the Pakistan army has been engaged in damage limitation.
Kayani's press conference was the first step. But since then, the outlines
of Pakistan's new policy have become clearer day by day. By arresting three
of the top leaders of Mullah Umar's Quetta Shura, including the Taliban's
military commander Mullah Baradar, Islamabad has shown the world that it has
the shura at its mercy and can wind it up whenever it wants.
Some of Pakistan's recent actions also foreshadow
the policy it is likely to adopt to safeguard its future. It intends to continue
Musharraf's policy of maintaining a truce with the Haqqani faction of the
Taliban in north Waziristan. When the US and ISAF finally leave Afghanistan,
Pakistan's conflict with the Haqqani faction will automatically end. It also
hopes to crush the Al Qaeda-linked Taliban in south Waziristan, Swat and the
NWFP. This is a tall order for, as Kayani well knows, the Taliban have been
dispersed but not destroyed. But Kayani could be pinning his hopes on the
belief that the departure of the foreigners from Afghanistan will reduce their
appeal for the ordinary Pathans and make it easier for the army to regain
control. The US seems to have bought the plan. It is now Delhi's turn to decide
where this will leave India.
- Writer's Email - premjha@airtelmail.in
