Creeping Coup Redux: Civil-Military Relations in Pakistan

Sushant Sareen, 

Senior Fellow, VIF

A few months before the 1999 military coup, a monthly newsmagazine in Pakistan carried a cover story titled ‘Creeping Coup’. In his second stint as Prime Minister from 1996-99, Nawaz Sharif had started involving the military in all sorts of things that ideally should have been handled by the civilian government. From checking electricity meters to unearthing ghost schools to cleaning canals, the army was being deployed in the role of a sort of National Guard. The then Army Chief, Gen Pervez Musharraf was always ready to oblige, quite willingly it appeared. Nawaz Sharif, at that point in time, was unassailable. He had a 2/3^rd majority in the National Assembly, the opposition was in disarray, the nuclear tests had beefed up his position even move (even though in the aftermath of these tests, the economy had virtually collapsed), he had sacked a Navy chief and followed it up by forcing out an army chief, the ISI Chief was his man. In short, everything seemed to be going in Nawaz Sharif’s favor.

Then Kargil happened, and things started sliding very fast. So much so that even a statement from the US warning against any extra constitutional move against the elected government didn’t help. Nor for that matter did Nawaz Sharif’s efforts of going out of the way to placate Musharraf. When it came, all it took was what a former Prime Minister Ch. Shujaat Hussain calls ‘one jeep and two trucks’ to overthrow the civilian government. Therefore, the thumb rule number one about civil-military relations in Pakistan is to never imagine that the democratic process is irreversible.

A decade and a half after he was ousted in a military coup, Nawaz Sharif is once again occupying the Prime Minister’s chair. A lot of water has flowed down the Indus during this time and a lot of things appear to have changed. But as recent events have demonstrated, what hasn’t changed is the reality of the military establishment’s ability to destabilize a civilian government and box it into a corner. What also hasn’t changed is the tendency of the civil politicians, whether in government or out of it, to fall back on the military and seek its support to fix their opponents. What is more, with most state institutions steadily becoming dysfunctional, the military has become the default option when things need to be set right. If in 1999 the military was cleaning canals, unearthing ghost schools, reading electricity meters, in 2014 they have gone a step further and have been handed over the security of airports, railway stations, and other vital installations. Worse, not just is the army virtually in control of two major cities – Karachi and now Islamabad – it is practically calling the shots in two provinces – Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The democratic transition from one civilian government to another had led many to imagine that democracy had finally stuck firm roots in Pakistan. Much of the credit for that ‘historic’ transition is due to former President Asif Zardari’s remarkable skill at political gymnastics which ensured that his party’s government completed its term. But he was also aided by individuals and circumstances, without which he might have fallen well short of breasting the tape.

The first thing that helped Zardari was that the PPP was replacing a quasi-military regime and for the military to directly intervene in political affairs soon after restoration of democracy was neither politically feasible nor possible. This is a second thumb rule of Pakistani politics – it is a two party system with the civilians being one party and the military the second party; each side gets a 10 year ‘term’, give or take a couple of years. Viewed from this perspective, the current problems facing the Nawaz Sharif government could be explained as ‘mid-term blues’ of the civilian dispensation. Be that as it may, Asif Zardari got the benefit of this thumb rule. What also worked in his favor was that the main opposition leader was Nawaz Sharif who never really allowed political differences and competition reach the point of no return. Nawaz Sharif’s attitude was partly colored by his experience of the sordid politics of the 1990s when political parties conspired with the military against the government, something that allowed the Army to become the dominant political player in Pakistan. Equally important was the fact that Nawaz Sharif was not left out in the cold after the transition from quasi-military to civilian rule.

By virtue of his party coming into power in the province of Punjab, Nawaz Sharif had a stake in the system which also meant that he could afford to be patient and let the government complete its term. Apart from the role played by Nawaz Sharif in ensuring the survival of the Zardari-led PPP government, there was also a judiciary running amok under the former Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and a media which fancied itself as a guardian of democracy. Add to all this the international situation that wasn’t conducive to any direct military takeover, and it’s not difficult to figure out how and why Zardari managed to drag his party’s government across the finish line in spite of a terrible record of governance.

Nawaz Sharif started his 3^rd term with some advantages that Asif Zardari never enjoyed. Based on the strength that these advantages gave the Nawaz Sharif dispensation, many observers and analysts were convinced that democracy would only get strengthened. Nawaz Sharif had a comfortable majority in the centre and controlled two provinces –Punjab and Balochistan. The judiciary and media were not hostile to him. In fact, the judiciary was beholden to him because of the role he played in the restoration of judges. The PMLN’s legendary media management skills meant that he would not face the hostility that Asif Zardari had faced from a right-wing, illiberal and intellectually challenged media. Most of all, the army appeared to be a bit on the back foot. They were wary of Nawaz Sharif and weren’t quite sure whether he will adopt a vindictive and vengeful policy towards the military. There were fears in the army that Nawaz Sharif might actually take the rhetoric of civilian superiority seriously and try to implement it. This wasn’t a problem that the army faced with Asif Zardari or his nominated Prime Minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, who were more than willing to even grovel before the military to keep it in good humor. So much so, at one point Gilani is reported to have said that he had told the then army chief Gen Ashfaq Kayani that he was at the service of the military.

While the army didn’t expect this level of obsequiousness from Nawaz Sharif, it also didn’t think it would be very smooth sailing with the new Prime Minister because of his reputation for never forgiving and his legendary aversion to being pushed around or being dictated to. Therefore, some amount of civil-military tension was inherent, more so because Nawaz Sharif was expected to not just push the envelope but also push back in order assert himself and show who is the boss and who will call the shots.

In the case of the PPP government, the civil-military tussle and tension came fairly early. Within weeks of the ouster of Musharraf from the Presidency, an attempt was made to bring the ISI under the control of the interior ministry. The army let the government know in no uncertain terms where it got off. After this first chastening, the PPP consistently yielded to the wishes and whims of the military. In Nawaz Sharif’s case, it took around six months for the latent tensions to surface. Until October 2013 when Gen Kayani was in office, and given how well-set and well-established he was, Nawaz Sharif bided his time. Another restraining factor on Nawaz Sharif during his first six months in office was the presence of the former chief justice, who retired only in December. It was after the exit of both these people that the transition was complete and Nawaz Sharif was in a position to be pretty much his own boss, or so be thought because almost immediately the problems started.

There were broadly four issues that became the bone of contention. The first was Musharraf and the treason case against him. The second was the government policy on TTP or the Islamist insurgency terrorism. The third was India and the fourth was the media war which broke out after the botched assassination attempt on the Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir. All these issues prompted the political hyenas to jump into the fray, either because they thought they could exploit the growing gulf between the civilian government and military, or as many believe, they were put up to this in order to box the government into a corner.

The manner in which these issues became a wedge between the government and the military give rise to two or three more thumb rules of Pakistani politics. Thumb rule number three is what can be called the paradox of power. Briefly, this means that in Pakistan the more powerful and unassailable you appear to be, the weaker and more vulnerable you are because the anti- forces then have a compelling reason to bring you down regardless of the consequences. A corollary to this thumb rule is the ‘devil may cause attitude’ of Pakistan and Pakistanis wherein the culture of ‘bringing down the wall of the neighbor or enemy even if you come under it’ has been internalized. This corollary has implications for India because when Indians parrot the nonsense about ‘neighbors can’t be changed’ and ‘geography cannot be changed’, the perversity that guides Pakistani thinking is often ignored. In other words, the Pakistanis would go to any length to bring India’s wall down even if they perish in the process.

The fourth thumb rule is that civil-military relations are based on system of diarchy in which the civilians are allowed a free hand in taking charge of municipal functions, while all the serious strategic, defence and foreign policy matters are controlled by the military. The fifth thumb rule is that once you appoint an army chief you lose control over him. It is a unique country in which an elected Prime Minister appoints his own nemesis. At the very least, it is a unique system in which the appointing authority loses control of the appointee as soon as the appointment is made.

These thumb rules need to be kept in mind to understand why the predicament in which the Nawaz Sharif government finds itself in and despite enjoying a more than comfortable majority in the National Assembly, rumors of its pre-mature demise are starting to do the rounds.

The Musharraf case clearly caused lot of bad blood between the military and the civilian government. It is not that the army is in love with Musharraf but more that it’s an institutional response to a former chief being humiliated and being put on trial. An even bigger issue is that of senior military officials being held accountable by the ‘bloody civilians’. For Nawaz Sharif, Musharraf is both a personal and political issue. At a personal level, Nawaz Sharif and many members of his kitchen cabinet have suffered terrible indignities at the hands of Musharraf and would like to settle scores. Politically, while the hardliners realize that the Musharraf issue can backfire on them, they also don’t want to open themselves to the chance of having resiled from the tough talk they did on Musharraf both while in opposition and after coming into power. The pro-treason trial lobby in the ruling dispensation fears that they will have to pay a heavy political cost if they let Musharraf go scot free. Plus there is the entire argument that if Musharraf is left off the hook, then it will only serve as an encouragement to the next man on the horseback to usurp power. While these people are aware of the heartburn in the military, some of them argue that if they have to run the country they must have a free hand else what’s the point of being in government but without the power to do things they want to do.

To be sure, there is a split within the ruling party on the Musharraf issue with one faction advocating the hard line and another faction led by Shahbaz Sharif and the Interior Minister Ch. Nisar Ali Khan advocating caution and accommodation. What really spoiled matters was when an alleged understanding that Musharraf would be allowed to leave the country after a court allowed him to do so, was scotched by the hard line faction at the last minute. Many formal and informal advisors are now advising the Prime Minister that he should live to fight another day and not fritter away his government on as irrelevant a figure as Musharraf, more so when even the army would like to see his back. For now there is a stalemate on this issue. But increasingly it seems the army will eventually get its way.

The second issue was on how to handle the TTP and other Islamist groups. The army’s strategic calculation demanded that action be taken against the ‘bad’ Taliban and control be established over the ‘no-go’ areas like North Waziristan. The civilian government had its reasons for not being very enthusiastic about giving the army a go ahead to launch a military operation in this area. One reason was of course personal security of the members of the ruling family and party. But another reason was that an operation would mean giving a free hand to the army which would increase its political space, something the government wanted to avoid. There was also the whole issue of blowback or retaliation which would not only affect the political popularity of the government and alienate its conservative right wing vote bank but also ruin the economic and investment climate. But as things have turned out, the military finally got its way when it launched the operation. In a clear signal that it was the military and not the government that called the shots on the operation in North Waziristan, the announcement of the operation was made first by the military spokesman and the Prime Minister’s statement followed.

The third issue bedeviling relations between the civilian government and the Army was India. Nawaz Sharif was very keen and eager to do business with India. A trade deal heavily loaded in favor of the Pakistan was agreed by India in February 2014. But at the last moment the military put pressure and scuttled it. The army clearly is not ready to let the civilians take charge of the India policy and it increasingly appears that the government has given in to the army on this issue. What this means for India is that it should take anything that the civilian government in Pakistan says with a healthy dose of skepticism. In any case, India’s policy on Pakistan should not be predicated on what the Pakistanis say but on what they do and by all accounts what they are doing on ground doesn’t really inspire any confidence that there is any major shift in policy towards India.

The fourth issue which spoiled relations between the government and the military was the media war that broke out after the assassination attempt on the Pakistani journalist, Hamid Mir. After Mir’s TV channel accused the ISI chief of being behind the attempt on his life, a virtual storm was unleashed against the Jang/Geo group. Much of this was orchestrated by the ISI which mobilized other news channels against Geo and used all sorts of strong arm tactics to shut Geo down. This was a moment of truth for the Pakistan media and it exposed the lie of independence of media. The ISI-Geo tussle was in part a commercial fight. For some months now, there were reports that ISI was in the process of starting a news channel of its own. Seed money for this was allegedly being partly contributed by the international terrorist and criminal Dawood Ibrahim. Also allegedly involved was a dubious business group in Dubai which is infamous for gold smuggling and also runs a TV channel in Pakistan.

The big obstacle in the path of these plans was Geo, which not only dominated the news networks and print media but also poked the ISI in the eye by exposing its media plans. As long as Geo’s domination continued, the ISI’s news channel would remain a bit player. Shutting Geo down or blocking its transmission was therefore imperative if space had to be created for another channel in an already crowded media space. The other channels became wiling partners in this misadventure, behaving like typical hyenas to bring down an adversary against whom they couldn’t compete otherwise. A prominent role in this was played by ARY channel which for months had been conducting a campaign of slander and vilification against Geo and its owners. The civilian government was caught in the middle of this media war and tried to walk the tight rope, or if you will the knife’s edge. They couldn’t ignore the army but also could not allow it to ride rough shod over Geo because if today it was Geo, tomorrow it would be someone else, perhaps even the government itself.

The Geo episode exposed the armpit of Pakistan politics and media. It became clear who stood where and how independent or subservient the media was. It also exposed the helplessness of the judiciary vis-à-vis the army, and irrelevance of civil society. The limitations of the civilian government in reining in the military became apparent. But ironically, the episode also revealed the weakness of the Army which despite all its efforts could only go so far and no further in targeting Geo. The point is that while the Army remains the most powerful political force in Pakistan, it no longer enjoys the kind of domination that it did some years back. Over the years, it has been challenged politically and militarily and its monopoly over the national narrative has also been dented.

While the Army’s ability to destabilize the government remains quite intact as does its power to overthrow the government, it probably no longer enjoys the power to run the country as it did in the past, not that it ran the country well when it got the chance. In fact, most of the problems confronting Pakistan today can be traced back to the military regimes or the military’s control over national security and foreign policy. What, however, gives the military an advantage over the civilians is the bugling and inefficient and uninspiring performance of the civilian governments – not just in the political realm but also in the economic and administrative domain. The failure of civilians to give even a modicum of good governance and solve the problems of the people has created space for the military.

Today, the political situation is once again in a bit of flux. Just one year after winning a third term as Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif’s government is finding itself under siege. Partly the situation is of the government’s own making and its bumbling and bungling ways. Apart from the fact that the government has failed to give even a little relief from the crippling energy shortages despite doubling the electricity tariffs, it is the almost amateurish political management which has created the spectre of instability despite the government having an almost 2/3rd majority in the National Assembly. For now a challenge is being mounted in the street by Imran Khan and a somewhat clownish cleric from Canada, Tahirul Qadri who is promising an instant revolution like it is some kind of instant coffee. Imran Khan, whose intellectual capacity and political thinking, is limited to drawing silly cricketing analogies wants the system to stay but at the same time is threatening to overthrow it by using street power and set the date of Aug 14 for forcing the government out of office. On the other hand, Tahirul Qadri, who was given a huge issue after the Punjab government fired on his supporters in Lahore and killed around a dozen people and injured around a 100, is making no bones about wanting to scrap the whole system.

Normally, a demonstration or even a massive anti-government protest shouldn’t be much cause for worry for a legitimate government, even less so when the demands being made by the protestors are illogical, extra-legal and even extra-constitutional. But Nawaz Sharif’s style of politics has come back to haunt him. Apart from the fact that many in the ruling party think that the agitation on streets is being orchestrated by the army to bring the government under pressure, perhaps even oust it, it is the steady isolation of Nawaz Sharif and his immediate circle from rest of the political mainstream and even his own party that is creating the impression of a government that is flailing rather helplessly. Not only has Nawaz Sharif ignored the very institution from which he derives his strength and legitimacy i.e. Parliament, he has also alienated members of his party by appointing cronies and family members to all plum positions in government. Even the decisions being taken are by a tiny group comprising the kitchen cabinet. The neglect of elected legislators has meant that they really don’t have any stake in the system. Worse, Nawaz Sharif has also ignored the main opposition party, PPP, which has suddenly woken up to the uncomfortable fact that by maintaining a posture of friendly opposition it is getting marginalized in the larger political game. The space that PPP has ceded has been filled by Imran Khan’s party, especially in the Punjab. Not surprisingly, PPP leaders from Punjab are restive and itching to take on the government. In order to keep the flock together, the PPP has now started making noises which have only added to the discomfiture of the ruling dispensation.

The nightmare for the government now is that if there are large scale street disturbances which go out of control, it could lead to a military intervention even if the military doesn’t want to intervene. The Army finds itself caught on many fronts and taking over the government will only stretch it further. Apart from confronting all the economic, political and other problems facing the government, the army will also have to face up to the diplomatic implications of ousting an elected government. Conversely, given that the army has already been involved in so many things, it might even consider taking over if things go out of control of civilian government. For its part, the civilian government has demonstrated its weakness by asking the military to intercede and convince Imran Khan to back off. It has also made a rather clumsy attempt by pitting the army against Imran Khan’s supporters by handing over security of Islamabad to the Army.

Under these circumstances, even if the current round of political confrontation passes off without incident, the government has already subordinated itself to the military and the only logical conclusion of this is that henceforth it will be left with only municipal functions while the military will call the shots on all issues of foreign and security policy including the mother of all issues which is India. What this means is that any engagement that India enters into with the civilian government will remain hostage to the Pakistan Army’s unreconstructed and unreformed view of India.

---

Published Date: 20^th August 2014, Image source: http://images.thenews.com.pk

Why Pakistan is Blowing Apart LoC Ceasefire?

Sushant Sareen, 

Senior Fellow, VIF

Even though there have been occasional violations by Pakistani troops of the ceasefire agreement on the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir, the recent flare-up has placed an enormous strain on the Confidence Building Measure (CBM) that had been mutually agreed by the two countries in late 2003. The violations of the ceasefire are no longer limited to either a small section of the LoC or to use of small arms but are taking place all along the LoC with higher calibre ammunition being used. What is more, the exchange of fire has continued unabated in one or the other sector of the LoC for nearly three weeks now. On the Indian side, the restraint that was being shown by the army in the face of regular provocations by the Pakistan army and its jihadist paramilitaries – pushing in infiltrators, firing on Indian positions, carrying out cross-LoC raids etc. –has now all but run its course. With the gloves coming off, the Indian Army has started to retaliate in a calibrated and proportionate manner.

The message being sent is clear: unless the Pakistanis back off (after all they started the shooting match with the killing of five Indian soldiers on the Indian side of the LoC), there is a clear and present danger of the ceasefire agreement collapsing. If this happens, things will return to the pre-ceasefire situation in which both sides suffered heavy casualties of not only troops but also civilians living close to the LoC. The problem for Pakistan is that open hostilities breaking out on its eastern front is the last thing that the over-stretched military can afford at this point in time. As it is, Pakistan is sinking in a sea of crises, not the least of which is a tanking economy, rampant terrorism, two and a half insurgencies (the Islamist one in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA, a separatist movement in Balochistan, and the stirrings of a nationalist insurgency in Sindh), abysmal state of law and order with sectarian violence and criminal mafias tearing the country apart. Add to this the looming spectre of instability and chaos post 2014 after the Western forces withdraw from Afghanistan. By all standpoints of normal rationality then, it just doesn’t make sense for Pakistan to ratchet up tension with India at this stage. Or does it?

Many Pakistani analysts, assuming an air of injured innocence to mislead both domestic and international opinion, wonder what Pakistan stands to gain by heating up the LoC, and that too at a time when the new government has expressed its keenness to reach out to India and normalise relations. Asides of the fact that Pakistan has been quite adept at playing both sides of the game – professing commitment to peace on the one hand and surreptitiously promoting terrorism and proxy war on the other hand – there are a number of reasons why the Pakistani military establishment, if not the entire Pakistani state machinery, could be turning normal rational behaviour on its head and actually coming to the conclusion that rising tension on the frontier with India serves not just the corporate interests of the Pakistan army but also the security and strategic interests of the Pakistani state.

The most benign explanation for the LoC flare-up is that the Pakistanis made a tactical miscalculation by crossing the LoC to attack an Indian patrol and kill 5 soldiers. The strident reaction from the Indian side hadn’t been factored in because for some time now such actions by the Pakistanis never evoked any major response from India. But this time things spiralled out of control and the pressure of public opinion coupled with the anger within the army forced the hand of the government to raise the ante and give back to Pakistan as good, if not better, than it got. With India refusing to back down or climb down from the escalation ladder, the Pakistanis might have bitten more than they can chew and are now trying to bring things back to normal. But this explanation doesn’t quite explain why, for a number of months now, the Pakistanis have been trying to reignite the flames of Jihad in Kashmir. The sharp rise in number of infiltration attempts, ceasefire violations and ambushes and attacks inside the state of Jammu and Kashmir suggests a more sinister game plan than just testosterone imbalance among Pakistani troops which made then indulge in needless adventurism along the LoC. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that Pakistan could once again be preparing the ground for putting Jammu and Kashmir back on the boil and both the recent heating up of LoC as well as the spike in acts of terror within the state are part of this plan for Kashmir Jihad 2.0.

Yet another reason why the eastern front has become hot, while tangentially related to the issue of Kashmir, has to do with Pakistan’s domestic power play between the military establishment and the civilian government. The Pakistan army isn’t very comfortable with Nawaz Sharif at the helm of affairs and feels spooked by his emphasis on civilian supremacy over all policy matters. There is a widespread perception inside Pakistan that Nawaz Sharif is unlikely to let the army wield the veto on foreign and security policy and will sooner or later make a play for whittling down the military’s influence in domestic politics. If the army has to remain top dog, it must pull Nawaz Sharif down a few pegs. The best way for doing this is raising tensions with India, a ploy that catapults the army to the centre-stage, and allows it to acquire the image of the saviour of the nation in the face of a hostile India. Related to this is the discomfiture of the Pakistani military establishment with Nawaz Sharif’s desire for normalising relations with India. The overtures made by Nawaz Sharif to restart some sort of an engagement with India hasn’t gone down well with the army. There are reports of the Pakistan army chief Gen Ashfaq Kayani cautioning Nawaz Sharif not to be hasty in reaching out to India. Renewed hostilities along the LoC effectively sabotage the peace moves of Nawaz Sharif. In other words, the Pakistan military has killed two birds – arrested any possibility of political irrelevance and shot down Nawaz Sharif peace moves – with one stone – ramping up tension on LoC. For his part, Nawaz Sharif too is believed to have been spooked by the sudden rise in temperature on the eastern front. Whispers in corridors of power in Islamabad suggest that Nawaz Sharif and his close associates fear and suspect that the Pakistan army could be doing another ‘Kargil’ to him. He, therefore, is trying to play down the LoC incidents and not fall for the trap which he thinks has been set for him by the army.

Domestic politics aside, there are other advantages also that the Pakistani establishment could be hoping to reap from the rising tension with India. Hints of this came in a report by one of the embedded journalists who quoted an unnamed senior army officer as saying that Pakistan was considering withdrawing troops on the border with Afghanistan and redeploying them on the border with India. This is a thinly disguised ploy of inviting US intervention on Pakistan's side. At a time when the US is in withdrawal mode from Afghanistan and is to all intents and purposes outsourcing Afghanistan to Pakistan, the last thing it would want is for Pakistan to shift its focus from its western border to its eastern border, or so the Pakistanis calculate. The expectation is that the US will, at the very minimum, lean upon India to cool things down and there is also a reasonably good chance that it could also go a step further to press India to seek a Kashmir solution which satisfies Pakistan. This sort of Pakistani calculation fits in well with the old and tired narrative (but one which has once again acquired some traction) that the problem in Afghanistan is not one of radical Islam or Islamist terror but actually an India-Pakistan proxy war. This nonsensical narrative peddles the line that the road to Kabul runs through Kashmir and the end point of this is that once the Kashmir issue is settled, radical Islam will die a natural death and South Asia will transform into a land of milk and honey. Ratcheting up tensions with India on LoC is therefore the first step in drawing the attention of the international community, in particular the US, to the Kashmir issue.

What is important to note is that Pakistan is willing to dismantle its security grid against the Taliban in order to beef up its defences against India. At one level, this is tantamount to an acknowledgment that Pakistan sees India as a much greater threat to its existence than the terrorism and devastation caused by the Taliban, and as such punctures holes in the airy-fairy talk about internal threats (Taliban and Islamic radical groups) replacing India as the primary threat to Pakistan's security. At another level, such a redeployment of troops and shift of focus will help the Pakistani authorities create space for a dialogue, even a deal, with the Taliban. On their part, the Taliban (about whom the Pakistanis never tire of insinuating that they are being funded by India!) have announced that they will ‘defend Pakistan's borders’ from any Indian aggression and that while their fight against Pakistan army is for the sake of Islam, they would not allow the enemies of the country (India) to attack their homeland. India therefore serves as a perfect excuse for both the Taliban and Pakistani authorities to enter into an accommodation of sorts, which in turn will create the opening for a possible peace deal. That any such deal will probably be very tenuous and at best tactical is of course another matter. But in the immediate at least, it will reduce the violence inside Pakistan and as such provide breathing space to both the Pakistani authorities and the Taliban.

The big question is whether Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is party to this double game, in which he plays good cop and is all sugar and honey to disarm India while his armed forces play bad cop to hurt and bleed India. His past record is rather mixed. The last time he was PM, Pakistan was merrily exporting terrorism into India even as he was engaging India in the Bus diplomacy. Members of his last cabinet used to openly hobnob with terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and some of them provided support and sanctuary to Kashmiri terrorists. There are reports of his links with Osama bin Laden and his turning a blind eye to sponsoring of Jihad International by his handpicked ISI chiefs. In his first term as PM, the ISI carried out the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai in 1993. In his second term, there was Kargil and other acts of terrorism. Even in the last five years, his party’s government in Punjab has been funding the activities of the parent organisation of LeT, Jamaatud Dawa, from the provincial budget.

Of course, if Nawaz Sharif is the changed man that many claim he is then he will need to prove his bona fides about wanting to improve relations with India by acting against his own jihadists, both the uniformed variety and the ones in Shalwar-Kameez. Until Nawaz Sharif walks the talk on peace with India, he can never be considered a credible partner in the normalisation process. India, meanwhile, must respond and react appropriately and proportionately to any and every provocation from Pakistan. Equally important, India needs to disabuse the West (especially the US) of any notions it might be harbouring of playing a mediatory role between India and Pakistan on the issue of Jammu and Kashmir. The US must be made to understand that if it couldn’t pressure Pakistan into stopping support for the Taliban despite the heavy cost such a Pakistani policy was imposing on the US in men, money and material, then there is not much traction it will get from India on Jammu and Kashmir or for that matter on Pakistan.

LoC Ceasefire Violation: Talking Peace only to Undercut The Dialogue by Other Means

Sushant Sareen 

(Senior Fellow, VIF) 

The flag meeting between the local Indian commander and his Pakistani counterpart has concluded in an utterly predictable fashion: India has protested the repeated violation of the LoC ceasefire by Pakistani troops and strongly took up the issue of barbarity displayed by Pakistani soldiers who crossed the LoC, killed two Indian soldiers and mutilated their bodies, carrying away the head of one soldier as a trophy; Pakistan has brazenly denied all the Indian charges and hurled counter-accusations at the Indians. 

Despite this talking at each other, the flag meeting could possibly have achieved the limited purpose for which it was being held viz. cooling down things so that hostilities don’t spiral out of control. Of course, how long the temperature remains lowered is another matter altogether. Sooner or later, efforts will be made from the Indian side to even the scores – the morale of the troops who are seething with rage over the savage actions of Pakistani soldiers depends on this. As far as the Pakistanis are concerned, they could well violate the ceasefire again, either to push in infiltrators and terrorists or in response to an Indian retaliation, or even in pursuit of some larger strategic game-plan which could very well have been the reason why tensions were ratcheted up in the first place. 

Basically, there are two possible explanations for the cross-LoC adventurism by the Pakistani forces at this stage. The benign explanation is that it was a routine ceasefire violation which spiralled out of control. In other words, it wasn’t part of any premeditated plan. Once the firing started, the two sides went up the escalation ladder with no easy way of defusing the situation because of political compulsions of all the main players. The civilian government in Pakistan is already coming under pressure of the Islamists and the military establishment for going soft on India and opening up trade and relaxing travel between the two countries. With general elections round the corner, the civilian government in Islamabad doesn’t want to appear as having backed down from giving a muscular response to an alleged Indian provocation along the LoC. 

The military leadership in Rawalpindi is also facing dissension within its rank and file for re-engaging with the Americans and opening up NATO supply lines post the Salala incident in which 26 Pakistan Army soldiers were killed in bombing by US aircraft in November 2011. For the Pakistan Army chief Gen Ashfaq Kayani to now appear as adopting a pusillanimous approach towards India will be quite disastrous. What is more, the Pakistan Army probably feels that it needs to send out a signal to India to not think that it is on its knees because of the myriad problems within Pakistan. In other words, the Pakistan Army wants to convey that it still has a lot of fight left in it and India shouldn’t think it can trifle with Pakistan just because it is in a tight spot on both the western front and internally. 

The predicament of the Indian political leadership is no less. Already seen as a weak, vacillating and extremely corrupt and incompetent government which is also seen as bending over backwards to appease Pakistan, the UPA-II finds itself in an unenviable position. It doesn’t want hostilities along the LoC to spread and would like to cool things down but without being seen as having thrown in the towel. Adding to its problems is the seething rage in the armed forces which cannot tolerate the thought of letting the extreme provocation by the Pakistan Army go unanswered. The manner in which the Indian government is trying to resolve the matter is by playing good cop – the political leadership playing down the incident and taking a soft approach – and the military leadership talking tough to cool down the soldiery – the air chief talking about ‘other options’ and the army chief warning of an ‘aggressive’ response to future violations of ceasefire and assuring his troops that India will respond to the outrage of mutilation of its soldiers at a time and place of its own choosing.

The bottom-line as far as the benign explanation goes is that neither side wants things to go out of control and the ceasefire to collapse. Despite India taking the issue of the treatment meted out to its soldiers extremely seriously, it doesn’t consider the matter to be of a level over which it is willing to either suspend the dialogue with Pakistan or start a general shooting match along the LoC. Of course, the incident has once again laid bare Pakistan’s treacherous conduct – talking peace and cooing sweet nothings on the one hand and displaying barbarity and indulging in unprovoked firing on Indian soldiers on the other hand. But India has somehow come to expect this sort of treachery from Pakistan and at least the current dispensation is more than happy to live with it. 

Before we touch upon the second and more plausible, if also more sinister, explanation of the entire LoC affair, it is important to disabuse ourselves of the nonsense that the Pakistan army is a professional and modern army which doesn’t engage in the mutilation of corpses of its adversaries. The fact of the matter is that despite all the trappings and traditions of the old British Indian army, the mindset of the Pakistan army is that of a medieval Islamist or Jihadist army. The only difference between the Pakistan army and its illegitimate offspring, the Taliban, is that the former is a uniformed force while the latter is not. None other than the former leader of opposition in Pakistan, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, has revealed that the Pakistan army would hurl living Taliban fighters out of helicopters flying from a height of a 1000 feet and more to instil fear and terror among the Taliban ranks. During the 1990’s, Pakistani Urdu press were full of stories and pictures of beheaded Indian soldiers which were displayed as trophies by the jihadist proxies of the Pakistan army. 

Apart from the mutilation of Limit Saurav Kalia and his men during the Kargil conflict, there is also the incident of Gen Pervez Musharraf felicitating the terrorist commander Ilyas Kashmiri after the latter presented him with the severed head of an Indian soldier. A former Indian general has revealed that during the 1965 operations in Chammb, the Pakistan Army severed the ears and noses and even genitals of dead Indian soldiers. And for anyone to suggest that in this latest incident, it was perhaps some jihadist force which carried out the mutilation is nothing but an apology, if not an alibi, for the Pakistan Army. The simple fact is that given the saturation presence of the Pakistan Army along the LoC, it is inconceivable for a jihadist force to operate without the permission and assistance of the Pakistan army. Therefore, there is no way that the Pakistan Army can be absolved of this dastardly and barbaric act which was carried out as part of a larger game-plan to deliberately increase tension along the LoC and the Eastern front.

This is where the second and more sinister explanation comes in. Ever since 9/11 and the subsequent US-led NATO occupation and operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan has been trying hard to convince the Western bloc and the international community that the road to Kabul goes through Kashmir. But until now, this ploy hasn’t received much traction, partly because India reacted very emphatically against drawing any such linkage and partly because Pakistan’s own double-speak and double-game in Afghanistan lost it all support and sympathy of the West. Now however, with the Afghan endgame unfolding – ISAF troop withdrawals from Afghanistan moving into a high gear, reconciliation moves with the Taliban gathering pace and the US desperate to leave behind some semblance of order before it quits Afghanistan – Pakistan senses another opportunity to draw the attention of the West to solve the Kashmir issue in accordance with Pakistan's wishes and holding out the threat that unless this is done Pakistan would be forced to divert its focus on the eastern front with India leaving the Western forces in the lurch in Afghanistan. The perceptible US tilt in favour of Pakistan is also emboldening the Pakistanis to indulge in some sabre-rattling and indeed adventurism on the eastern front under the belief that if things get heated up on the Indian front, the US and its other Western allies will be left with no choice but to intercede on Pakistan's behalf against India. 

The timing of the latest provocation along the LoC also makes sense because Pakistan is holding the presidency of the UN Security Council in January and tensions in Kashmir allow Pakistan to try and internationalise the Kashmir issue at the UN. The alacrity with which the Pakistani officials proposed involving the UNMOGIP to investigate the entire incident suggests premeditation behind the cross-LoC raid. Not only has the Pakistan foreign office been trying hard to get the UN involved, it has also launched a diplomatic offensive with the American and EU ambassadors to internationalise the issue. 

As far as India is concerned, it needs to operate at two levels to scotch this Pakistani move. India must react strongly to any provocation along the LoC, something that the Army Chief Gen. Bikram Singh has indicated in his press conference. At the diplomatic level, it is important that India convey to the US that while we understand their compulsions in Afghanistan and the fact that the Americans will want to protect their interests in the Af-Pak region by reaching out to Pakistan, India has also its own vital interests to protect and there are certain red-lines the breach of which India will never allow. The US cannot expect India to surrender its vital interests for the sake of the Americans. Once India makes clear to the international community where it gets off, the so-called pressure that is likely to be brought on India will disappear. 

India needs to keep in mind the lesson of Kargil. Once hostilities started, the international community tried to pressure India against responding forcefully to Pakistani aggression, holding out assurances that they will try and resolve the matter. Had India agreed, the Pakistanis would have been still sitting on the heights they occupied with the international community twiddling its thumbs. But once India responded with force and refused to listen to the self-serving advice of the international community, the boot was suddenly on the other foot and Pakistan was seen as the aggressor and all the international pressure was then on Pakistan to vacate its aggression. This then is the reality of international politics and soft-peddling on issues of vital interest will only lead to surrender of these interests.

How We Lost the Peace

Kanwal Sibal 

(Member, VIF Advisory Board)

 

The ceasefire violations occurring on the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir are not abnormal. Such incidents occur when two armies with a history of fighting each other face each other in contested territory. It is the act of the Pakistani army in mutilating the bodies of Indian soldiers killed by them that is abnormal. So is the response of the Pakistani government to this deplorable incident.

Pakistan, true to form, has denied the mutilation charge. Its foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, is “appalled” at India’s outlandish claim, as their internal investigation shows that no one from Pakistan crossed the LOC and killed Indian soldiers. She made the worthless proposal for joint investigation, having already announced the result of Pakistan’s own enquiry. She then deliberately tweaked us by proposing an investigation by UNMOGIP whose role India does not recognise since 1971.

The Pakistanis claim that the highly “professional” army would do no such thing as mutilation. But then, is it normal for a professional army to have “jihad” in its motto, along with “faith” and “piety”. Is it a professional army or a religious army of the faithful whose profession is to fight for Islam?

Once again, in the face of Pakistan’s provocation India is at a loss to react effectively. We wonder what Pakistan gains by such an act when the overall relationship is improving, forgetting that this has happened before, with Kargil, various acts of terror against our cities, pilgrimage centres, and economic institutions, and finally, the Mumbai attacks taking place even while the dialogue process was on. For those behind such provocations the “gain” is political and psychological- of mobilizing anti-Indian elements behind the army, boosting the morale of the Pakistani armed forces by demonstrating that Pakistan can take on India, and expose the latter’s inability to exercise any military option.

Pakistan looks strong as a result. The intention may also be to prevent the thinking of the rank and file from being overly influenced by the positive momentum of the peace process. It may also be to show contempt for the fuss made in India lately over the mutilation of the body of Lt. Kalia during the Kargil war and show that such acts can be repeated with impunity. The Pakis-tani side knows that taking the case to the ICJ is not an option as Pakistan has to agree to the reference.

India has stated many times at the highest levels that it has no option but to continue the dialogue with Pakistan, acknowledging publicly our helplessness. We have shown to Pakistan in recent years that we can absorb serious provocations without retaliating. We did not break diplomatic ties even after the Mumbai attacks; doing so now would seem an over-reaction. It is extremely difficult for the government to reverse course as that would be an avowal of a dramatic failure of its Pakistan policy.

In the face of the defiant Pakistani attitude in the present case, we could take some steps that will not be seen as an over-reaction, but will help to retrieve some ground that we have lost in our over-eagerness to engage Pakistan, as if we need to placate them.

We should cease saying that we have no option but to negotiate with Pakistan; we should change our discourse that both countries are victims of terrorism, as we are not responsible for terrorism in Pakistan. We must forbid visits by Hurriyat leaders to Pakistan and insist that Pakistani leaders will not meet Hurriyat leaders in Delhi. We should postpone for the present any exchange of visits and delay the convening of the next round of the composite dialogue. We should not encourage sporting exchanges.

We could review some of our decisions, depending on developments. Cross LOC trade and movement is incompatible with our interests as we are unnecessarily encouraging the Kashmiris on our side to feel connected and have a sense of solidarity with Pakistani Kashmiris, which is a dynamic that Pakistan can control better than us.

On Kashmir our position should be that there is nothing to discuss except Pakistan’s interference in J&K, and this should be said in private and in public. We should remove Siachen from the dialogue agenda as having it there implies that Pakistan has some locus standi in the matter. The Hurriyat leaders, after their visit to Pakistan, are warning of the fall-out of the Afghan problem in J&K after 2014. We could be less squeamish about Baluchistan and consider permitting invitations to go to separatist Baluch leaders by Indian think-tanks.

As a smaller, more vulnerable country, wracked by extremism and violence, in economic distress, over-stretched by its ambitions, militaristic in thinking, adept at cynically exploiting its geopolitical position, capable of extreme obduracy, animated by fear and defiance of India and attitudes distorted by its Islamic vocation that makes it resort to terrorism as an instrument of state policy, Pakistan is not like us.

Unless we are willing to understand that, we will continue to make mistakes in our Pakistan policy. It is not our responsibility to save Pakistan from itself.

Tracking Talks - India Continues to Fumble in its Engagement with Pakistan

Kanwal Sibal 

(Advisory Board, VIF)

We are constantly reviewing the state of our relations with Pakistan in think tank discussions and in the media even when progress in the relationship is inordinately slow. Many think that as a society we pay exaggerated attention to Pakistan, almost to the point of being obsessed with our neighbour. Critics would argue that the more we show anxiety about improving relations with Pakistan, the more room we give to it to persist with its negative policies. Many of our other neighbours- who by no means make any special effort to earn our goodwill- do not comprehend the relative neglect with which they feel we treat them compared to our excessive reaching out to Pakistan even when it is the country most hostile to us.

While one could legitimately criticize our handling of Pakistan and the one-sided concessions we are prone to make in the hope that our adversary would eventually be convinced of our good faith and reciprocate our gestures, there are several reasons that compel us to pay seemingly inflated attention to it.

Pakistan’s geographic and demographic size is considerable; geopolitically, it is strategically located; it is a nuclear power. As a country ravaged by Islamic radicalism and terrorism, it is a source of great instability in the region and beyond. Rather than being ostracized for its destabilizing role, it has been cultivated for decades by the U.S. and China, with its hostility towards India being leveraged by them for their own geopolitical ends. Beyond the U.S. and China, Pakistan has been a negative factor in our relations with Europe, other allies of the U.S. and Islamic countries in general, not to mention the role it has played in undercutting us in the UN.

It is for these reasons, which have also included pressure on us on human rights and non-proliferation issues, we have been unable to ignore Pakistan or treat it with benign neglect. We are compelled to attach importance to our highly problematic relationship with it. If the levels of our tolerance and even generosity towards it would appear quite misplaced, our pretending that Pakistan is too small to matter would be denying reality.

It is this broad context that one could make an attempt to assess our dialogue strategy with Pakistan and its results at the official and Track 2 levels, as well as through the back-channel.

As regards our strategy, it is based on some a priori notions. However, translating them into effective policy that produces wanted results is not an assured exercise. We have worked on the assumption that while we can change friends, we cannot change neighbours, meaning that we have no option but to engage Pakistan, whatever the challenges it confronts us with. We also think that as the bigger country we need to be forthcoming and go the extra mile to reassure Pakistan that we are not a threat to its security. There is also the belief that we are the same people with a shared history and culture, and that differences between us can be surmounted if the requisite effort is made in good faith. Even if Pakistan is recalcitrant, common interests, we feel, will at some moment drive it towards resolving problems with India. The hospitality with which individual Pakistanis treat Indians who go their country and their friendly discourse reinforces the proclivity amongst a section of our population to politically and emotionally invest in hopes of peace with Pakistan. All this is accompanied by an unwillingness to look objectively at the hard facts of Pakistan’s policies and actions against us, because acknowledging them squarely will make it difficult for the votaries of friendship with Pakistan to advocate their soft line.

A complicating factor is the notion of “secularism” that inhibits a section of our society from frontally identifying and decrying the element of Islam that plays a noxious role in determining Pakistani thinking and attitudes towards us. This section seems to believe that a robust discourse against Pakistan and, in particular, condemning its use of religion to breed hostility against us, would be construed as being anti-Muslim. At the political level, it is believed that reaching out towards Pakistan and advocating friendship with it would be welcomed by India’s Muslim community and would yield electoral dividends. This is not being speculative as several political leaders, even belonging to the BJP, have expressed such a calculation. In addition, at the domestic level, the perennial problem of handling Kashmiri sentiments and containing unrest there induces us to positively engage with Pakistan.

The history of government-to-government dialogue between India and Pakistan is long and chequered and need not be recounted. An assessment of the Indo-Pak Composite Dialogue Process, which began in 1997, would be more pertinent for our purpose. This dialogue was interrupted by Pakistan’s incursion into Kargil in 1999 and India’s military mobilization in 2002 following the attack on the Indian parliament by Pakistani terrorists. It was resumed in 2004, but was interrupted again after the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai by Pakistani based terrorists with clear official connivance. It resumed again in March 2011 and has continued since, though our side has been reluctant to call it “composite” anymore, preferring to characterize it as “comprehensive” instead, in order to signal on our part a reconfiguration of our priorities with emphasis on trust-building, step-by-step progress and terrorism. It is instructive that the cause of the periodic disruption of the dialogue has been either Pakistan’s direct attacks against us as in Kargil or indirect ones through its terrorist proxies. This reveals the rather shallow commitment of Pakistan to the dialogue process, which it sees as a tactical option to pressure India to yield to its demands rather than a genuine desire to resolve India-Pakistan issues by abandoning the idea of territorial or sovereignty gains.

The official dialogue process has as agenda items Peace and Security, including CBMs, Jammu and Kashmir, Siachen, Wullar Barrage project/Tulbul Navigation Project, Terrorism and Drug Trafficking, Economic and Commercial Cooperation and Promotion of Friendly Exchanges in various fields. As regards Peace and Security, the cease-fire declared between the two countries in November 2003 is holding, though with periodic violations by Pakistan. The cease-fire has certainly helped to reduce tensions on the Line of Control (LOC) and between the two countries in general. The Pakistani side would argue that with this cease-fire a major Indian complaint that Pakistan was sending in infiltrators under cover of fire has been addressed. Without the cease-fire some CBMs at people-to-people level in the two parts of Kashmir would not have been possible, such as trade and bus services across the LOC. It is difficult to say to what extent this has contributed to softening negative sentiments in the Valley towards the rest of the nation, as movement of goods and people is limited and will remain so short of full normalization of India-Pakistan relations, because there is little organic ethnic connection between J&K and POK and no trade barriers between the Valley and the rest of India that results in production surpluses in the Valley not finding adequate markets.

If these steps are intended to appease the anti-Indian and pro-Pakistan elements in the Valley, then they will be seen as concessions extracted from India as a first step towards greater integration between the two parts of Kashmir that will, in their minds as well as in Pakistani calculations, inevitably lead to dilution of India’s full sovereignty over J&K. If, as official sources suggest, India is more keen on such exchanges and Pakistan more reticent, then the logic of India’s steps is not clear because we do not have the upper hand in the Kashmir problem. Our discourse that we want to make the border in J&K “soft”, when there is only a cease-fire line there at present and Pakistan has not given up its territorial claim, and the sense of alienation prevailing in the Valley expressed in slogans of “azadi” makes our own control of the state difficult, seems somewhat disconnected from reality.

The first nuclear CBM on Non-Attack on Nuclear Installations and Facilities was signed by India and Pakistan in December 1988, much before the framework of the “composite dialogue” was established. We continue to exchange up-dated documents of these sites. As an addendum to the 1999 Lahore Declaration it was agreed that the two countries will consult bilaterally on security concepts and nuclear doctrines to develop CBMs in the nuclear and conventional fields, besides notifying each other in advance of ballistic missile tests. In the technical talks that followed, it was agreed, inter alia, to set up a hotline between the two Foreign Secretaries, with each side also affirming its unilateral moratorium on nuclear test explosions unless extraordinary events jeopardizing the supreme interests of the two intervened.

These limited gains aside, Pakistan persists in its nuclear and missile competition with India. It has objected to the India-US nuclear deal, deliberately distorting its implications for India’s nuclear capability and gratuitously making it appear that it constitutes a threat to its own security by changing the strategic balance in the region- a point made in the joint resolution passed unanimously by the Pakistani parliament in April this year. Pakistan has sought a similar deal for itself, failing which it has held up FMCT discussions at Geneva on the ground that it needs to stock adequate fissile material to counter India’s ability to increase its stocks because of the NSG exception it has obtained. In the meantime, it has obtained two additional nuclear power plants from China in a joint response of the two countries to the India-US nuclear deal. According to international reports Pakistan is rapidly increasing its nuclear weapon holdings, including developmental work on a nuclear capable cruise missile. It is taking steps to introduce tactical nuclear weapons in the region as a response to India’s Cold Start doctrine, which it has hyped up to serve this purpose. Pakistan refuses to adhere to a no-first-use (NFU) declaration, which would an important nuclear CBM, on the ground of being weaker conventionally. It has, through a variety of statements, set out redlines which, if crossed, would trigger a nuclear response. India’s objective in nuclear CBMs would be to nudge Pakistan to adhere to a NFU declaration in order to raise its low threshold of nuclear weapon use. This is unlikely to happen, more so as Pakistan refuses to take into account India’s larger nuclear-related needs to counter China.

On Jammu and Kashmir, while levels of infiltration from Pakistan have gone down and terrorism has receded, it is as yet unclear whether this is essentially a tactical response because Pakistan is now facing a terrorist challenge from within, its armed forces are preoccupied with the situation on the western frontier, the end-game in Afghanistan is drawing nearer, tensions in US-Pakistan relations are rising and the depredations of the Pakistani Taliban continue. In this situation when the hands of the Pakistani military are already full, it would not make sense for them to activate the border with India, more so when they would not be able to count on US benevolence as before. A strategic turning of the page on J&K and the use of terrorism to advance political goals does not seem to have occurred as Pakistani authorities have not put the requisite curbs on jihadi groups, training camps in POK have not been wound up and some attempts at infiltration continue as stated by our Home Minister lately.

After some tactical adjustment of its position on J&K during President Musharraf’s time when he agreed to explore a solution to the issue outside the UN resolutions and self-determination- which in any case are politically defunct at the international level- Pakistan has reverted to its traditional position of seeking a resolution in accordance with UN resolutions, as reiterated by President Zardari in the UNGA in September this year. This provoked a sharp response from India and a counter reply from Pakistan, replaying the contentiousness of the past. These polemics have occurred inspite of the dialogue process. Earlier in April, Pakistan parliament’s joint resolution on Pakistan-US ties called, in a throwback to the past, for resolving the Kashmir issue in accordance with UN resolutions. The Pakistani leadership regurgitates time and again the worn out formula that Pakistan will continue to give moral, material and diplomatic support to the Kashmiris in their fight for freedom. Pakistan’s attachment to outdated resolutions is hardly in conformity with any new thinking on how to narrow outstanding differences.

Despite 13 rounds of talks between India and Pakistan, both before and after the establishment of the composite dialogue process, no progress on resolving the Siachen issue has been registered. Pakistan claims that the basis of an agreement was reached in 1989, which India denies. In any case, Pakistan embarked on the Kargil adventure to avenge Siachen, as admitted by General Musharraf. Following that Pakistan stepped up its terrorist onslaught against India, culminating in the unspeakable attack on Mumbai. Other factors have intervened such as China’s stepped-up presence in POK, not to mention China’s questioning of India’s sovereignty over J&K. All this should make India doubly chary about yielding its sovereignty over Siachen in any way in order to appease Pakistan. The 1949 ceasefire line, supplanted by the LOC in 1972, ends at Point NJ9842 on the map, after which it supposed to move north to the glaciers. This is not the place to discuss the details of the issue, except to say that by virtue of the accession to India of entire state of J&K, any part of J&K that was not in control of Pakistan in 1949 or 1972 remained Indian whether India occupied it physically or not. It is Pakistan that tried after 1984 to extend itself into Siachen. It was helped in its physical aggrandizement by the cartographic aggression against India in the 1960s and early 70s by the U.S. Defense Mapping Agency which arbitrarily extended the ceasefire line from NJ9842 eastwards to the Karakoram Pass, with other cartographers and atlases following suit. One can reasonably suspect some form of US-Pakistan-China complicity for geopolitical reasons in the context of the Cold war depicting the line thus. Unfortunately, the U.S. has made no attempt to rectify the maps.

India’s current position is that Pakistan must first agree to authentication of the Actual Ground Position Line along the Saltoro ridge, then delineation on the map and finally demarcation of the agreed border, before any demilitarization of Siachen by both sides is considered. General Kayani has characterized this as hardening of India’s position on Siachen. The clarification of our position by the Raksha Mantri in parliament would seem to set at rest fears that under pressure to produce some substantive results to enable the Prime Minster to visit Pakistan, India may make some concession on Siachen.

On Sir Creek the technical discussions have been completed. Pakistan is still not agreeing to the mid-channel boundary and insists on the right bank of the creek as the border. Prime Minister believes that an agreement on this dispute is “doable”, but Pakistan may like to link this to Siachen. The Wullar Barrage/Tulbul navigation Project is lying moribund since 1987 when Pakistan objected to it. The composite dialogue has made no progress on the issue. On the contrary, while this dialogue has been pursued to create more trust and understanding, Pakistan has widened differences on water issues by earlier objecting to the Baghlihar project and now to the Kishenganga project on which it has sought international arbitration. Pakistan has whipped up domestic passions on the water issue, raising the bogey that planned run of the river Indian projects on the western rivers permitted by the Indus Waters Treaty are violative of it and will divert waters belonging to Pakistan in a situation of reduced glacier flows and climate change concerns.

On the trade front forward movement has undoubtedly taken place. Whether this is on account of the dire economic situation Pakistan finds itself in or is a product of greater bilateral engagement can be debated. It would seem the Pakistani establishment believes that it can move economically with India because it can show greater gains for itself than in moving on the political front. Even if Pakistan’s readiness to trade more with India is a result of its economic stress, progress on this score is to be welcomed. Pakistan has moved from a positive list to a negative one, and is committed to reducing it progressively till December this year when it is committed to accord India MFN status. In the meantime, a new Integrated Check Post has been set up at Wagah, India has changed its legislation to allow Pakistani investment in India and is contemplating permitting Indian investments in Pakistan. It is addressing Pakistan’s non-tariff barrier concerns. Pakistan is, however, permitting only a limited number of goods to be traded across the land frontier, which means that trading by sea reduces the competitiveness of Indian products. Pakistan is not yet ready to allow transit facilities through its territory for Indian commerce with Afghanistan and Central Asia. It should be borne in mind though that large trade exchanges are no guarantee against political tensions as the case of US-China and China-Japan show. People to people exchanges between India and Pakistan is another area in which progress has occurred, as the latest agreement on liberalizing the visa regime shows, though Pakistan has not yet formalized it.

One has to distinguish the utility of Track 2 discussions in the case of countries that either have no diplomatic relations, and hence no Track 1 contacts, or are unable to engage with each other because of serious tensions and growing danger of conflict, and those where the governments are engaged in a regular dialogue with each other at various political and official levels. In the case of India and Pakistan, despite Kargil and terrorism- even on Mumbai’s scale- official channels of communication between the two governments have remained functional. To that extent the role and utility of Track 2 discussions in our case is limited. Pakistan has, of course, always wanted third parties to get involved in India-Pakistan issues on the assumption that its case would be supported by them, based on the conduct of these parties over decades. The West and its allies have always harboured fears about a conflict between India and Pakistan, more so after the two countries became nuclear. Many western governments have therefore encouraged think-tanks and foundations to bring together Indians and Pakistanis at Track 2 level to discuss their differences and recommend some solutions to vexed issues. The attempt is to influence government thinking and move parties away from established positions. The U.S., UK, Germany, Canada, the European Union, and Singapore are amongst the most active in financing such meetings. Retired senior diplomats, intelligence chiefs, former military chiefs, academicians and journalists are brought together in various capitals for discussions on terrorism, Jammu and Kashmir, Siachen, nuclear stability, economic ties, water -related issues, people to people contacts and Afghanistan etc. The agenda at its core is not very different from the Track 1 agenda, though the Tack 2 format allows a broader discussion on mutual threat perceptions, the internal dynamics in both countries and perspectives for the future etc. The involvement of former military officers is a way to fill the gap that exists in India-Pakistan relations created by the absence of a military to military dialogue at the official level.

The impact of these Track 2 contacts on official policies is not easy to determine. A priori, it should not be much as no breakthrough has been achieved on any of the core issues under discussion. In any case, in these Track 2 discussions, the Pakistani side tries to underplay the issue of terrorism, replaying the same arguments that the government uses, to the effect that Pakistan itself is a huge victim of terrorism. Hafiz Saeed is dismissed as of little consequence, or equivalence is made with Bal Thackeray. The problem of growing religious radicalism is underplayed, the water issue is raised strongly and appeals are made to the Indian side to resolve Siachen in order to boost the efforts of the peace lobby. Naturally, there is a strong pitch in favour of more people to people contacts and a liberalized visa regime. In sum, the Pakistani agenda is pushed while Indian concerns are side-stepped. The Indian interlocutors are generally more conciliatory and more ready to concede Pakistani viewpoints, partly because the participants chosen are so inclined in the first place, and partly because it is felt that the purpose of Track 2 is lost if they merely followed the official line. We have an obsession with out-of-the-box thinking. Our capacity for self-criticism and assumption of guilt is of course well known. We think our credibility improves if we take positions against the country’s official stance on important issues.

Beyond this, there is the larger question of the influence of Track 2 personalities within their own countries. In Pakistan, given the structure of power there, the grip of the armed forces on core foreign policy issues, the weakness of its democracy and the street power of radical religious groups, the more outspoken Track 2 persons cannot be credited with too much influence. The Indian participants may have good individual standing and access to real policy makers, but here too the culture of interaction between Track 1 and 2 is weak. It can be said that Track 1 in India does not feel that it is dependent on Track 2 for vital inputs for policy making. All in aIl, the contribution of Track 2 to policy making is limited, which does not mean that powerful foreign governments do not try to shape discourse and media projections through Track 2 efforts to advance their own agendas. A case in point is the US State Department supported blueprint for a solution to the Kashmir issue drafted by the New York based Kashmir Study Group led by Farooq Kathwari, which, with General Musharraf’s endorsement became the basis of back-channel talks between India and Pakistan.

This brings us to the contribution of the back-channel to India-Pakistan relations. Such channels might be useful in exchanging highly confidential messages at the topmost political levels with a view to exploring possibilities of new understandings or remove existing misunderstandings. One should make a difference between using back-channels for communicating messages and undertaking negotiations. The latter is a more risky proposition because bureaucratic processing of positions to be taken is not generally involved, which means that the system is kept out of the loop and individual thinking or that involving a very restricted circle gains ascendancy. While back-channels may give extra room for manouevre to politicians, the danger of committing errors also increases. One has also to address the question whether in a democracy it is right to use back-channels for negotiations on sensitive, complex issues affecting the nation.

In the case of India and Pakistan, the back-channel was used in Prime Minister Vajpayee’s time involving individuals of confidence, but outside the system, as it were. Under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the back-channel involved National Security Adviser J.N.Dixit on our side and President Musharraf’s aide Tariq Aziz. After Mr Dixit’s demise in 2005, Special Envoy Satindar Lambah took over, holding reportedly 15 rounds of discussions with his counterpart between 2005 and 2007 on resolving the Kashmir issue. President Musharraf’s proposals for J&K are known and so is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s vision of a framework for a solution. Broadly the discussions centred on a division of the state into various regions, demilitarization of sensitive locations, self-governance, and free movement across the LOC and some forms of joint management, if not sovereignty. Former Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri claims that an agreement was virtually reached but because President Musharraf got embroiled in domestic problems, our Prime Minister could not travel to Pakistan and the opportunity to seal a deal was lost. It would appear that a substantive and detailed agreement might indeed have been reached but did not fructify because of political developments in Pakistan. Since then Pakistan’s civilian government has categorically disavowed the progress made in Musharraf’s time, clarifying that proposals then made by Pakistan are no longer on the table. Although the then Prime Minister Gilani had appointed former Foreign Secretary Riaz Mohammed Khan as Tariq Aziz’s successor, the actual back-channel talks remain suspended. Pakistan has officially reverted to its traditional position of seeking a solution on the basis of UN resolutions. The Indian government too has also distanced itself from the backchannel. Just as well because we have eroded our own diplomatic hand in negotiations with Pakistan on key issues in our anxiety to engage Pakistan in a dialogue on the “front-channel”. The public could be legitimately worried at the possibility of India making controversial concessions to Pakistan on the back-channel. Prime Minister’s anxiety to visit Pakistan is not assuring in this regard.