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A breakthrough with India?
Under a new visa order, Pakistan risks ceasing to be a national security state
After more than a decade of resistance from the Pakistan Army, and a Pakistani mind nurtured by the textbook narrative of 'enemy at birth', Pakistan has signed a liberal visa protocol with India that will be transformational for the region, not so much for India as for Pakistan, if it is implemented. This transformation may not lead to the normalisation of Indo-Pak relations but will certainly lead to normalisation of Pakistan as a state.
The reaction was by and large positive because for the first time all rightwing and liberal communities of Pakistan are in favour of opening up trade and investment with India, knowing full well that without a liberal visa regime the opening will come to nothing. But there has been resistance, recorded by Channel Five TV among others, doggedly expressed by the informal boss of the Defence of Pakistan Council, Hafiz Saeed, JamaatIslami representatives, and some retired military officers laying out extravagant strategic scenarios of Pakistan's final subordination to the joint enemy of US and India through the new visa regime.
Since the military handles foreign policy vis-a-vis the two enemies, COAS General Kayani is to be praised for lifting his ban on liberal visa, triggering people-to-people contacts riding on expectations of economic benefit to Pakistan. If there was a South Asian Nobel Prize for Peace, he would deserve it, even though it would risk alienating a widespread community of non-state-actor proxy warriors whose own security hinges on a permanent state of war with India. Therefore expect more terrorist violence by elements originally midwifed by the Army.
Under the new visa order, Pakistan risks ceasing to be a national security state. When you say 'security' you are of course talking about the MI, the ISI and even IB. These are the agencies created to ensure that Pakistan is secure. Out of these, the ISI has always chosen to be high-profile and has revealed its inner working mostly through its loose-tongued officers.
ISI officers catch RAW agents, male and female, and regularly cope with MOSSAD agents that Pakistan is presumably crawling with. Today, Interior Minister Rehman Malik suffers from this paranoid pathology when he blames the depredation of the Taliban to their paymaster, India. He must feel a bit uneasy meeting Mr Krishna with a false smile pasted on his face.
Given the short sightedness and blunders of ex-chiefs, one can gauge the general mental level of the people who work for the ISI. Ex-prime ministers injected their IB and FIA (Rehman Malik was once in FIA) with mediocre officials and made the whole nation suffer in their 'homoeopathic' response to pressures from the GHQ.
There was a time when ex-ISI boss Hamid Gul used to say: if an elected government comes to the conclusion that normalisation of relations with India is in the national interest, it should put that in the election manifesto and see if the people elect the party after that. In the past, visa agreements okayed by the cabinet were sabotaged by the ISI through a unilateral and illegal doctoring of the final text.
National security is defined through strategy. Who formulates strategy in Pakistan? In India it is the civilian who does it; in Pakistan, it is the army. Normally it is the civilian intellectual who should think about a state's strategy. The army should accept a consensual civilian strategy and mould its own thinking according to it. Strategy should be dynamic, moulding itself to the changing national interest, not embedded in the concrete of permanent passions.
In fact, strategy should not be passionate because then it tends to transform the state into an entity that 'feels', starts crying when it is offended and guffaws when it is pleased. A strong nation will make a strategy with the objective of creating events and changing situations. A weak nation will have a strategy giving it the ability to make adjustments to changing situations. It is important for all states not to become internationally isolated, but it is particularly important for the weak ones not to become internationally isolated.
The Indo-Pak visa liberalisation is contained in the following concessions made by Pakistan; 1) citizens of either country, above the age of 65, will be given a 45-day, single entry visa on arrival at the Attari/Wagha check-post; 2) specific visas will be issued to businessmen depending on their financial standing, one-year, for five cities, for up to four entries; 3) pilgrim tourism will be allowed if pilgrims apply at least 45 days before the commencement of their intended tour and will be issued a non-extendable, single entry visa for 15 days; individual tourist visa is still embargoed; 4) people visiting relatives or friends in the other country will be granted a visa for five specified cities for a period not exceeding six months; 5) a longer duration visitor visa for up to two years with multiple entries, to citizens above the age of 65, spouses of a national of the other country and children below 12 years of age accompanying parents; 6) group tourist visas may be issued to those travelling in groups of not less than 10, and not more than 50, by approved tour operators.
Will 'clearance' be any different for 'group tourism'; will the Pakistani spooks visit you at home and scare the daylights out of you saying you are a agent of RAW - and now also of CIA - because you have visited the Indian visa officer? The additional risk will emanate from the Punjabi Taliban who want the war in Kashmir so intensely that they can kill you to deter the two states from moving to peace. More Mumbai attacks can reduce the latest visa agreement to nullity.
This liberal visa regime will still not allow you to get up and go to Wagha border in your car and eat lunch in Amritsar. Those who think Pakistan has bent backwards to allow the liberal visa at the risk of national security should also dwell a little on what kind of bending Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has done to sign this latest agreement which may yet be rejected by proxy warriors in a very unstable Pakistan where laws cannot be enforced.
India has chosen to set aside its preconditions relating to terrorism that it attached to any Pakistani initiative at normalisation. New Delhi has decided to forget the most recent falsehoods concocted by our Interior Minister and the various TV channels about how India was paying the Taliban to kill innocent Pakistanis and enabling the Baloch rebels with dollars to launch attacks in Balochistan.
There was a time not long ago when Mr Krishna used to come to Islamabad asking for proof which was never forthcoming. He still wants Pakistan to do something about the elements in Pakistan who carried out the Mumbai massacre of 2008 and has swallowed the high profile acceptance of some proxy warriors in Pakistan that the world accuses of crossborder terrorism.
It hardly matters that the two mainstream political parties - PPP and PMLN, who operate the bipartisan democracy of Pakistan - are in favour of visa liberalisation with India. If President Zardari is a pro-India and pro-US renegade, Nawaz Sharif is even more radically infected. He has been announcing - in the face of disagreement from his conservative vote-bank - that he would abolish visa with India after coming to power. He actually went further than anyone in Pakistan in consigning the perennial bilateral disputes to the post-normalisation era when he suggested to the Army Chief that Pakistan should withdraw from Siachen unilaterally.
Front-loading disputes favours crossborder terrorists and the Army and its myriad commentators. Disputes have been created by Pakistan to postpone normalisation; secondary 'non-core' disputes have been created by India to postpone resolution of core disputes. The status quo endangers a destabilised Pakistan. Pakistan must choose wisely. Wisdom uncomfortably means flexibility and compromise on Pakistan's only value: ghairat.
Under a new visa order, Pakistan risks ceasing to be a national security state
After more than a decade of resistance from the Pakistan Army, and a Pakistani mind nurtured by the textbook narrative of 'enemy at birth', Pakistan has signed a liberal visa protocol with India that will be transformational for the region, not so much for India as for Pakistan, if it is implemented. This transformation may not lead to the normalisation of Indo-Pak relations but will certainly lead to normalisation of Pakistan as a state.
The reaction was by and large positive because for the first time all rightwing and liberal communities of Pakistan are in favour of opening up trade and investment with India, knowing full well that without a liberal visa regime the opening will come to nothing. But there has been resistance, recorded by Channel Five TV among others, doggedly expressed by the informal boss of the Defence of Pakistan Council, Hafiz Saeed, JamaatIslami representatives, and some retired military officers laying out extravagant strategic scenarios of Pakistan's final subordination to the joint enemy of US and India through the new visa regime.
Since the military handles foreign policy vis-a-vis the two enemies, COAS General Kayani is to be praised for lifting his ban on liberal visa, triggering people-to-people contacts riding on expectations of economic benefit to Pakistan. If there was a South Asian Nobel Prize for Peace, he would deserve it, even though it would risk alienating a widespread community of non-state-actor proxy warriors whose own security hinges on a permanent state of war with India. Therefore expect more terrorist violence by elements originally midwifed by the Army.
Under the new visa order, Pakistan risks ceasing to be a national security state. When you say 'security' you are of course talking about the MI, the ISI and even IB. These are the agencies created to ensure that Pakistan is secure. Out of these, the ISI has always chosen to be high-profile and has revealed its inner working mostly through its loose-tongued officers.
ISI officers catch RAW agents, male and female, and regularly cope with MOSSAD agents that Pakistan is presumably crawling with. Today, Interior Minister Rehman Malik suffers from this paranoid pathology when he blames the depredation of the Taliban to their paymaster, India. He must feel a bit uneasy meeting Mr Krishna with a false smile pasted on his face.
Given the short sightedness and blunders of ex-chiefs, one can gauge the general mental level of the people who work for the ISI. Ex-prime ministers injected their IB and FIA (Rehman Malik was once in FIA) with mediocre officials and made the whole nation suffer in their 'homoeopathic' response to pressures from the GHQ.
There was a time when ex-ISI boss Hamid Gul used to say: if an elected government comes to the conclusion that normalisation of relations with India is in the national interest, it should put that in the election manifesto and see if the people elect the party after that. In the past, visa agreements okayed by the cabinet were sabotaged by the ISI through a unilateral and illegal doctoring of the final text.
National security is defined through strategy. Who formulates strategy in Pakistan? In India it is the civilian who does it; in Pakistan, it is the army. Normally it is the civilian intellectual who should think about a state's strategy. The army should accept a consensual civilian strategy and mould its own thinking according to it. Strategy should be dynamic, moulding itself to the changing national interest, not embedded in the concrete of permanent passions.
In fact, strategy should not be passionate because then it tends to transform the state into an entity that 'feels', starts crying when it is offended and guffaws when it is pleased. A strong nation will make a strategy with the objective of creating events and changing situations. A weak nation will have a strategy giving it the ability to make adjustments to changing situations. It is important for all states not to become internationally isolated, but it is particularly important for the weak ones not to become internationally isolated.
The Indo-Pak visa liberalisation is contained in the following concessions made by Pakistan; 1) citizens of either country, above the age of 65, will be given a 45-day, single entry visa on arrival at the Attari/Wagha check-post; 2) specific visas will be issued to businessmen depending on their financial standing, one-year, for five cities, for up to four entries; 3) pilgrim tourism will be allowed if pilgrims apply at least 45 days before the commencement of their intended tour and will be issued a non-extendable, single entry visa for 15 days; individual tourist visa is still embargoed; 4) people visiting relatives or friends in the other country will be granted a visa for five specified cities for a period not exceeding six months; 5) a longer duration visitor visa for up to two years with multiple entries, to citizens above the age of 65, spouses of a national of the other country and children below 12 years of age accompanying parents; 6) group tourist visas may be issued to those travelling in groups of not less than 10, and not more than 50, by approved tour operators.
Will 'clearance' be any different for 'group tourism'; will the Pakistani spooks visit you at home and scare the daylights out of you saying you are a agent of RAW - and now also of CIA - because you have visited the Indian visa officer? The additional risk will emanate from the Punjabi Taliban who want the war in Kashmir so intensely that they can kill you to deter the two states from moving to peace. More Mumbai attacks can reduce the latest visa agreement to nullity.
This liberal visa regime will still not allow you to get up and go to Wagha border in your car and eat lunch in Amritsar. Those who think Pakistan has bent backwards to allow the liberal visa at the risk of national security should also dwell a little on what kind of bending Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has done to sign this latest agreement which may yet be rejected by proxy warriors in a very unstable Pakistan where laws cannot be enforced.
India has chosen to set aside its preconditions relating to terrorism that it attached to any Pakistani initiative at normalisation. New Delhi has decided to forget the most recent falsehoods concocted by our Interior Minister and the various TV channels about how India was paying the Taliban to kill innocent Pakistanis and enabling the Baloch rebels with dollars to launch attacks in Balochistan.
There was a time not long ago when Mr Krishna used to come to Islamabad asking for proof which was never forthcoming. He still wants Pakistan to do something about the elements in Pakistan who carried out the Mumbai massacre of 2008 and has swallowed the high profile acceptance of some proxy warriors in Pakistan that the world accuses of crossborder terrorism.
It hardly matters that the two mainstream political parties - PPP and PMLN, who operate the bipartisan democracy of Pakistan - are in favour of visa liberalisation with India. If President Zardari is a pro-India and pro-US renegade, Nawaz Sharif is even more radically infected. He has been announcing - in the face of disagreement from his conservative vote-bank - that he would abolish visa with India after coming to power. He actually went further than anyone in Pakistan in consigning the perennial bilateral disputes to the post-normalisation era when he suggested to the Army Chief that Pakistan should withdraw from Siachen unilaterally.
Front-loading disputes favours crossborder terrorists and the Army and its myriad commentators. Disputes have been created by Pakistan to postpone normalisation; secondary 'non-core' disputes have been created by India to postpone resolution of core disputes. The status quo endangers a destabilised Pakistan. Pakistan must choose wisely. Wisdom uncomfortably means flexibility and compromise on Pakistan's only value: ghairat.
Will he be allowed to stay in the Taj? He would want to see Kasab's hanging, no? 
