Indo-Pak policy contradictions
While the media is shouting against the US for slandering Pakistan after reports of President Bushs complaint about ISI complicity in Taliban attacks inside Afghanistan, the information minister, Sherry Rehman, is reported to have said in Islamabad the other day that some old elements of the ISI could be involved. But Pakistan is not sitting idle. After the Washington plaints, Islamabad has supplied proof of Indian involvement in terrorism inside Pakistan. This has prompted India to report that SMS messages received from Pakistan predict more blasts in Kerala after Karnataka and Gujarat.
Significantly, however, Pakistans foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, struck a different note when he said in Colombo on Friday that the only way to go for India and Pakistan is to increase trade and cultural contacts and thus pull down the Berlin Wall that stands between the two. But even as he said this, Pakistan was offering a defence pact to Sri Lanka, knowing full well that defence pacts in South Asia are a red rag inviting trouble. The question in the region will be: defence against whom? Predictably, much hostile writing will be undertaken in the India media now to reinforce the hawks who wish to keep the Indo-Pak rivalry on the boil.
We cant help coming to the conclusion that the two states are communicating at the level of clandestine hostile acts at a time when the PPP government is trying to minimise its trouble spots inside and outside the country. Thus the world is gradually waking up to the possibility of another Indo-Pak war, this time transplanted into Afghanistan and the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Indeed, it is actually unfolding behind the scenes as the NATO-ISAF forces take on the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the foreground. Karl Inderfurth, former US assistant secretary of state for South Asia from 1997-2001, and Wendy Chamberlin, former US ambassador to Pakistan from 2001-2002, wrote jointly last month to express their concern over this development: India will claim it has legitimate interests in Afghanistan and that it is a major donor in the international effort to rebuild that country. Pakistan will charge that India is running operations out of its many consulates in Afghanistan to stir trouble across the border, especially to fan the flames of the anti-Islamabad insurgency in Balochistan. Pakistan sees itself as potentially caught in a vice between its western and eastern neighbours. But these long-standing concerns are now being trumped by a new reality, the need for India and Pakistan to look beyond their traditional rivalries and agree on a joint strategy to confront the extremists operating along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
The problem here is that we continue to look at the situation in military terms. If India has created a pincers situation against Pakistan by going into Afghanistan, we think we can answer the move by creating another pincers against India in Sri Lanka whose ethnic war involves the Indian state Tamilnadu and embarrasses India. But since New Delhi is quite paranoid about developments in its periphery it might go back to its doctrine of the Cold War when it saw its neighbours as collaborators of an oceanic power (read the US) trying to destabilise India. In the event, this would further complicate the security situation in the region with both India and Pakistan trying to prove that they can carry on with their asymmetrical warfare while holding on to nuclear weapons.
The media adds fuel to the fire and saps the confidence of those in Islamabad who favour the normalisation approach to India. The latest badge of dishonour is the final stage of the conclusion of a nuclear treaty between the US and India. Pakistani TV anchors and their discussants find that honour must precede state interest which is always attached to the national economy and that sacrifice should be made of the people of Pakistan by telling the US that Pakistan is not interested in playing the game of being an ally any more. But the truth is that most political observers in Pakistan have become knee-jerk and non-cerebral, giving Pakistans enemy a handle through what is called compellance: get the enemy to do what it wants to do for self-destruction.
The discourse between Pakistan and India must shift from the military to the civilian mode. The two prime ministers meeting in Colombo must forge a new way of looking at the current situation. Mr Manmohan Singh should not allow a policy of greater trade and cultural contacts to be derailed. Mr Yousaf Raza Gilani, despite all the criticism levelled at him after his US visit, must continue his reconciliation agenda and avoid using the language of challenge. We are standing on the threshold of a paradigm shift in Indo-Pak relations. We should realise that that the internal threat facing Pakistan is trying to take it in a direction from where there might be no return. *
Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan
