PAKISTAN

Five years on: Peace and security must go together as India deals with many Pakistans
Five years after a squad of 10 terrorists from Pakistan attacked the city of Mumbai and its people, ties between New Delhi and Islamabad continue to have enormous scope for improvement. The 26/11 terror strike was one of the darkest chapters in India-Pakistan relationsand it is incumbent on New Delhi to insist on bringing the Pakistani perpetrators to justice. However, the Indian leadership must also recognise that Pakistan is not a monolith. There are in fact many Pakistans, with several constituencies willing to pursue a path of peace and cooperation with India. 

If Pakistan's jihadis in alliance with elements in the deep state are India's biggest security challenge, New Delhi ought to cultivate and enhance ties with Pakistani businessmen, civil society and even the military. True, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may have limited capacity to rein in anti-India elements. But boosting people-to-people and cultural ties can offset this, creating significant stakeholders in peace between the two countries. In this context, opening reciprocal consulates in Mumbai and Karachi and Pakistan granting India most favoured nation status for trade will generate much mutual goodwill and economic benefits alike. 

Having said that, peace and security are not mutually exclusive. India's disparate security and intelligence agencies, which often act at cross-purposes, need to get their act together. November 26, 2008, was a day of unprecedented shock and suffering, but terrorist strikes before and after have caught security agencies unprepared. How can such tragedies be avoided? First and foremost, the government must establish a national commission, comprising experts from many fields, with a sweeping mandate to investigate and acknowledge the failures of the past before making no-nonsense recommendations that would shape the foundations of a professional and effective security network. 

With coordination as the buzzword, the new security framework involving a revampedIntelligence Bureau and Research and Analysis Wing must evolve plans and readjust their policies and practices to take on, deter or defeat cross-border and home-grown terrorism - with their brief being to expect the unexpected. Along with preventive measures, contingency plans must be drawn up in advance on countermeasures to be undertaken, should another 26/11-like cross-border attack succeed. Retaliatory strikes on terror assets should be almost automatic, along with clear diplomatic communication that such strikes are not an attack on Pakistan but only on non-state actors which, by its own admission, it is unable to control.

Pak. Opposition to challenge Bill

While the government managed to get the Protection of Pakistan (Amendment) Bill passed late Monday night in the National Assembly, the Opposition parties which tore up the Bill in the House are determined to take the fight to the Supreme Court.

The controversial law which started off as an ordinance was referred to the Standing Committee on Interior and Narcotics which debated the Bill and approved it while proposing some amendments. The Bill is expected to give more powers to the security forces to tackle terrorism and powers to search and arrest apart from preventive detention of up to 90 days and excluding the public from proceedings of the special court.

The ordinance which was notified in January was not approved by the Senate and the Bill too is going to run into difficulties in the Upper House. The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf announced on Tuesday that it would challenge the Bill in the Supreme Court and that it had the support of other parties like the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) had voiced alarm at the promulgation of Protection of Pakistan (Amendment) Ordinance 2014 in January and said the law violated constitutionally guaranteed rights and legitimised illegalities.

In a statement, the HRCP said: “There are far too many things in the law that rights-respecting individuals would find difficult to stomach. The main concerns include giving the authorities the power to withhold information regarding the location of any detainee, or grounds for such detention; detention of a person in internment centre instead of ordinary jails; creating new classifications of suspects such as “enemy alien” or “combatant enemy”; extending the preventive detention period for any suspect; and legitimising illegal detention and enforced disappearance through giving retrospective effect to the law.

The HRCP said when the apex court had declared prolonged and unannounced detention by security forces illegal and called for legislation, ordinances like these seemed to endorse such long periods of detentions. Citing exceptional circumstances to justify the derogation of rights and for delegation of exceptional powers to the law enforcers is particularly worrisome in the context of enforced disappearances in Pakistan, the Commission said. The ordinance will only compound the saga of enforced disappearance in Pakistan and strengthen impunity.

Dancing with the nuclear djinn

He saw the signs of the approaching doomsday all around him: in moral degradation, in casual sex, in the rise of western power, in space travel, in our high-tech age. God, wrote Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons guru Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood in Mechanics of the Doomsday... , had not privileged man to know when it would come, but “the promised Hour is not a far off event now.” It would come as a “great blast,” perhaps “initiated by some catastrophic man-made devices, such as sudden detonation of a large number of nuclear bombs.”

Long mocked by his colleagues for his crazed beliefs — the physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy records him as saying, “djinns, being fiery creatures, ought to be tapped as a free source of energy” — and condemned to obscurity after his arrest on charges of aiding the Taliban, Mr. Mahmood may yet be remembered as a prophet.

The doctrine debate

India’s next government will, without dispute, find itself dancing with the nuclear djinn Mr. Mahmood helped unleash. In its election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party has promised to “study in detail India’s nuclear doctrine, and revise and update it to make it relevant to [the] challenges of current times.” Mr. Seshadri Chari, a member of the group that formulated this section of the party’s manifesto said: “why should we tie our hands into accepting a global no-first-use policy, as has been proposed by the Prime Minister recently?”

The debate will come in dangerous times. Pakistan has been growing its arsenal low-yield plutonium nuclear weapons, also called tactical or theatre nuclear weapons. Estimates suggest some 10-12 new nuclear warheads are being added to the country’s 90-110 strong arsenal, and new reactors going critical at Khushab will likely boost that number even further. New Delhi must respond — but the seeds of a nuclear apocalypse could sprout if it gets that response wrong.

Mr. Chari’s grasp of fact doesn’t give much reason to hope for much else: India’s no-first-use commitment was made by a government his party led, not Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In 1998, battling to contain the international fallout from the Pokhran II nuclear tests, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee promised Parliament that “India would not be the first to use nuclear weapons.” Later, in August 1999, the National Security Advisory Board’s draft nuclear doctrine stated that India would only “retaliate with sufficient nuclear weapons to inflict destruction and punishment that the aggressor will find unacceptable if nuclear weapons are used against India and its forces.”

The no-first-use posture, scholar Ashley Tellis has noted in his magisterial book, India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture , was founded on a pragmatic judgment of India’s strategic circumstances. Even if India needed to fight shallow cross-border wars, Dr. Tellis argued, its “nominal military superiority over Pakistan and its local military superiority, allow such operations to be conducted by conventional means alone.”

For more than a decade-and-a-half, the commitment has held, but there have been signs it is fraying at the edges. In 2003, India announced it reserved the right to deliver a nuclear-weapons response to a chemical or biological attack, a significant caveat to the no-first-use promise. Then, in a speech delivered at the National Defence College, National Security Adviser, Shivshankar Menon, appeared to add a caveat to India’s nuclear doctrine, saying in passing that it committed to “no first use against non-nuclear weapon states.” This was interpreted by some observers to mean India might consider first strikes against nuclear-weapons states.

Dr. Singh reiterated Mr. Vajpayee’s formulation early this month — but there is at least some reason to believe the caveats reflect ongoing debates at the highest levels of the strategic community.

From its genesis, questions have hung over India’s no-first-use commitment. How would India react to credible intelligence that an imminent Pakistani first-strike against its own nuclear arsenal, would degrade its ability to retaliate? How might India deal with an attack that came from an insurgent group operating from within Pakistani territory, which seized control of a nuclear weapon? In addition, as the scholar Vipin Narang has argued, India has not committed against using its superior air power against Pakistani missile launchers armed with nuclear warheads — confronting its western adversary in a “use-it-or-lose-it” dilemma.

Bharat Karnad, a strategic affairs commentator who will likely influence a future BJP-led government’s nuclear thinking, thus described no-first-use as something of a pious fiction: “one of those restrictions which countries are willing to abide by except in war.”

Dangerous future

This much, we do know: the next government, whoever forms it, will command a more lethal nuclear arsenal than ever before. Hans Kristensen and Robert Norris have noted that while India’s nuclear arsenal, at some 80-100 warheads, is smaller than that of Pakistan, it is set to expand. India is introducing new missiles and is inducting almost-impossible-to-target nuclear-powered submarines. The experts estimate that India already has a weapons-grade plutonium stockpile of 520 kilograms, enough for 100-130 warheads, but will need more from the prototype fast-breeder reactor at Kalpakkam to meet the needs of its growing arsenal.

India’s strategic establishment seems certain it needs these weapons — but remains less than clear on just how and under what circumstances they might be used.

The threat from the east is relatively predictable. For years now, India has periodically suffered from dragon-under-the-bed nightmares — the prospect that a more aggressively nationalist China, whose conventional forces are expanding and modernising dramatically, could initiate a war to settle the two countries’ unresolved conflicts. China is bound by a no-first-use pledge, but some experts fear India’s conventional forces might be overwhelmed. It is improbable, though, that these losses would pose an existential threat to India.

“Ironically,” Dr. Narang has written, “China doubts India’s no-first-use pledge for the same reasons the United States doubts China’s: that in a crisis, no rhetorical pledge physically prevents the state from using nuclear weapons first.” For India’s nuclear strategists, this is a good thing: China’s fears should deter it from a large-scale war.

The TNW challenge

From the east, though, the threat is more complex. In the wake of the 2001-2002 India-Pakistan crisis, the Indian Army began acquiring the resources to fight limited conflicts at short notice — in essence, wars of punishment for acts of terrorism. Pakistan responded by growing its Tactical Nuclear Weapons (TNW) arsenal, for use against advancing Indian formations inside its own territory. Last year, eminent diplomat Shyam Saran lucidly explained the thinking. Pakistan hopes “to dissuade India from contemplating conventional punitive retaliation to sub-conventional but highly destructive and disruptive cross-border terrorist strikes.”

From Cold War experience, Pakistan likely knows its nuclear-weapons strategy makes no sense. In 1955, historian David Smith has recorded, a NATO exercise code-named Carte Blanche concluded that a war using TNWs would leave two million dead in the north German plains. Exercise Sagebrush later concluded that all participating military formations would also end up being annihilated. Exercise Oregon Trail, conducted from 1963-1965, showed that when forces concentrated to fight conventionally, they “offered lucrative nuclear targets” — but if they “dispersed to avoid nuclear strikes, the units could be defeated by conventional tactics.”

Pakistan’s generals know expert studies, like that of A.H. Nayyar and Zia Mian, demonstrate that TNWs would be near-useless in stopping an Indian armoured thrust into Pakistan. The generals know that TNWs have to be dispersed, vastly increasing the risks of miscalculation by local commanders, accidental use, or even theft. Ejaz Haider, a Pakistani strategic commentator, has bluntly stated that the confused state of the Pakistan’s TNW doctrine “essentially means we don’t know what the hell to do with them.”

India doesn’t either. Purely symbolic gestures like revoking the no-first-use policy will yield no dividends, though. If Pakistan is desperate enough to use TNWs, thus inviting an Indian second strike, it certainly won’t be deterred by a threat to unleash Armageddon first. Backing down on no-first-use will, moreover, deny India the fruits of being seen as a responsible nuclear-weapons state, one of the reasons Mr. Vajpayee made his call in the first place.

It isn’t clear, though, that reason will prevail: Mr. Mahmood, after all, isn’t the only crazed South Asian in shouting distance of a nuclear bomb. In 1999, as war raged in Kargil, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh journal organiser had these words for Mr. Vajpayee: “Arise, Atal Behari! Who knows if fate has destined you to be the author of the final chapter of this long story. For what have we manufactured bombs? For what have we exercised the nuclear option?”

It is critical that voices like these be nowhere near the ears of the leaders whose hands hover over our nuclear button.

Why India must stay the nuclear hand

Revising India’s no-first-use posture, as the BJP is purportedly considering, would be unnecessary and dangerous.

The BJP’s election manifesto pledged to “revise and update” India’s nuclear doctrine. Initial reports suggested that rather than just a routine update, a future BJP government might revisit and abandon India’s pledge not to be the first party to use nuclear weapons in a crisis or conflict, otherwise known as a No First Use (NFU) pledge.

The NFU pledge is a cornerstone of India’s nuclear doctrine, formally adopted by the BJP-led NDA government in January 2003. While pledging NFU, and to not threaten the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states (a so-called negative security assurance), the doctrine promises massive retaliation if weapons of mass destruction are used against India or its armed forces. India’s massive retaliation doctrine is strictly designed to deter a nuclear attack. The goal, if crafted properly and if deterrence is successful, is to never to have to fire a nuclear weapon.

In potentially revisiting India’s NFU pledge, the 2014 BJP would be questioning a fundamental tenet of the 2003 BJP’s nuclear doctrine, formulated in large part by the then-national security advisor, Brajesh Mishra. The doctrine has been accepted by successor UPA governments, and the NFU pledge publicly reaffirmed by NSA Shivshankar Menon. It is unclear whether reversing NFU is seriously being considered by the BJP, or whether these are just rumours. Abandoning the NFU pillar of the nuclear doctrine would be a terrible idea for India’s national security. It would potentially transform India’s deterrence-only nuclear doctrine to one of nuclear warfighting, with serious ramifications for Indian security.

First, abandoning NFU is strategically unnecessary for India. Threatening the first use of nuclear weapons is useful for one primary purpose: to deter a conventionally superior adversary, where the threat of using nuclear weapons against conventional forces is necessary to offset the adversary’s conventional advantage over passable terrains.

This is really the only scenario that requires a state to contemplate using nuclear weapons first. But India has conventional superiority against Pakistan, and this gap will only grow in the future as India incorporates more — and more advanced — platforms into its armed forces. India does not need the threat of nuclear weapons — or nuclear warfighting — to deter Pakistani conventional forces from attacking India. India need only deter nuclear use by Pakistan, for which its present assured retaliation doctrine is a powerful and sufficient deterrent.

Some advocates of abandoning NFU point to the fact that Pakistan threatens to use nuclear weapons first against India (precisely because of India’s conventional superiority) and is developing tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons such as the Nasr system to deter Indian army operations across the international border. Therefore, according to former foreign secretary Lalit Mansingh, “There is a feeling within nuclear experts that because of this changed scenario, we need to rethink our response as well.” But since India already reserves the right to retaliate against any nuclear use — whether from Nasr or Shaheen missiles — these developments do not alter the basic deterrent logic or aim of India’s retaliatory doctrine.

How will reversing NFU improve India’s ability to respond to Pakistani development of battlefield nuclear weapons? Against China, India has achieved a greater conventional balance and, in any case, the first use of nuclear weapons against Chinese ground forces in the likely terrain of any conflict renders them futile as a practical deterrent.

Second, not only is abandoning NFU unnecessary, it would make any militarised crisis with Pakistan very dangerous for India. Pakistan does not have a nuclear force guaranteed to survive a first strike from India. This makes the threat of first-use by India much more alarming to Pakistan. In a crisis, absent a formal NFU assurance, Pakistan would have reasons to fear a disarming Indian first strike and begin to calculate that it is in a “use them or lose them” situation, where it is better off striking first before India can wipe out its nuclear forces.

In a mutual first-use world where at least one side worries about the survivability of its forces (as Pakistan might), the overriding incentive by both sides is to “go first”, before the adversary, so that one’s nuclear weapons are not eliminated by an opponent’s first strike. India’s formal NFU pledge is therefore a stabilising firebreak that stays both Pakistan’s and India’s nuclear hands in a crisis.

Third, formally abandoning NFU would carry significant costs and set a dangerous precedent in the second nuclear age in which the world presently finds itself. Having a credible first-use doctrine involves costly development and intensive management procedures for both strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, and would carry risks of inadvertent and unauthorised nuclear use. India has been accepted by the world (and formally by the Nuclear Suppliers Group) as a legitimate and responsible nuclear power. Reversing NFU could provocatively undermine the rightful legitimacy that the NDA and successive UPA governments achieved.

One could retort that the formal NFU pledge is just words — words that Pakistan and China may not even believe. But these words signal intent, and declaratory nuclear doctrine is an important and valuable window into a nation’s intentions on when and under what conditions it might be thinking the unthinkable.

For example, it is certainly worth re-evaluating whether “massive retaliation” is an appropriate doctrine, as opposed to simply “assured” or “certain” retaliation, which is both more credible and better achieves India’s deterrent objectives.

India’s security situation is such that its nuclear forces are primarily required to deter nuclear use and coercion against it, demanding only a doctrine of credible and assured retaliation — this is difficult enough to manage, and aligning India’s nuclear posture with that doctrine is something that both the NDA and UPA governments have admirably worked hard to achieve.

The formulators of India’s doctrine in the first NDA governments — K. Subrahmanyam and Brajesh Mishra for example — understood this and made NFU a pillar of India’s nuclear posture. Those who may be thinking of revising the NFU pledge should remember why they did so, and recognise that no changes in the geostrategic landscape necessitate abandoning NFU.

One hopes that lucid strategic sense prevails and that future governments focus on further enhancing the credibility and reliability of India’s retaliatory deterrent nuclear doctrine and posture, rather than dangerously trying to abandon it.

What Pakistan wants from India

Pakistanis have been watching the election scene in India with considerable trepidation. The intellectual elite and some sections of the media are aware that détente has progressed better whenever strong leadership has existed in both countries. However, an almost visceral dislike of Narendra Modi seems to blur perspectives, not only on account of the 2002 Gujarat riots but also in expectation of a turn towards ultra-nationalism, accompanied by chest-thumping, anti-Pakistani belligerence and a revival of Hindutva politics.

Observing that the umbrella secular vote, normally spearheaded by the Congress, has come under severe strain mainly because of anti-incumbency, analysts question whether there will be a new articulation of ‘post-Nehruvian centrism,’ leading to an embrace of the unfettered market model of ‘Modinomics.’ Doubts have been raised over whether this will lead to exclusivism or provide a mask for religious supremacism. While acknowledging the impact of Indian Muslims as an aspirational community in at least 110 out of 543 Lok Sabha seats, they are depicted as fragilely trying to negotiate space between victimhood and tokenism, without benefitting adequately from opportunities for education, employment or material security.

What India needs to understand

Pakistanis hope that decision-makers in the new Indian government would try to understand that Pakistan has changed in the last five years. As was observable in the 2013 election campaign, its parliamentary mainstream no longer claims to think obsessively about India. Democrats across the political spectrum in Pakistan want better regional co-operation in future, premised on mutually beneficial terms of trade, though they believe trade alone will not alter the baggage of the past.

There is a need to correctly assess the nuances of political transitions underway in Pakistan. These include the rise of a ‘nativised,’ right-of-centre bourgeoisie that occupies urban space, the emergence of newly empowered religio-political groups and a changing balance of power between institutions of state.

Pervez Musharraf’s indictment reveals that the military’s undisputed dominance may be eroding. Even its interference in the trade policy has to be seen in this light. From being a hegemon, the military may have become a veto player, still capable of influencing major decisions with regard to crucial issues of security and foreign policy. This is a major shift in Pakistan’s politics but transition to complete civilian supremacy may take a while.

An erstwhile partner of military dictators, Pakistan’s judiciary has asserted an independent stance for a while now, not hesitating to drag ubiquitous ‘agencies’ of state to court to explain disappearance of missing persons. Sadly, this has not been accompanied by alacrity to bring radical Islamic militants, including the seven arrested terrorists implicated in the Mumbai attacks of November, 2008, to book. Though this causes enough embarrassment or even introspection in the establishment, public opinion in Pakistan finds it difficult to counter frequent or repeated criticism from India on this account. Neither do Pakistani politicians and the media react well to macho, high-octane rhetoric from India, either in response to domestic posturing in Pakistan on Kashmir or international border incidents.

While it would be naïve to expect too much to change too quickly, election watchers in Pakistan realise that much would depend on the extent of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s mandate and who its allies would be in an expected coalition government. They assess, however, that regional coalition partners may not substantially impact the formulation of policies by the new government. There is a view, though, that compulsions of a rightist political lineage may force a BJP government to reverse ongoing peace initiatives or escalate tensions in Kashmir.

How then should relationships be forged with the new dispensation? How would Pakistan react to a possible policy of complete neglect — benign or otherwise? No easy answers appear evident at this stage. The way forward may have to be found through a mix of middle-of-the-road approaches accommodating reasonable expectations with respect to long-pending or contentious bilateral issues. Gradual visa relaxations for selected categories, easing of barter lists in cross-border trade, and opening up of more village-level meeting points and routes as between Kargil and Skardu are ways forward. While Mr. Modi’s stated inflexibility on Sir Creek is noted, retired Pakistani defence services personnel on Track II dialogues point to recent flexibility, through new joint surveys of the disputed land border, re-location of missing boundary pillars and exchange of non-papers including maps of old maritime boundary claims. These have brought considerable clarity in respective positions. India still relies on the median line principle, especially with respect to the base point from where the maritime boundary would be delineated. Give and take is possible to resolve this ‘low hanging’ dispute if political will can be built up, avoiding media hype to interpret this as a win or loss for one side or the other.

For some time now, especially after the Gyari avalanche in April 2012, Pakistan has been quite keen to resolve the Siachen dispute. This again signals a new flexibility in erstwhile military positions through Track II mediatory contacts, for possible agreement to a way forward. However, since then, the Indian position has hardened with strategists holding that control of the Siachen/Saltoro heights are not only technologically affordable now but tactically and strategically a desirable objective in the context of evolving threats from China.

State sponsorship of terror

Peace-loving Pakistanis acknowledge that any new subversive attacks from across the border on the Mumbai 26/11 model could elicit a much more drastic reaction from a BJP government. They know these are usually undertaken by terrorist outfits — support to whom the Pakistani military may not be ready to give up just yet, despite more serious domestic threats which it faces from the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. There is grudging awareness that while these outfits can be curbed by the Army/Inter-Services Intelligence, they do enjoy certain clout in civil society. It may take more for civil society pressures to work from within to promote introspection and forsake use of such asymmetric options by the military.

If this does not happen, security mechanisms and the counter-terror grid in India would have to be honed further. Personal security threats to VIPs would continue. There can be no scope for complacency. Without lowering its guard on security in the homeland, the Indian establishment may have to think long and hard about evolving better covert responses to terror modules in a calibrated manner.

An opportunity to seal a deal with Pakistan

Prime Minister Narendra Modi thinks out of the box. He showed this in inviting his counterparts from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) to his swearing-in. In his meetings with them, however, going by what was reported, he toed the standard line, which, on issues new to him, was both understandable and prudent. As he moves forward, though, he should review received wisdom on our neighbours, above all on Pakistan.

If the Foreign Secretaries meet only to talk about talks, they will simply mark time. We want satisfaction on terrorism before we talk on other issues, though Nawaz Sharif has made clear that Pakistan wants a dialogue that is comprehensive, even if not “composite”. There is a huge irony in this, because in the sincerest form of flattery, Pakistan has embraced our traditional position and we have appropriated theirs. For over two decades after 1971, we urged Pakistan to discuss all issues with us, while it refused without satisfaction on Kashmir. We argued that it was absurd to reduce relations between neighbours to a single issue, no matter how important, and took it as a triumph when Pakistan eventually agreed to what we dubbed the “composite dialogue”. Bizarrely, we have now disowned what we conceived and Pakistan has adopted the foundling, but as we reduce ourselves to a single issue — terrorism — we give Pakistan the excuse to revert to its own one-child policy — Kashmir.

Settlement on Kashmir

For over a decade now, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has used terrorism against India for two entirely different purposes.

The first is to derail any initiative that might lead to the peace that they dread; the attack on our Embassy in Kabul in 2008, on Mumbai later that year, on the Consulate in Herat before Mr. Sharif flew in for the inauguration, were all launched to make it hard for any Indian government to reach out to Pakistan.

The second is to derail India’s growth by targeting the cities and centres that fuel it because an economically strong India would be militarily more powerful, increasing the asymmetry with Pakistan.

Therefore, a settlement of Kashmir will not necessarily mean the end of terrorism. In fact, if Mr. Modi takes India back to pre-2009 rates of growth, terror, driven by envy, will return unless Pakistan’s civilian government gets and is given the strength to stop it. Nothing will boost its standing more than an honourable settlement on Kashmir. Such a settlement would bring the prolonged misery of the Kashmiris to an end, and is therefore as much in our interest. Assuming that it will take a couple of years for our growth to resume, there is a window of opportunity now to move forward. It is also a window that might close, for other reasons, around the same time.

From later this year, as the U.S. abandons Afghanistan, the Pakistan Army will use all its energies to get its proxies into Kabul. Over the next two years, hordes of young Pakistanis will be sent off to fight ajihad there. It is unlikely that the regime in Kabul can hold out after the last U.S. troops leave in 2016. From 2016, battle-hardened Pakistani jihadi s will be in surplus to requirements in Afghanistan, and will start returning home, where neither the government nor the Army will want them, fearing that they will be the next targets. Their ISI handlers will have every incentive to send them eastwards, as they did after the Taliban takeover in the 1990s. Terrorism from Pakistan will spurt again, with the potential to disrupt relations, unless the two governments already have in place understandings that will give the government in Islamabad every incentive, and the leverage, to rein the ISI in.

We should therefore try to resolve problems now, starting with Kashmir, on which there is nothing left to negotiate. Over several years, very skilful interlocutors in the back channel have negotiated an agreement that represents the maximum that either country can concede.

Both Prime Ministers have inherited a draft which their opponents cannot object to or undermine. In Pakistan, Mr. Sharif can point out that the draft was negotiated entirely under the supervision of General Musharraf; the Corps Commanders and General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, then DG (ISI), were briefed on the broad outlines and concurred. Since the Pakistan Army claims to be the custodian of Pakistan’s security, this cannot be an agreement that in any way harms its interests.

Mr. Modi has the same safety net. This is a draft negotiated entirely by the last regime. Sanjaya Baru writes in his book that on the nuclear agreement, Dr .Manmohan Singh told former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee that he had simply completed what his predecessor had started. On Kashmir, Mr. Modi can say as much to Dr. Singh. The Congress can hardly disown its own Prime Minister’s handiwork, while other parties have no reason to be disruptive. A historic agreement can and should be sealed.

The Prime Minister will be counselled that it is best to move slowly, plucking the low-hanging fruit first. This is unwise. Gradualism does not work with Pakistan, because those who fear peace stymie it. Every tentative step will have a hurdle placed before it, usually of bodies killed by terrorists, and we will stop. The only way to defeat this easy subversion is to clear away the problems between us in one fell swoop. This means that we should settle Siachen and Sir Creek as well.

On both, settlements are feasible, and in our interest. On Siachen, our army now claims a strategic advantage in staying on the Saltoro Ridge, since it is a salient between Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) and the Shaksgam Valley, which Pakistan ceded to China.

In this day and age, there are enough means to monitor the large-scale movement of troops over difficult terrain which would be essential if Pakistan tried to reoccupy the glacier or the ridge.

Human, economic benefits

Sir Creek is even more easily settled, since we now have agreed maps, jointly drawn up. Political decisions are needed on the concessions each side is prepared to make on the final alignment, which will in turn determine the shape of the maritime boundary. Settling that would bring us two important benefits, one human, the other economic: firstly, our fishermen, all from Prime Minister Modi’s State, who stray over a notional boundary, would have a clear idea of what is off bounds; the numbers rotting away in Pakistani jails would plummet. The economic gain would be that with the maritime boundary settled, the claim we have lodged with the U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf would be much more easily accepted. Pakistan does not have the financial or technological means to explore the shelf and the seabed, but we do.

Finalising India’s offers on Siachen and Sir Creek should be part of the agenda for the first 100 days that Prime Minister Modi has asked for. On Kashmir, it is entirely his call. If these three issues are resolved, as they can easily be, Pakistan will have no excuse to drag its feet on any other bilateral issue. The Pakistan Army’s refuseniks will still oppose peace, but will find it increasingly hard to get its citizens to believe that India is an enemy, against which terror can be let loose.

India, Pakistan revive back channel talks

Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S., Jalil Abbas Jilani, said India and Pakistan had reopened back-channel talks following a meeting between the Prime Ministers in New Delhi last month.

According to Dawn , Mr. Jilani said on Tuesday that Pakistan desired an uninterrupted peace process with India that would address the causes of all outstanding disputes and “not just symptoms”.

Mr. Jilani said there had been proposals to develop a serious mechanism to counter terrorism, adding that revival of the peace process would be the first step towards creating a cooperative and tension-free relationship between the two countries.

Trade ties

Mr. Jilani said that Pakistan was interested in improving trade and economic relations with India, as it believed that this could bring prosperity to the entire region.

The Ambassador further said the Foreign Secretaries would meet shortly to resume the delayed peace process, the report added.

The back-channel talks intend to address terrorism and other issues. — ANI

1914 Serbia, 2014 Pakistan

Yesterday, June 28, exactly one hundred years ago, the Serbian terrorist, Gavrilo Princip, unwittingly started the First and Second World Wars that left more than a hundred million people dead before the madness gave over three terrible decades later. Along with five other young men, all about the same age as Ajmal Kasab and his companions, Princip and his companions lined up under successive lamp-posts along the quay that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was to drive down along with his wife, Countess Sophie Chotek, to the Sarajevo Town Hall for a formal welcome reception.

The five terrorists were infuriated because the Archduke and his consort had chosen the precise anniversary of the worst day in Serbia’s collective memory, the defeat of the Serbian Tsar, Dušan, by the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, more than five centuries earlier, but which rankled as the day when the dream of Greater Serbia was ended for half a millennium. In the eyes of all Serbian nationalists and terrorists, with the Ottoman hold on the Balkans collapsing, the time had now come to avenge that defeat. Just as six centuries of Muslim rule in Delhi, from 1192 AD when Muhammad Ghori established the Sultanate to 1858 when the last Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was deposed had reverberated in the minds of the Kasab gang of terrorists as the order to be re-established, so did the Serbian terrorists propose to reverse the 1878 occupation of Bosnia by Austria and its annexation to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1908 to pave the way to the re-establishment of Tsar Dušan’s Greater Serbian Empire that had perished on the Fields of Kosovo on June 28, 1389.

The K. Subrahmanyam report has indubitably established that plenty of intelligence about what was happening on the other side of the Kargil range was available with the Indian military and civilian authorities even as Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was preparing for his ‘historic’ bus-trip to Lahore in February 1999. The establishment brushed all this aside the better to concentrate on making a huge success, in event-management if not substantive terms, of the bus-ride. Not even the Pakistan government’s decision to cancel the half-hour bus-ride from Wagah to Lahore for security reasons alerted the Indian government to the fragile nature of the goodwill on display. So also did Oskar Potiorek, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Governor in Bosnia, ignore numerous intelligence warnings of the security dangers attendant on the Archduke’s insistence on visiting Bosnia as the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Bosnian army.

The Archduke’s adamant insistence on making the visit was as much a turning a blind eye to evidence as was Defence Minister George Fernandes being complicit in not passing on with adequate stress the information flowing into military intelligence of unseemly activity in Skardu. And for much the same reason as overtook Governor Potiorek: currying favour with the Boss. In Governor Potiorek’s case, there was the personal determination to show his authorities in Vienna how firmly and irreversibly he had consolidated the Empire’s annexation of Bosnia; in the case of Vajpayee’s cohorts, it was the earnest desire to not play spoil-sport to their hero’s race to the Nobel Peace Prize. Anything that would detract from the occasion as evidence of a conspiracy was brushed aside in 1914 by Vienna and Sarajevo just as unwanted evidence was studiously ignored by Delhi and Srinagar in 1999.

But there was an even more touching reason in the case of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his consort. They had been married on the same 28{+t}{+h}day of June fourteen years earlier in 1900. It was a morganatic marriage — that is, Sophie could never become Empress nor her four children succeed their father because court protocol decreed that Countess Sophie did not have adequate blue blood flowing in her veins to have her seated on ceremonial occasions next to the heir apparent and certainly not as Empress after the octogenarian Emperor Franz Joseph passed on. As historian A.J.P. Taylor remarks, the one endearing feature of the heir-apparent’s character, for all his faults, was his enduring love for his wife. When he found that, as Commander-in-Chief of the Bosnian army, the same rules of protocol did not apply as in the Emperor’s court and, therefore, his consort could accompany him to Sarajevo as an equal, he determined on a second honeymoon and nothing would thwart him from his noble purpose, just as nothing would or could thwart Vajpayee from his.

We now learn from the autobiography of Nawaz Sharif’s former (and present) Foreign Minister, Sartaj Aziz, that the Pakistan cabinet was indeed briefed by army chief, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, in detail at the end of March 1999 — that is, a month after the Vajpayee visit and a few weeks before the Kargil invasion was to begin — and that on being told by Musharraf that his men could possibly be in Srinagar within a week of scaling the Kargil heights, Nawaz Sharif raised his hands and asked, with his Cabinet colleagues, for Allah’s dua . So also did the Serbian government in Belgrade know that something could go gravely wrong with the Archduke’s visit to Sarajevo but as they broadly shared the goals of their terrorists, even if they had nothing to do with this particular plot, the Serbian government played along while covering their tracks, just as Nawaz Sharif did about his government’s awareness of Musharraf’s Kargil misadventure. Credible denial, not action to halt the plot, was Sharif’s leitmotif as it was of the Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pašiæ and his Cabinet.

And the reasons for shying away from personal involvement but ensuring that nothing was done to stop the outrage from occurring also weirdly parallel those between the Serbia of yore and the Pakistan of the present. The arch Serbian plotter was Dragutin Dimitrijeviæ, known by his ‘takhallus’ of ‘Apis’ the Bee (the nickname he had acquired as a cadet for always buzzing around earnestly). He had earned his laurels by being the most ruthless of the regicides, who in 1903 had assassinated the previous Serbian King Aleksandar Obrenoviæ and his Queen (the two, by sheer coincidence, having been married just three days before Franz Ferdinand and Sophie in the face of similar furious objection from the court and the politico-military establishment — in Queen Draga’s case because she was a notorious nymphomaniac, the Interior Minister having lost his job because he protested to King Aleksandar that he had himself slept with the incoming Queen!) Apis had gone on to become the chief of intelligence (shades of ISI) and then split off to become the clandestine recruiter and trainer, like Ajmal Kasab’s ‘Major Iqbal’, of an army of subterranean terrorists picked up from the coffee-houses of Belgrade where unemployed but idealistic Serbian youth whiled away their time in useless, unrealistic political dreams — the massacre of kafirs to earn a quick passage to Paradise in the case of Kasab and his companions; the realisation of Greater Serbia in the case of Princip and his friends.

Apis took care to recruit for the Sarajevo mission boys suffering from terminal tuberculosis who knew they were destined to die young but preferred the glory of death for a noble cause to just wasting away in an infirmary. For the terrorists, of both the 20{+t}{+h}and the 21{+s}{+t}centuries, death held no fear and cyanide pills were thoughtfully provided in the event of capture. And where young Pakistanis have been fed on dreams of re-establishing global Muslim rule as in the century that followed the Prophet ( pace Allama Iqbal’s Shikwa , or Complaint to Allah as to why he had snatched the world from Muslim hands, and his renowned poem on Granada, ‘Yeh Gumabde Miane’, rendered into immortal song by Malika Pukhraj), Serbian nationalism, and its appendage, Serbian terrorism, also thrived on ballads and epic songs woven around ‘a mythical pantheon’ that included ‘the celebrated assassin’ Miloš Obilic who was said to have infiltrated the Turkish camp and slit the Sultan’s throat. Matching the revivalist irredentism of Allama Iqbal was the 19{+t}{+h}century Serbian writer, Garašanin, and the 1847 epic, The Mountain Wreath by the Prince-Bishop of Montenegro, which was to Serbian nationalism what Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya’s Anand Math was to Indian nationalism. Most significant of all, Apis’ Serbian Black Hand organisation operated independent of the Serbian government, but with both immunity and impunity, as does Hafiz Saeed’s Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Thus, when the Sarajevo assassination occurred, the Serbian government could carry conviction with most of the world, if not with Vienna, that whatever links anyone might wish to draw between the shadowy Apis and his merry band of terrorists, the Serbian government could not be fairly blamed. Even so, could the Pakistan government credibly distance itself from the 2001 attack on our Parliament and Mumbai 26/11 — at least in the eyes of the world, if not our own. And so also could Pakistan persuade the world to distinguish between the Pakistan government, on the one hand, and ‘rogue elements’ in the ISI and the Lashkar-e-Taiba, on the other. Moreover, the Belgrade government of 1914 could no more dare touch Apis than the Sharif government dare touch Hafiz Saeed.

When, therefore, Vienna laid at the door of Belgrade responsibility for the Sarajevo assassination, the government of Serbia protested that it had nothing to do with the assassination and was quite as keen as the Austro-Hungarian Empire to discover who the assassins were and who were behind them. This cut little ice in Vienna who insisted, as Delhi now does, that the Pakistan government own up, unveil the links between their agencies and the terrorists and demonstratively take action to bring the guilty to book. Belgrade then could no more meet these demands than Islamabad can today.

As the crisis deepened, it seemed to almost all the players that this was no more serious than the several crises that had beset the Balkans in the recent past, all of which had been defused by quiet diplomacy and a little sabre-rattling, most notably the crisis of the previous year, 1913, in which Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, had earned considerable kudos by convening a meeting in London of the envoys concerned and finding an interim solution. He floated a similar proposal in July 1914, but this time there were no takers.

Conscious too that Vienna and Belgrade were not the only players but had Germany behind Austro-Hungary and France behind Serbia, statesmen comforted themselves with the thought that all this wasdéjà vu , that the first Balkan crisis had been tided over and the much more serious Agadir crisis of 1911 over a German gun-boat, the Panther , having appeared off the Moroccan coast challenging French hegemony in North Africa and British colonial interests in all of Africa, had also been overcome. Why, therefore, could not an amicable solution be found despite Vienna having issued an ultimatum to Belgrade threatening invasion if the Serbian government did not provide satisfaction on a number of conditions put to Belgrade by Vienna that no self-respecting independent nation could possibly accept? Even Churchill thought it was “the most insolent document of its kind ever devised”. Yet, Belgrade accepted all the conditionalities but one.

That provided the casus belli that Vienna was obliged to follow, at Berlin’s urging, even as Belgrade’s nerve was being strengthened by Czarist Russia assuring them of Slavic solidarity in the event of Aryan-Magyar aggression by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. France was in two minds, President Poincare sailing to Russia to consolidate the military cooperation arrangements between Russia and France in the event of war, dragging along with him his reluctant pacifist and socialist Premier, René Viviani. Britain had its nerve stretched for it wanted no part of any of these quarrels despite the ‘military conversations’ it had had with France which effectively bound it to come to France’s help if France were invaded by Germany or Britain’s security threatened by Germany violating Belgium’s neutrality to gain access to Belgium’s Channel ports, principally Antwerp and Ostend.

Despite this tangled skein of alliances, so little was the actual outbreak of war anticipated that in the last week of July the Kaiser went on his annual cruise in the waters of the Baltic, sailing to his favourite summer haunts in Scandinavia; Poincaré and Viviani were also on the high seas; the German army commander, Moltke, and the Austrian army commander, Conrad, were both on vacation, as was half the British Cabinet and the Governor of the Bank of England. When Russia issued its first August ultimatum to Germany in the wake of the Austro-Hungarian bombardment of Belgrade at the expiry of its ultimatum, almost all the principal players were blissfully unaware that the worst war in human history had started.

On our sub-continent, we are almost as blissfully unaware of what would happen if, as is entirely likely, a similar scenario were to play out between Pakistan and India. There could be a massive terrorist attack on India from a base on Pakistan soil. Knee-jerk, we would, like the Austrians, demand immediate reprisals by the Pakistanis against all non-state and state actors responsible for the outrage. Pakistan, like the Serbian government, would hem and haw, not only because they do not know all that has happened but also because they do know that if they were to find out, all Hell might break loose. If then the arm-chair generals who are to be seen with their bristling moustaches and beetled eyebrows on our TV sets were to go ballistic, as I bet they would, our government would be forced to reveal its 56-inch chest. Any threat of war, especially between nuclear weapons-armed neighbours, would bring in outside interference. It is not difficult to guess who would play Kaiser’s Germany and who Czarist Russia. And even as in 1971, when no one but us was concerned with the merits of our case, so also would no outside power waste time or effort apportioning blame; we would both be held responsible. At this, national pride would triumph over international intervention, and just as Emperor Franz Ferdinand was prevented by the war machine from pulling back from the brink, as he had done on numerous previous occasions, so also would belligerent governments on both sides of our border find it impossible to counsel good sense in the face of the assault led by their respective TV anchors. “The nation wants to know…” And the nation’s youth would march off to their deaths and the nation’s old would await incineration in a nuclear holocaust.

The lesson for India and Pakistan of The Sleepwalkers who led their countries to collective disaster in 1914, a disaster that none wanted but none could prevent, is that menacing mutual brinkmanship must be replaced by pragmatic understanding. We in India need to understand that Pakistani terrorism cannot be ended for talks to begin; and that unless talks begin, there is no handle in the Pakistan government’s hands to contain India-specific targeted terrorism. We can climb as many pulpits as we wish, make as many impassioned appeals to the world and Pakistan as we desire, prepare ourselves for the worst and ready ourselves to inflict on Pakistan the worst, but the end result will be an Armageddon worse than anything our imagination can conceive or our mythology grasp, if we do not agree now to an ‘uninterrupted and uninterruptible’ dialogue with Pakistan. What overtook Europe could overtake us — unless we listen to the voice of Gandhi instead of Clausewitz and Nietzsche. It is by engaging with our opponents that we can turn them from friend to enemy; by confronting them, we could potentially turn our millions of Pakistani friends into implacable enemies. We cannot afford to sleepwalk our way to war. We must seize whatever opportunity presents itself, or which we ourselves can create, to make the 21{+s}{+t}century the Asian century instead of repeating in Asia in the 21{+s}{+t}century the horrors of Europe’s 20{+t}{+h}century. Then perhaps the two World Wars might not have been fought in vain.

Pakistan amends anti-terror law

Pakistan’s Parliament amended an anti-terrorism law Wednesday, doubling the maximum prison sentence for those convicted of terror offences and allowing security forces to detain suspects for up to 60 days. Rghts activists and opposition parties had attacked the law as repressive.

The Protection of Pakistan Bill 2014 allows security forces to detain suspects for up to 60 days without disclosing their whereabouts or the allegations against them. It also allows for people who have been found guilty of terror offences to go to jail for 20 years, up from ten.

When the legislation was first introduced as ordinance in April it allowed for 90 days detention, which Human Rights Watch (HRW) and opposition parties criticised.

Security forces had been granted powers to open fire on anyone they see committing or “likely to commit” terror-related offences, but the amendment means now only senior officers can “as a last resort”.

Next steps for cross-LoC trade

The two govts need to lay down a clear road map for formalizing LoC trade and bringing it within the ambit of SAFTA

Nisha Taneja & Samridhi Bimal

A modern check post on the lines of the integrated check post at Wagah/Attari will address several of the infrastructural problems being faced by businesses on both sides. Photo: AFP

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Jammu and Kashmir on 4 July is expected to not only give direction to the security-related issues but also give an impetus to trade across the line of control (LoC). This is likely to come following the recent visit of officials from the Union ministry of home affairs, who assessed the cross-LoC impediments and have recommended measures such as provision of international subscriber dialling (ISD) facility for government officials and the trading community, expansion of the list of tradable items from the existing 21 items, opening banking facilities on both sides of the border, increasing the number of weekly trading days and installation of full body truck scanners.

While these measures are welcome steps, they indicate a move towards normalizing trade between the two countries. These measures facilitate a shift from barter trade to a formal and institutionalized trade through banking channels. This shift would have to be done gradually. During the transition phase, other measures need to be taken so that the shift is smooth for traders in the two parts of Kashmir. At present, there is a limit of 100 trucks that can cross LoC per day. This should be increased and the infrastructure to facilitate it would need to be put in place. A modern check post on the lines of the integrated check post at Wagah/Attari will address several of the infrastructural problems being faced by businesses on both sides. The number of trading days can also be increased to seven from the present four per week. In addition, the number of trading hours can be increased to 12 as is being done at the Wagah/Attari border.

At present, trade through barter is based on mutual trust without any formal contract. In cases of dispute, there is no formal mechanism that traders can seek recourse to. An interim measure for traders to meet at the border to resolve mutual disputes could be put in place by allowing them temporary permits for 12-24 hours. Such permits are already being issued to truck drivers and could be extended to traders as well. LoC trade can also benefit through exhibitions being organized in the two parts of Kashmir. Such exhibitions in other states have had a very positive impact on trade expansion between the two countries.

The current arrangement of barter trade at the LoC is being carried out at zero duty. Even though trade in the notified commodities is supposed to take place in locally produced goods, in practice, goods are being diverted from other states and from third countries to avail of the zero-duty. Traders have devised mechanisms such that trucks from other states enter Jammu and Kashmir from Lakhanpur where the goods are unloaded and then loaded on to J&K trucks. The goods are then trans-shipped again at the LoC from Indian trucks to Pakistani trucks. All this adds significantly to transaction costs.

Full normalization of trade at the LoC would mean addressing these distortions. While this shift would mean an imposition of duties applicable under SAFTA (South Asian Free Trade Area), trade facilitation measures will provide benefits through lower transaction costs, which is likely to outweigh the costs incurred by traders through customs duties which at present do not exceed 5%.

The two governments need to lay down a clear road map for formalizing LoC trade and bringing it within the ambit of SAFTA. A clear direction would perhaps reduce the pain of adjustment and in the long term, lead to peaceful and prosperous economic relations between the two Kashmirs.

Coming late to the war

Earlier this month, the Pakistan army launched a new offensive in North Waziristan, which came close on the heels of unprecedented air strikes aimed at Islamist groups. This troop deployment is different from previous ones in its sheer magnitude and its targets.

North Waziristan is one of the best known Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), a region which was demarcated by the British to act as a buffer against Afghanistan, as Russia’s southward expansion in the Great Game had set off several wars. The British never managed to establish any real control over the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Not only was the Durand Line disputed by the Pashtun tribes straddling the “border”, but some of those located to the east also continued to swear allegiance to the Afghan rulers.

After 1947, taking into account this sense of independence, the Karachi government followed the path trodden by the British: it relied on local leaders, the maliks, to whom it granted an annual stipend andconsiderable autonomy. As the name implies, the agencies of the FATA come directly under the authority of Pakistan’s president, who delegates power to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa governor to oversee the administration. But at the level of each agency, power lies mainly in the hands of the political agent (PA, whose name and scope of action have not changed since the British), who enjoys extensive authority under the British Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR), which remained in effect after 1947. According to this body of laws, the PA, a bureaucrat appointed by the governor, can punish any tribe as he sees fit. He can imprison whoever he likes for three years without having to offer justification.

Imtiaz Gul, an expert on the FATA, believes that “The main reason for the popularity of successive Islamist movements in the tribal areas stems from the draconian system of the FCR… the search for a fair justice system and the craving for equal citizenship has come to be synonymous with sharia” (The Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan’s Lawless Frontier). Many Islamist groups, in fact, claim the role of dispenser of justice, not only because they purportedly redress the wrongs done to the downtrodden, but also because they combat inequalities. This was one of their justifications for the recent assassinations of maliks, who have traditionally supported the cause of Pashtun nationalism inherited from Abdul Ghaffar Khan.

In the 1980s, Islamist movements began to prosper in the FATA because of the anti-Soviet jihad. At times, up to 40,000 people crossed the Durand Line daily at Torkham in the Khyber agency, one of the border crossing points, and in 1988, 104 of the 278 refugee tented villages in the Pashtun areas were in the FATA (“Demographic Reporting on Afghan Refugees in Pakistan”, Nancy Duprée). Thus, a sort of osmosis took place, closely meshing the FATA movements and the Afghan jihad, a form of integration first reflected in the development of new madrasas. Pakistani jihadist groups also set up their headquarters and their training camps in Wana, South Waziristan, and in Mir Ali, North Waziristan, and on the Afghan side, in Khost, where al-Qaeda had camps in the late 1980s.

A segment of the FATA youth was thus drawn into the jihad in the 1980s. Nek Muhammad, from South Waziristan, is a case in point. He came from a poor family, like many of his fellow combatants, and joined the Taliban in the mid-1990s. He ended up commanding 3,000 men in Bagram, where he fought the “American invasion” in November 2001. Returning to Kalosha, South Waziristan, with a fleet of six all-terrain pickups, Nek was someone to be reckoned with. As funds poured in with al-Qaeda fighters retreating into his territory, Nek grew richer.

For years, the Pakistan army tried to negotiate with the Islamists of the FATA. The first agreement was signed with Nek in 2004 in Shakai, South Waziristan. In exchange for his commitment to refrain from launching cross-border attacks in Afghanistan and to “register” foreign militants, the Pakistan government agreed to release a large number of prisoners and granted financial compensation to the victims of military operations. Due to lack of compliance — the clause stipulating that foreign militants be registered was indeed naive — military operations resumed within weeks. But they soon resulted in new rounds of talks, leading to another agreement signed in February 2005, this time by Baitullah Mehsud, who had succeeded Nek, killed in 2004 by a drone attack. Mehsud headed what was to become known as the Pakistan Taliban in 2007. In fact, till 2007, the Pakistan army contented itself with striking deals whose terms, very similar to those described above, were never observed.

Things started to change in the late 2000s, when the army was deployed in South Waziristan, in the Swat Valley and in several other places. The army stepped up operations in the Pashtun areas after General Kayani became chief of army staff in 2007. About 211 of them reportedly took place from 2007 to 2010. But the losses were heavy, estimated at around 2,300. Consequently, the army preferred to refrain from deploying ground troops and left the matter in American hands without specifically saying so. It was in this context that the US launched massive drone strikes. But this technique was not effective enough and became problematic after politicians denounced this violation of the country’s sovereignty during the 2013 election campaign. After becoming prime minister, Nawaz Sharif claimed that he wanted to reach a negotiated settlement with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

After months of trying to hold talks, the government had to admit that the TTP was either too divided or not sincere about meaning business. Last month, the attack on the Karachi airport sealed the fate for talks and enabled the army to again take the lead and attack North Waziristan. This area had been spared so far, primarily because it is the stronghold of the Haqqani network, which has helped the ISI in Afghanistan to gain some “strategic depth” in the 1980s and to fight the Indian presence in the 2000s. The deployment of troops in this area suggests that the army has realised that Islamists — including the Haqqani network — pose an existential threat to the country and that they have to be decimated now, before the Nato forces withdraw fully from Afghanistan. If this is the case, the Pakistan army, which has traditionally considered India its priority target, is on the verge of a paradigm shift. But is it not too late? There are still some Nato forces in Afghanistan, but the country seems, ironically, to be a safe haven for the TTP, which may continue to strike from the other side of the Durand Line for a long time. And then Nawaz Sharif, who has been sidelined by the army initiative, may stage a c

India-Pakistan gas pipeline may be completed in a year

The proposed India-Pakistan pipeline, through which India plans to supply natural gas to Pakistan, may be completed within a year, The Hindu has learnt.

The pipeline, being put in place by the Gas Authority of India Ltd (GAIL), will start from Gujarat and reach Punjab passing through Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

GAIL will source liquified natural gas (LNG) from international suppliers, which will then be regasified at the LNG terminal at Dahej in Gujarat, for supply to Pakistan.

“The pipeline may be completed in 12 months,” official sources said on Thursday.

India had granted basic customs duty exemption of 5 per cent on regasified LNG for supply to Pakistan in this year’s budget, opening up avenues of expanded energy trade with the neighbour.The proposed project will utilise GAIL’s existing Dadri-Bawana-Nangal pipeline network, which now extends to Jalandhar.

“This may be extended to Lahore via Amritsar by laying a 110-km pipeline of 24-inch diametre,” the sources said.

The pipeline will start at Dahej in Gujarat, pass through Vijaipur in Madhya Pradesh, Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, Bawana in Delhi before reaching Nangal in Punjab.

India to ask U.N. Military Observer Group to wind up

India will deliver its toughest message on the U.N. mission on the LoC yet, telling visiting chief of the U.N. Peacekeeping forces, U.N. Undersecretary General Herve Ladsous, that the United Nations Military Observer Group on India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) has “outlived its utility.”

The visit of Mr. Ladsous is part of a three-nation tour to some of the biggest contributors to the U.N.’s peacekeeping forces, India, Bangladesh and Nepal. He arrives in Delhi on Friday and will have meetings with officials of the Ministry of External Affairs, Defence and Home Affairs, given that both the army and the police contribute soldiers to the UNPKF. Informed sources said India would forcefully reiterate its stand that the UNMOGIP wind up its operations.

While there is no explanation why the government has decided to act against the UNMOGIP’s office allotments at this time, India does have more leverage with the UNPKF than ever before, given that it is the second highest contributor to the peacekeeping forces after Bangladesh.

Over the past 60 years, more than 1,70,000 Indian soldiers have been a part of 43 of 68 U.N. peacekeeping missions. The U.N. mission has been strapped by reduced offers of both funding and troops from several countries. Pakistan, the third largest contributor, has reduced its contribution by about 30% this year. Diplomatic sources said Mr. Ladsous would seek to explain that it was for the Security Council to withdraw the UNMOGIPs operations, even as he hopes to ask India for more troops for the U.N.’s 16 peacekeeping missions this year.

Mr. Ladsous’s visit comes two months after the government issued a notice telling the UNMOGIP in Delhi to vacate its government-allotted bungalow, along with four locations in Jammu and Kashmir by September 1. India has contended that the U.N. mission’s mandate, set up in 1948 had lapsed in 1971 after the ceasefire line changed, and the Shimla agreement.

However, Pakistan continues to welcome the UNMOGIP mission based there. Speaking in Islamabad on Thursday, Pakistan Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhury said “Pakistan will continue to facilitate the UNMOGIP, which is a source for providing credible information to the U.N. Security Council through its regular periodic reports. We have noted with concern that there were some administrative issues for the UMMOGIP in New Delhi but we believe it needs to be facilitated in the performance of its very important role.”