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| Editorial: Dealing with Pakistan |
| Business Standard / New Delhi Dec 04, 2008, 00:59 IST |
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Any response to the latest attack on India by Pakistan-based terrorists has to start with the question: Who is in charge in that benighted country? Is it Asif Ali Zardari, the country’s president, who declared that ‘There’s a bit of India in each Pakistani’? Or is it the army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) unit? If the view is taken, as the Prime Minister has done publicly in the past, that Pakistan too is a victim of terror and that it is Mr Zardari whose hands need to be strengthened, then the Indian response will have to be a muted one. The argument here is that the army is biding its time, waiting for civilian rule to fail all over again, and in the interim it is making life as difficult as possible for the elected rulers. This is the very line that Mr Zardari has used in his post-Mumbai interviews to the western press — the attackers may be based on Pakistani soil, but they are ‘non-state actors’, so why take it out on the state?
If, on the other hand, the view in New Delhi is that the civilian rulers of Pakistan are largely irrelevant, and that it is really the army and the ISI that run the country, India’s tactical response has to be altogether different. As it happens, the United States is now of the view that, notwithstanding the promises made by Gen Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan has no plans to dismantle its terror network. It is for this reason that the US has begun a policy of bombing Pakistani territory if that is where it suspects terrorists are holed up. The limitations of this US approach have already been exposed.
So what is India to do? The first objective has to be to mount global pressure on Pakistan. It would be a good idea for India to make public all the evidence that points to Pakistan’s role in the Mumbai outrage and in previous attacks, such as on India’s embassy in Kabul. The fact that the terrorists who landed in Mumbai singled out Jews and sought out British and American passport-holders is important from this point of view, as it should become clear to the major countries that this is not just an Indian problem, they have as much of a stake in taking out the terror camps as India does.
The next question is whether India can go on the offensive. “Hot pursuit” was a favourite topic of discussion for years when terrorists in Kashmir came in from across the Line of Control, but has obviously been found to be not practicable. Massing armies on the border, as the Vajpayee government did in 2001-02, achieved little because India did not really want to go to war; the only fruit of that costly exercise was American pressure on Gen Musharraf to formally forswear terror, a commitment that he kept very partially.
Targeted strikes, aimed at places like the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s headquarters in Muridke, are a possibility, but airborne attacks without warning could send off alarm bells in Pakistan’s air defence system and run the risk (however remote) of a nuclear response. But it is interesting, in this context, that there have been little beyond token protests from the Pakistani side to the US bombings on Pakistani territory near its western borders. The question though is why India is unable to do a strike against even the lightly armed Bangladesh, which houses and helps terrorists wanted in India? Perhaps the worry would be the diplomatic consequences of such action.
The conclusion that this analysis suggests is that, while India should explore what it can do by way of a tactical military response without causing full-scale war, the game-plan has to be nuanced, and played at different levels. On the one hand, it is in India’s interest to strengthen the hands of the forces in Pakistan that would like that country to steer a different course from what it has done in recent years — and the fact is that the jihadists have never done well in an election. On the other, there has to be a strategy that makes Pakistan realise that its actions involve a price that has to be paid, and that aggression against India is counter-productive — after all, Kargil brought the US and India closer together, the attack on Parliament in 2001 made the US pile pressure on Pakistan, and so on. The price that Pakistan is made to pay could also be economic (why help the country get an IMF loan when it is in trouble?), it could be diplomatic (isolate Pakistan in every international forum where this is possible), and it could even involve using water as a weapon. The problem of course is that it is always difficult to ride two horses at the same time, and so long as the Pak army is aiding and abetting the jihadists, there are severe limitations on what any of this will achieve. Still, the country has to persist, even as it improves its intelligence network and strengthens its defences against jihadi attacks, which (let us face it) are not going to stop.
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