The Punjabi-uncle way of peacemaking

THE SPY CHRONICLES: RAW, ISI AND THE ILLUSION OF PEACE

A S Dulat, Asad Durrani & Aditya Sinha

HarperCollins

319 pages; Rs 799

There’s a warm, reassuring timbre to Amarjit Dulat and Asad Durrani’s ruminations on India and Pakistan: The tone of Punjabi uncles at the Delhi Gymkhana who, long divided by history, discover brotherhood over Black Label. Let’s-give-peace-a-chance is a familiar subcontinental trope — but unusual for men who spent much of their lives leading wars with each other.

Former Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) chief Dulat and former Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate head Durrani’s Spy Chronicles, a dialogue ably led by Aditya Sinha, doesn’t in fact chronicle their work: There’s nothing revelation-seekers couldn’t find on Google.

In essence, the book makes a pitch for a new India-Pakistan peace process, led by what Mr Durrani describes as a “group of wise men” trusted by both countries’ national security establishment. The case for this, both concur, is simple: “We know the price.”

This argument is unexceptionable — indeed, irrefutable. The bitter relations between India and Pakistan have claimed tens of thousands of lives, and destroyed millions more. For years now, the spy chiefs have met at Track II dialogues, seeking a way forward (full disclosure: I have also participated in some of these meetings). 

Yet, the two spy chiefs’ prescription for peace is inadequate, even anodyne.

Kashmir, both spy chiefs assert, ought to be the fulcrum of the peace process. “The best thing that can happen and seems possible is to make Kashmir the bridge,” Mr Durrani says. Mr Dulat concurs: “Kashmir should be the bridge it’s the right starting point.” “If you move forward on Kashmir, then you are automatically moving forward on terrorism” [page 106]. 

This is an empirically dubious proposition. The Indian Mujahideen was born, with ISI patronage, even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and General Pervez Musharraf’s now-famous secret dialogue on Kashmir was well underway; 26/11 came in the wake of multiple, useless meetings of the Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism set up in 2007.

Even though Mr Dulat asserts an intelligence cooperation would “contain [violence] or stop it”, this hasn’t been the case. Dialogue between the National Security Advisors did nothing to prevent Pathankot or an escalation in Kashmir; earlier meetings between spy chiefs A K Verma and Asad Durrani signally failed to deescalate the crisis in Punjab.

Indeed, while Mr Durrani holds out General Zia-ul-Haq and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi as models of India-Pakistan engagement, 1987 — the year of the dictator’s famous cricket-match visit to New Delhi — saw civilian fatalities in the ISI-backed Khalistan insurgency almost double to 910, up from 520 the previous year.

For both, these efforts fell through because of bureaucratic spoilers and political pressure. Mr Durrani blames bureaucratic “nit-pickers”; Mr Dulat laments Manmohan Singh spent too much time looking over his shoulder at the opposition. This may or may not be true — but dodges the real questions. 

There is a wealth of new scholarship — Christine Fair’s Fighting to the End, Aqil Shah’s Army and Democracy, Husain Haqqani’s Reimagining Pakistan — which explains what the real problem is: A Pakistan Army sees itself as the praetorian guard of an ideological state, with conflict against India as its raison d’etre. 

Mr Durrani’s responses to issues of critical concern illustrate the problem: He refuses to introspect on Pakistan’s role in the events of 26/11; the kidnapping of foreign hostages in Kashmir, he blandly asserts, was a “false flag operation”.

Large parts of the book lament lost opportunities to deal with actors in Kashmir — but have no plausible account to offer on the reasons for the failure. There is no analysis of why both India and Pakistan failed to properly assess the storm looming in Kashmir in 1987-88; the reasons for the secessionists’ failure to deliver on their promises of dialogue with Prime Minister Singh; what drove the violent new youth Islamism, which exploded in 2008.

The lack of rigour in the book is, arguably, of a piece with South Asia’s anaemic tradition of writing on intelligence and spycraft. There is no equivalent of the memoirs of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Robert Agee, nor of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnost officer Yuri Modin’s insights into his operations in the West. 

Even though some Indian intelligence officers have offered some insight into their work and institutions — B Raman’s Kaoboys and Intelligence, or Open Secrets are examples — these books lack in analytic and historical rigour.

The unwillingness to interrogate our history reflects a culture of secret service in which the notion of service to the state is deeply embedded and the notion of accountability to citizens non-existent.

In the final analysis, Spy Chronicles illustrates the problem, not the solution: National security élites lack the self-critical historical sensibility needed to assess where things went wrong, and the rigour to conceive of genuinely new ways forward. Gymkhana Club nostalgia is a wonderful thing — but it isn’t a prescription for India-Pakistan peace.