Anyone with clean hands?

All have played the game, with differences of degree

The debate on state support of terrorism in South Asia should get real, even if governments in the region find themselves unable to do so during formal diplomatic encounters. Indeed, Pakistan President Asif Zardari has made so bold as to break with all his country’s lies of the past and admit to Pakistan’s role in promoting cross-border terrorism. So perhaps it is time to recognise that no country is innocent, and that this has been the case for the last 60 years. If Pakistan has spent much of the last three decades stoking rebellion and secession in first Punjab and then Kashmir, as also in supporting repeated strikes by Pakistani nationals in Delhi, Mumbai and elsewhere, if Bangladesh has been supporting terrorist outfits like the United Front for Liberation of Assam (Ulfa), and if sundry players in the region have been supporting Naga and other rebels, the fact is that India does not have a clean record either.

It colluded with the US Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s to support and arm the Khampa rebels in eastern Tibet. The Intelligence Bureau had a hand in stoking secessionist fires in what was to become Bangladesh. In response to Dhaka’s support for sundry terrorist and rebel outfits in the north-east, India periodically supported the Chakma rebels (tribals who are Buddhists-animists) in Islamic Bangladesh’s Chittagong hill tracts. And of course, in the 1980s India trained and supported sundry Sri Lankan Tamil groups, including most famously the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. India also aided and supported the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan when it was fighting the Taliban in the south.

The interesting point about this history is that such covert state support for insurgents/militants/terrorists has achieved little. The Khampa rebellion never had any hope and China retains control over Tibet. Support for the Chakmas was a tit-for-tat operation without any strategic goals, and Bangladesh eventually did a deal with the Chakmas to at least formally protect their way of life. Support to rebel Tamil groups boomeranged, for it helped build the LTTE into the monster that it became, and resulted in the misadventure of the Indian Peace-Keeping Force and eventually the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Support for the Northern Alliance did serve to keep it functional during the difficult years of Taliban rule, but Kabul was captured only when the US intervened militarily. And if, for argument’s sake, India is giving support to Baluchi rebels, the wisdom of such policy must be questioned unless it is merely another tit-for-tat operation to remind Pakistan that two can play the game, and thereby to use it as a negotiating ploy. The only real “success” that can be claimed is in the breaking away of East Pakistan to become Bangladesh, but it might be argued that that was inevitable, given the geographical, cultural, linguistic and other gulfs between the two parts of the original Pakistan.

If it is accepted that no one has clean hands in this game, the operative question is whether it places all countries in the region on the same footing. The answer is that it does not. There is a difference between tactical operations and strategic choices and, flowing from that, differences of scale. As everyone knows, quantum differences in scale change the nature of the beast. And the truth is that no country other than Pakistan makes support of cross-border terrorism a central part of state policy. No other country has anything approaching the Inter-Services Intelligence organisation; indeed, no other country has ceded so much of the state’s monopoly of violence, which is why Pakistan now finds itself threatened by the non-state actors whom it has fed and nurtured. India on its part must ask itself how it should conduct itself if it wants to be seen as a responsible power that aspires to a permanent seat in the Security Council.