Heightened danger
If Pakistan is to get Talibanised, India has to raise the importance and attention given to securing itself
In his comments to journalists in Delhi, the Prime Minister has said that he is not yet sure that India should join the core group that the United States wants to set up for Afghanistan. Such caution may be well-advised, but there is no getting away from the fact that, in the wake of recent events in Pakistan and Afghanistan, India’s security environment has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The problems of the past could look like child’s play when compared to what may be in store, as the centre of worry shifts from events in relatively distant Afghanistan to what may happen in next-door Pakistan. Richard Holbrooke’s uncharacteristically soft approach during his India visit last week, and his statement that there can be no solution in Afghanistan without India’s involvement, reflects more than anything else the American realisation that the situation in the region is getting worse, and will continue to deteriorate.
It does not help that Pakistan’s rulers still live in a state of denial. They continue on the one hand to play the old double game of asking for guns and money and insisting that there should be no accountability with regard to how either is used, while on the other they have stepped up the export of terrorists into Jammu & Kashmir. With typical chutzpah, they also ask for the bilateral dialogue process to be renewed, without doing anything to convince India that the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks are being brought to book. Islamabad may assert that it too is the victim of terrorism, but its actions suggest that it still thinks it can ride the tiger.
If Pakistan is to get Talibanised, there is precious little that India can do to stop the process. What it has to do, therefore, is to raise dramatically the degree of importance and attention given to securing itself, internally and externally. Most of the last five years have been a write-off from the perspective of internal security; under an incompetent home minister (until December), the security forces have functioned without essential equipment, there has been poor coordination of intelligence and action on the ground, and the coast guard has been neglected. Even the defence forces have been stymied by the failure to place orders for hardware, to build border road networks in difficult terrain, and to make sure that decision-making processes are streamlined and money provided for the people who are asked to defend the country. A third of the air force’s fighter planes have been said to be virtually non-operational for want of spares and other reasons; the navy has not seen any net addition to its fleet for the last three decades while the Chinese invest heavily in their navy; and the army has had significant slippages in its procurement programme (tanks, artillery, etc). If this state of affairs persists, there will be hell to pay.