Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century

by Shashi Tharoor

  The geopolitical reverberations of the carnage placed Islamabad firmly in the dock. The interrogation of the one surviving terrorist, Ajmal Kasab, and evidence from satellite telephone intercepts and other intelligence, led to an international consensus that the attacks were masterminded by the Wahhabi-inspired Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group patronized, protected and trained by the ISI as a useful instrument in Islamabad’s proxy war against India in Kashmir.

  While Pakistan chafes at its inability to wrest the Kashmir valley from India, and resorts to all conceivable means to win that territory, it has understandably accepted its inability to do so through conventional warfare. That is why, for more than two decades now, a succession of Pakistani military rulers has made it a point to support, finance, equip and train Islamist militants to conduct terrorist operations in India, to bleed India from within and to inflict upon it what a Pakistani strategist called ‘death by a thousand cuts’.

  India’s response has been defensive, not belligerent. India is a status quo power that seeks nothing more than to be allowed to grow and develop in peace, free from the destructive attentions of the Pakistani military and the militants and terrorists it sponsors. Pakistan has sought to obscure this reality by seeking to convince the West and China that its militarism is in response to an ‘Indian threat’, a notion assiduously peddled in Washington and London by highly paid lobbyists for Islamabad. The rationale for this argument goes back to 1971, when India, in their version of the narrative, attacked and dismembered Pakistan. This action, it is suggested, reveals India’s intentions: it is simply waiting for the opportunity to do to what remains of Pakistan what it did to the country’s old political geography.

  The facts, of course, are quite different. Pakistan’s genocidal military crackdown on its own eastern half sent 10 million Bengali refugees flocking into India, the largest refugee movement in human history. India could not care for these people indefinitely, and sought a permanent solution—which, given the intransigence of Islamabad’s military rulers, could only lie in the independence of East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh). India accordingly supported the secessionist guerrillas operating against the Pakistani occupation there. It was in fact the Pakistani military that gave India an excuse to launch all-out war by attempting a pre-emptive air strike on Indian air force bases and then declaring war on India, which New Delhi happily accepted as a cue to sweep into the east and liberate Bangladesh. That done, India called a ceasefire in the west, instead of continuing to march in to subjugate Pakistan (entirely feasible in those pre-nuclear days) or even to free its own territory in Kashmir from Pakistani rule. These are not the actions of a nation that has any additional designs on Pakistan. In fact 1971 offered a unique set of historical circumstances that are no longer replicable. And they require brutality and short-sightedness on a colossal scale from Pakistan itself, which presumably is also not going to be repeated.

  For these reasons, the notion of any Indian ‘threat’ is preposterous; bluntly, there is not and cannot be an ‘Indian threat’ to Pakistan, simply because there is absolutely nothing Pakistan possesses that India wants. If proof had to be adduced for this no-doubt-unflattering assessment, it lies in India’s decision at Tashkent in 1966 to give ‘back’ to Pakistan every square inch of territory captured by our brave soldiers in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, including the strategic Haji Pir Pass, all of which is land we claim to be ours. If we do not even insist on retaining what we see as our own territory, held by Pakistan since 1948 but captured fair and square in battle, why on earth would we want anything else from Pakistan?

  No, the ‘Indian threat’ is merely a useful device cynically exploited by the Pakistani military to justify their power (and their grossly disproportionate share of Pakistan’s national assets, as brilliantly spelled out in Ayesha Siddiqa’s book Military Inc.). The central problem bedevilling the relationship between the two subcontinental neighbours is not, as Pakistani propagandists like to suggest, Kashmir, but rather the nature of the Pakistani state itself—specifically, the stranglehold over Pakistan of the world’s most lavishly funded military (in terms of percentage of national resources and GDP consumed by any army on the planet). To paraphrase Voltaire on Prussia, in India, the state has an army; in Pakistan, the army has a state. Unlike in India, one does not join the army in Pakistan to defend the country; one joins the army to run the country. The military has ruled Pakistan directly for a majority of the years of its existence, and indirectly for most of the rest. No elected civilian government has been allowed to complete its full term, with the exception of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, initially appointed to power by the outgoing military junta, later elected in his own right and overthrown by his generals at his first attempt at re-election. The army lays down the ‘red lines’ no civilian leader—and not even the ‘free’ media—dare cross. In return, the military establishment enjoys privileges unthinkable in India. In addition, serving and retired military officials run army-controlled shopping malls, petrol stations, real-estate ventures, import–export enterprises, and even universities and think tanks. Since the only way to justify this disproportionate dominance of Pakistani state and society is to preserve the myth of an ‘Indian threat’, the Pakistani military will, many in India believe, continue to want to keep the pot boiling, even if Kashmir were to be handed over to them on a silver salver with a white ribbon tied around it. In the analysis of the Pakistani commentator Cyril Almeida, the army is not strategically interested in peace; it may not want war (which general relishes dying?) but it does not want peace either.

  In 2008, just before the terrorist assault, the newly elected civilian government in Islamabad had shown every sign of wanting to move away from this narrative of hatred and hostility. But Pakistan is a deeply divided nation. As the Kabul bombing showed, the disconnect between the statements of the government and the actions of the ISI suggested that the government is too weak to control its own security apparatus. An attempt to place the ISI under the interior ministry in the summer of 2008 had to be rescinded when the army refused to accept the order (even after it had been officially announced on the eve of the Pakistani prime minister’s first visit to Washington). When, in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, Pakistani President Zardari acceded to the request of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to send the head of the ISI to India to assist Indian authorities in their investigation, the Pakistani military again forced the civilian government into a humiliating climbdown, saying a lower-level official might be sent instead. (He wasn’t.)

  As the former Indian diplomat Satyabrata Pal trenchantly noted, ‘The ISI may well be Pakistan’s answer to the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy, Roman nor an empire: it has no intelligence, it does Pakistan no service and will in time inter it.’ The Islamist extremism nurtured by a succession of military rulers of Pakistan has now come to haunt its well-intentioned but lamentably weak elected civilian government. Attacks against the Pakistani state over the last few years have proved that terrorism, created, nurtured and equipped by Pakistan’s military, is now well and truly out of its government’s control. The militancy once sponsored by its predecessors now threatens to abort Pakistan’s sputtering democracy and seeks to engulf India in its flames. President Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widower, surely realizes that India’s enemies in Pakistan are also his own: the very forces of Islamist extremism responsible for his wife’s assassination in December 2007 were also behind the bombing of Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel in the summer of 2008. There has never been a stronger case for firm and united action by the governments of both India and Pakistan to cauterize the cancer in their midst. This is not as implausible as it sounds. There is a rational argument on both sides that things have gone too far in the wrong direction, and that cooperation is the only way forward. The problem is that each terrorist attack undermines the case for such an approach and discredits the dwindling minority on both sides who believe it to be both true and necessary.

  Rarely had a Pakistani civilian
government been more inclined to pursue peace with India than Zardari’s in 2008. Whereas his predecessor, General Pervez Musharraf, had mastered the art of saying one thing and doing another, Zardari had been pushing for greatly expanded trade and commercial links with India and the liberalization of the restrictive visa regime between the two countries. Indeed his foreign minister was in Delhi for talks on these issues when the terrorist assault occurred. Zardari had also begun winding down his government’s official support for Kashmiri militancy against the government in New Delhi, and had announced the disbanding of the ISI’s political wing. When he went so far as to propose a ‘no first-strike’ nuclear policy, matching India’s stance but violating his own military’s stated nuclear doctrine, Indians had begun to believe that at long last they had found a Pakistani ruler who understood that normalizing relations with India would be of great practical benefit to Pakistan itself.

  The terrorists and their patrons clearly wish to thwart any moves in the direction of a rapprochement between the two countries, which would thwart their destructive Islamist agenda. But the Mumbai terror assault only seemed to confirm that—though President Zardari is adept at going on Indian television and saying what his viewers across the border wish to hear—the peacemakers in Islamabad are not the ones who call the shots in that country.

  Pakistan at first predictably denied any connection to the events, but each passing revelation rendered its denials less and less plausible. President Zardari even claimed that the captured terrorist was not Pakistani. It took an intrepid British journalist of Pakistani descent to track down Ajmal Kasab’s native village of Faridkot in Punjab, report his parents’ identities and confirm his background. The parents were promptly spirited away by the Pakistani authorities, the villagers silenced and the next journalist who tried to follow the story, an American, was beaten up for his pains.

  Those first weeks of Pakistani denial after 26/11 rankled, because many in India had thought—having paid too much attention to the earlier positive noises from President Zardari—that when 26/11 happened, it would be a golden opportunity for the civilian government of Pakistan to stand up and say, ‘We’re in this fight together. The people who did this to you are going to do the same thing to us, and we want to work alongside with you. Our intelligence agencies will join you in the investigation.’ Instead of which, we got denial, obfuscation, delay and deceptive sanctimony.

  When Zardari initially agreed to India’s request for the ISI chief to visit New Delhi, he stated that Pakistan ‘will cooperate with India in exposing and apprehending the culprits and masterminds’ behind the attacks. It soon became clear that this was not an objective unanimously shared in Islamabad. The ISI is not exactly keen on cooperating with an investigation into the massacre’s Pakistani links. The Mumbai attacks bore many of the trademarks of the extremist ‘fedayeen’ groups based in Pakistan, notably the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which in the past has benefited from the patronage of the ISI. Whether the Pakistani military is orchestrating the violence or merely shielding its perpetrators, it clearly has no interest in seeing its protégés destroyed. It soon became apparent that for all of President Zardari’s soothing words, the Pakistani government cannot ensure that different elements of the state fall in line with the government’s vision. And the country’s civilian government—India’s official interlocutors—dare not cross the red lines drawn by the military, for fear of being toppled. If India is to take Islamabad’s professions of peaceful intent seriously, credible action with visible results is required. It has not been much in evidence in recent years.

  Despite its denials and its disingenuous calls for more proof—all of which had the effect, whether by accident or design, of buying time for the perpetrators to cover their tracks, to husband their resources and to reinvent their identities—Pakistan has never been more isolated in the international community. It is now universally accepted that the massacre in Mumbai was planned in and directed from Pakistani territory, and the inability of the Pakistani government to prevent its soil from being used to mount attacks on another state make a mockery of its pretensions to sovereignty. No one wishes to undermine President Zardari’s civilian government, which remains the one hope for something approaching a moderate, secularist regime in that country. But it is an understatement to point out that Zardari does not enjoy the unstinting support of his own security establishment. And his weakness makes it less and less useful for outsiders to shore him up.

  Before the attacks on Mumbai, the United States had been promoting a reduction of India–Pakistan tensions, in the hope—openly voiced by then president-elect Barack Obama (and repeated by him in office)—that this would free Pakistan to conduct more effective counterinsurgency operations against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in its north-western tribal areas. Pakistan has six times the number of troops deployed against India than it has deployed on its western border to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Obama therefore called for promoting a rapprochement between India and Pakistan as a key objective of US foreign policy in the region. Peaceful relations with India would have permitted more resources to be shifted from east to west. Instead the perennial danger is of the Pakistani military, despite India’s restraint, moving in the other direction. Washington fears that India–Pakistan tension will make its own task in Afghanistan more difficult. But for a long time, Washington found few takers in India for continuing a peace process with a government that did not appear to control significant elements of its own military. Now that India and Pakistan are talking, the Pakistani military has been able to move some of its military resources westward, with no discernible impact on the country’s security.

  Ironically, Zardari had proven to be a useful ally of the United States before 26/11; in addition to overtly lowering the temperature with India, he was cooperating tacitly with American Predator strikes against the Islamic extremists in the Afghan borderlands, much to the resentment of pro-Islamist elements in his own military. This cooperation would be jeopardized if the seething anger throughout India at the Pakistani sponsors of terror boiled over; the hardliners in Islamabad’s army headquarters will then have the justification they need to jettison a policy they dislike and turn their weapons back towards their preferred enemy, the Indians. Obama had pointed out during the 2008 US presidential election campaign that American military assistance to Pakistan was being diverted to the purchase of jet aircraft and battle tanks aimed at India, rather than on the tools needed to combat the militants in its lawless tribal belt. After Mumbai, Washington’s biggest fear became that the Pakistani military might seek to move its forces away from the western border with Afghanistan, where the United States wants them to aid NATO’s fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and reinforce the eastern border with India instead. This is why it is important for India not to give them any excuse to do so.

  With Pakistan initially denying all responsibility for the murderous rampage that was planned on its soil, India seemed to have no good options. It was a typically Pakistani conundrum: the military wasn’t willing, and the civilian government wasn’t able. And the fear remained that expecting Zardari to fulfil even India’s minimal demands might be tantamount to asking him to sign his own death warrant. What we needed done had to be done in a way that did not undermine the civilian government.

  At the same time, India had to act: we all knew that anything that smacked of temporizing and appeasement would further inflame the public just a few months before national elections were due. But New Delhi also knew that though some hotheads in India were calling for military action, including strikes on terrorist facilities in Pakistani territory, this would certainly lead to a war that neither side could win. If anything, such an Indian reaction would play into the hands of the terrorists, by strengthening anti-Indian nationalism in Pakistan and easing the pressure on the Islamists. And since both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, the risk of military action spiralling out of control is always too grave for any responsible government to contemplate.r />
  Some loud Indian voices on the country’s ubiquitously shrill 24/7 news channels pointed enviously to Israel’s decisive action against neighbouring territories that have provided sanctuary for those conducting terrorist attacks upon it. They clamorously asked why India could not do the same.

  As Israeli planes and tanks exacted a heavy toll on Gaza barely a month after 26/11, these opinion leaders in India watched with an unusual degree of interest—and some empathy. New Delhi joined the rest of the world in calling for an end to the military action, but its criticism of Israel was muted. For as Israel demonstrated anew its determination to put an end to attacks upon its civilians by militants based in Hamas-controlled Gaza, many in India, still smarting from the horrors of the Mumbai attacks, asked: couldn’t we do it too?

  For many Indian commentators, the temptation to identify with Israel was strengthened by the seizing of Mumbai’s Jewish centre (the Chabad-Lubavitch house) by the terrorists on 26/11 and the painful awareness that India and Israel share many of the same enemies. India, with its 150-million-strong Muslim population, has long been a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause and remains staunchly committed to an independent Palestinian state. But 26/11 confirmed what had become apparent in recent years—that the forces of global Islamist terror had added Indians to their reviled target-list of ‘Jews and crusaders’. If Israel was frequently attacked by rockets raining upon it from across its border, India had suffered repeated assaults by killers trained, equipped, financed and directed by elements based next door in Pakistan. When White House Press Secretary Dana Perino equated members of Hamas to the Mumbai killers, her comments were widely circulated in India.