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.