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Thursday March 28, 2024

A dangerous time

By Imtiaz Alam
September 22, 2016

In a late but polite reminder for an urgent need for a re-calibrated ‘policy response’ to an ‘exceptionally dangerous challenge’, three distinguished foreign secretaries and a national security adviser have advised Pakistani authorities to take some effective measures to avert the looming international isolation that India is exploiting while keeping ‘other options’ for an opportune time, place and form of its choosing.

Can we still avoid playing into the hands of the Hindu nationalist party in power in India and find a respectable way out of what now seems to be a logical culmination of our ‘enmity-with-all syndrome’?

It is very difficult, if not impossible, for weak political leaders and stronger short-sighted strategists to get out of the vicious cycle of hostility-and-isolation when an ‘organised retreat’ from multiple brinks is in order.

And fishing in troubled waters will provide adversaries ample room to wriggle out of the tight corner that may find themselves in.

In the wake of the attack on the military barracks in Uri, Pakistani officials’ have counter-blamed India to have orchestrated Uri to divert attention from indeed the most atrocious human rights violations in the Indian-administered Kashmir. This may sell easily to the domestic audience but cannot impress the international community, which may be overwhelmingly inclined to buy India’s diversionary accusations against Islamabad of allowing the use of its territory for cross-border terrorism or using non-state actors or ‘good Taliban’ to pursue strategic agendas.

Consequently, whether the accusations or misperceptions are right or wrong, the ground reality is that the failure of the quadrilateral forum consisting of Afghanistan, US, China and Afghanistan has been substituted with a trilateral alignment between the US, India and Afghanistan against terrorism allegedly emanating from Pakistan.

And world leaders, including US Secretary of State John Kerry and the British prime minister, have broadly endorsed India and Afghanistan’s concerns or accusations. Even China has called for caution against escalation of tension around the volatile situation of Kashmir while asking for resumption of dialogue between the two nuclear rivals.

However, what was being widely speculated and promoted in most of the Indian media for multiple retaliatory measures has not happened so far. Military experts in India have cautioned against surgical strikes in Pakistan.

Yet, as a follow-up to India’s drive to diplomatically isolate Pakistan by playing on easy-to-sell accusations of fomenting terrorism across the region, one can expect incidents on the Line of Control and covert terrorist or subversive operations across Fata, Balochistan and Karachi.

It seems, given Ajit Doval’s aggressive doctrine in subliminal warfare, that New Delhi may preferably combine heightened overt border tensions with covert matching terrorism by exploiting ethnic and sectarian cleavages and using mercenaries from among the renegade strategic assets that we once created. And they are plenty and easily available in the troubled lands of Afghanistan and from among the alienated radicals from Balochistan and certain treacherous elements in Karachi.

The Uri incident has indeed served India’s purpose and has become instrumental in diverting attention from a genuine Kashmiri upsurge and atrocities being committed against the people at a mass scale in the valley. It is quite paradoxical that the major states in the region – despite facing threats from a variety of terrorists – should in any way promote terrorism and proxy wars to the benefit of disparate non-state actors. And it is quite interesting that these three countries have the common trait of externalising their internal troubles while lending a helping hand to the ‘trouble-makers’ of the other side.

India blames Pakistan for its trouble in Kashmir and Pakistan accuses India for the unrest in Baluchistan. And both, instead of finding a political solution, are inclined to enforce a military solution. On the principled level, even though instances are not that comparable, India is going to try to counterbalance the demand for self-determination by the Kashmiris with its support for the secession of Balochistan. The irony is that neither India nor Pakistan has principled credentials over the right to self-determination – even if both had benefited from this right in attaining their freedom.

In an exclusive joint piece in ‘Dawn’, former foreign secretaries, Inamul Haq, Riaz Hussain Khokar, and former NSA Mahmud Durrani have suggested alleviating US-Afghanistan concerns regarding alleged sanctuaries being used by the Afghan Taliban and the need to “rethink our (Afghan) Taliban policy”. Emphasising the need to “do all that we can to prevent (the) use of our territory for militant activities inside Afghanistan and take visible measures for this purpose”.

They want the “suggested declaration” to be made “preferably as a part of the Prime Minister’s UNGA’s speech”. Wondering “why is it that Pakistan has ended up always siding with the most regressive elements in Afghanistan”, the seasoned diplomats have cautioned against the “pretensions of influence with the Taliban leadership”, falling “in the insidious Afghan ethnic divide” and asked to be “firm with the likes of Haqqani group”, some of whom “we falsely regarded as (strategic) assets”.

The wise men of have observed that “nothing will help India more than an evidence of outside extremist elements blending with the indigenous Kashmiri uprising to justify its extreme violence in Indian-held Kashmir and its aggressive posture against Pakistan”. The basic point is that these two nuclear-armed neighbours cannot afford a break in communication.

The purpose of quoting the joint position of three foreign secretaries and a national security adviser is that even those who had played an important role in the formulation of foreign and security policies or had observed them from within the establishment have asked for a reversal of the course that pushed us into a blind alley. They must be heeded.

The writer is a senior journalist.

Email: imtiaz.safma@gmail.com

Twitter: @ImtiazAlamSAFMA