By Praful Bidwai
New Delhi: Six weeks after the Mumbai attacks, the Indian government is still floundering in search of a strategy to get Pakistan to crack down on Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and other extremists. Islamabad has finally admitted that Amir Ajmal Kasab is a Pakistani national—but only after unfairly sacking National Security Adviser Mahmud Ali Durrani for saying just that. Yet, important sections of the establishment continue to deny that the attacks were masterminded from Pakistan, which therefore must bring their perpetrators to justice. And while the danger of a military conflict breaking out has momentarily receded, it has certainly not disappeared. South Asia still stands close to a vortex of yet more violence and counter-violence.
The tragic irony of India’s strategic confusion is that it’s playing its diplomatic cards badly vis-a-vis Pakistan just when it has collected high-quality evidence of LeT’s role in the Mumbai attacks in a 69-page dossier, including vital details of real-time conversations from November 26 to 29 between the assailants and Pakistan-based top-level LeT operators.
Thus, a day after India officially presented the dossier to Pakistan, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh repeatedly accused Pakistan of complicity in the attacks and of using “terrorism as an instrument of state policy”. Speaking to a conference of Chief Ministers on internal security, he treated Pakistan as a homogeneous entity and charged it with “whipping up war hysteria” and said its “fragile” government, presumably including the civilian government, is responsible for the neighbourhood’s “uncertain security environment”: the “more fragile a government, the more it tends to act in an irresponsible fashion”.
This runs counter to the rationale of the India-Pakistan peace process and the very logic of a Joint Anti-Terrorism Mechanism, which has been active since March 2007. It also makes nonsense of New Delhi’s considered view, expressed in numerous briefings, that Pakistan’s civilian government is keen on friendly relations with India and on acting against jehadi terrorists, and needs to be supported, as do all moderate elements in that country.
Dr. Singh adduced no concrete evidence to prove the Pakistan government’s active involvement in the Mumbai attacks. His charges were based on a general political assessment, surmise or inference, similar to that drawn by Home Minister P Chidambaram, who told a TV channel that “in a crime of this size and scale, I will presume that it was state-assisted until the contrary is proved. I will draw an adverse inference…”
Such inference fits past patterns in which the ISI diabolically instigated terrorist violence in Kashmir and Afghanistan while practising “plausible deniability”. It may well hold true of Mumbai too, although there are equally persuasive hypotheses that suggest that the ISI’s role may be confined to intelligence-sharing or logistical support. At any rate, the truth of the assessment has to be specifically established in Mumbai’s case. Dr .Singh got carried away in levelling a serious charge based on a surmise not backed by solid proof.
Merits apart, this speaks of serious policy incoherence. If India’s objective, as Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon put it, is to get Pakistan to cooperate in investigating LeT’s links to the crime “at its end”, including the planning, financing and organising of the operation, then it’s counterproductive to point fingers at Pakistan in ways which would put up the back of even the civilian government. If the goal is to discredit Pakistan in the eyes of the world, then it’s pointless to share the dossier with it.
This incoherence is partly explained by New Delhi’s frustration with Pakistan’s stonewalling tactics and attempt to divert international attention from Mumbai to the dangers of an India-Pakistan war. But this response isn’t mature. Contrary to the view that Pakistan has “won the first round” in the post-Mumbai contestation, the world still remains focused on the attacks, not least because of their use of guns in public places, scale and ruthlessness.
Another problem is sheer ineptitude. India has been publicly making demands upon Pakistan to surrender a varying number (between 25 and 42) of extremists, including recent fugitives and Khalistani terrorists active in the 1980s—without having the legal forum or means to enforce these, for instance through an extradition treaty.
The Mumbai attacks are an ideal case for the International Criminal Court, which was created precisely to try such grave crimes. But India and Pakistan have refused to sign the Treaty of Rome creating the ICC on unconvincing, narrowly nationalist grounds. India can also invoke the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation’s anti-terrorism convention of 1987, and the Additional Protocol of 2004. But India hasn’t done this either.
Pakistani leaders mulishly deny that the Mumbai attacks were directed from Pakistan, and more broadly, that its government bears responsibility for India’s security. Even a cursory look at the dossier should reveal a rich body of unimpeachable evidence, including GPS (global positioning system) and satellite telephone signatures; transcripts of conversations between the attackers and their handlers; photographs of arms with Pakistani markings; use of virtual telephone numbers generated over the Internet; and the associated money trails involving US company Callphonex and a certain “Kharak Singh”.
It’s futile for the Pakistan government to deny that this evidence is strong enough to bear scrutiny in the courts of any civilised country. The whole world knows that it’s the self-proclaimed goal of LeT and similar groups to attack civilians in countries like India and undermine their governments. Indeed, that’s the purpose with which the Lashkar was created.
But how does India convince or pressure Pakistan to act against LeT and dismantle the terrorist infrastructure that jehadi groups and secret state agencies have built? Theoretically, there are four ways of doing this: armed coercion, third-party mediation mainly through the United States, persuasive bilateral diplomacy, and multilateral intervention, primarily through the United Nations Security Council and related institutions.
The first option must be ruled out altogether because it is fraught with the grave danger of a Nuclear Holocaust. Indeed, it isn’t a feasible or practical option at any level. India’s conventional superiority over Pakistan isn’t great enough for Islamabad to want to avert war, leave alone compel it to yield to New Delhi’s demands. Besides, this option would play straight into the hands of al-Qaeda-Taliban, which wants an India-Pakistan conflict so that Pakistani troops can be moved away from the Afghanistan border. This would relieve pressure on the extremists, and allow them to regroup and overrun a hugely sensitive region that has become the epicentre of global terrorism.
India is investing heavily, but unwisely, into the second option—virtually outsourcing to the US its own responsibility to engage with Pakistan in the mistaken belief that Washington would somehow persuade/force Islamabad to act decisively against jehadi extremists before they devour Pakistan. This assumes that Washington has a special relationship of such exceptional strategic proximity with India that it’s prepared to turn against or discipline Pakistan in the interests of fighting terrorism.
However, going by experience, Washington can act in ways that breed/promote terrorism, as it did in Afghanistan in the 1980s by recruiting the mujaheedin to fight the USSR. The US may not even be an honest broker between India and Pakistan. Rather, it will re-hyphenate them. Apart from the imbalance and myopia typical of US policy, there’s a huge risk in greater US involvement in this region. President-elect Barrack Obama plans to intensify the Afghanistan war by doubling the number of US troops. This will increase the US’s dependence on the Pakistan Army, and downgrade India’s anti-terrorist concerns.
Potentially, the most fruitful and wisest approach for India is serious bilateral diplomacy combined with a Security Council-centred multilateral strategy. Post-Mumbai, India and Pakistan have only conducted “megaphone diplomacy”. India should have used Track-II approaches and quietly engaged Pakistani officials at different levels, sharing with them, and confronting them with, evidence against LeT. But the Singh government has behaved as if Track-II can only work in peacetime, not during crises.
This is a fallacy. Various crises, including the Vietnam War and the US-USSR détente of the 1970s, show that Track-II is useful in emergencies too. Many of our senior officials, including Pakistan’s just-sacked NSA, Gen Durrani, and India’s special envoy on Kashmir, Satinder Lambah, are Track-II veterans, who can still be drafted to talk to the relevant officials. It’s defeatist to believe that Pakistan’s policymakers can never be reasonable—unlike America’s.
The Security Council can also be approached under a slew of resolutions, from 1373 to 1566, which cast a duty on all states to act against terrorists, refuse to harbour them, and inform one another about their activities. Failure to do so can invite sanctions. If Pakistan fails to act, India can demand “smart sanctions”, which don’t punish ordinary people, such as suspension of military aid, travel bans on state functionaries, and monitoring of progress of Pakistan’s anti-terrorist actions.
Creative diplomacy is the need of the hour. Indian and Pakistani civil society groups have taken welcome initiatives to show that it’s both possible and necessary. The least our governments can do is to follow them.
- IPA
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