Daily Times

Two India Pakistan service chiefs, General Jehangir Karamat, former COAS (Pakistan), and Air Chief Marshal Shashi Tayagi have suggested a number of steps to implement Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) for the two archrivals (rather, de-hyphenated arch enemies) in a jointly written staff paper. I discussed that at some length in my previous piece (‘CBMs in South Asia’, Daily Times, May 14, 2012).

Written with much professional expertise, the paper leaves the CBMs and their implementation by India and Pakistan practically to exclude the interest and the role of extra-mural-powers, especially the US, in all matters concerning peace and war in the subcontinent.

The authors admit that CBMs are not the “panacea, if people (read government) want to have a conflict, CBMs will not prevent it.” Only “sober thoughts” could avoid “hair-trigger alerts” brought about by “lethal” weapons deployed close to the borders. However, sober thoughts are easier to commend than to adopt for action.

Lastly, the two countries are faced with two entirely asymmetrical situations geo-politically and militarily. Pakistan is faced with a war on terror assuming an existential threat to it as an organic, unified whole for an indeterminate length of time. It has an unpredictable and potentially hostile Afghanistan on one side, a not-too-friendly India and a churlish, impossible-to-satisfy US on the other.

India unfortunately has veered too close to the US and moved away from Pakistan more than ever in a regional, global mode. India, Afghanistan and the US make a trident, aimed at Pakistan. Even as a psychic, schizophrenic obsession, India-Pakistan peace remains a pawn to the emerging trident in a global/regional environment.

With India as one of the US’s most favoured strategic allies in the region and Afghanistan as a ‘major non-NATO ally’ in the subcontinent, no exclusive India-Pakistan peace initiative can attain its full flowering without an assenting nod from the US. In effect, it is more likely to be nipped in the bud. Whereas India is rightly viewed as the emerging power in South and Southeast Asia, Afghanistan has been known for its enduring mischief and negative potential vis-à-vis Pakistan. It did not hesitate to raise the ‘Pashtunistan’ bogey the day Pakistan was born, to stay in an unremittingly hostile mode against it ever since.

Now virtually as a protectorate of the US and an ally of India, it would see that no enduring CBMs between India and Pakistan had a smooth run without its finger in the strategic pie.

President Hamid Karzai views Afghanistan and India as ‘two countries or peoples linked to one another from the dawn of history’. His attitude towards Pakistan might as well be a re-birth of the dire anti-Pakistan stance of the Northern Alliance.

The opportunistically cobbled together and disparate Northern Alliance defeated the Taliban, forcing them into a disorderly retreat from Kabul after 9/11. Therefore, to expect any India-Pakistan prospective CBMs to have a smooth passage with a hostile Afghanistan on one side, an indignant US and its principal strategic ally and ever-obliging India on the other, would be little more than wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, this is not to reduce the value of any such initiatives. The question still remains as to how to translate a vision into reality. India and Pakistan developed ‘extensive’ CBMs over the years. The Simla Agreement of July 1972, the Islamabad Declaration of January 2004 signed by President Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee on the sidelines of the SAARC summit, the Nawaz Sharif-Vajpayee Lahore Declaration and Memorandum of Understanding February 1999 were some of the most definitive, peace accords — endorsed and signed at the highest executive level. Yet after a brief promising start, those had little to show for themselves, mainly for the woeful lack of mutual confidence within.

The Agra Summit remains about the sorriest example of a bold initiative collapsing on the bedrock of abiding mutual distrust. The failure of a peaceful solution of the Siachen issue arrived at between Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi in 1989 fell hostage to bad faith too. That was when India and Pakistan had been relatively free of today’s aggressively proactive role of the US and Afghanistan in the affairs of the subcontinent. The situation has practically reversed since the US’s virtual and continued occupation of Afghanistan with India’s tacit support.

The arbitrarily coined ‘Af-Pak’ term should now yield place to the India-Afghanistan-American (IAA) acronym in view of the emerging triangular axis.

What more could be illustrative of such an emerging triangular compact (trident) than the threat of keeping Pakistan out of the Chicago conference on Afghanistan?

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen had warned that Pakistan ‘could miss out on important Chicago talks for failing to reopen the supply line’ to secure a place in the coming talks. It is also to be hoped that Pakistan would not repeat the mistake of boycotting such summits like the last Bonn Conference. As I wrote, it had been a big mistake to let our case go by default. Now it is for Pakistan to decide for itself which alternative to choose.

In plain language, this would be like relegating Pakistan’s role in the Afghanistan war to a place of little or no importance to the future shape of things in the region. In practical terms, either to accept the ownership of the war on terror and get along with the US or to assert itself briefly only to submit at a later stage.

The crises since NATO’s unprovoked attack on our Salala post and military casualties could have been resolved sooner than allowed to develop to a point of no return at our cost. Such dire eventualities could be avoided only through a broad based national concord. Thus, the two service chiefs appeared to have acted like ‘the mole missed the beam’.

(Concluded)

The writer is a retired brigadier and can be reached at brigsiddiqi@yahoo.co.uk