Daily Times

Washington seems to be mulling over the idea of winning Pakistan’s cooperation in Afghanistan by helping it resolve its India problems. This is one of the options being looked at by the US strategists trying to find a way out of the 16-year long Afghanistan quagmire for America. The other options seem centred on forcing Pakistan into cooperation by denying it economic aid and sending drones deep into the country targeting terror hide-outs.

The self-induced fear of the US that nuclear weapons would easily fall into the hands of terrorists with the state of Pakistan presumably going into tail-spin as the punishment would take effect is said to be persuading these Trump administration strategists to try the India-Pakistan talk felicitation option first failing which the other harsher options could be employed.

But before this option is finalised and put into motion it would be prudent on the part of these US strategists to do a close reading of ‘Choices’, a book by Ambassador Shivshankar Menon who has served India as National Security Adviser to the Prime Minister (January 2010 to May 2014), as Foreign Secretary (October 2006 to July 2009) and also as his country’s High Commissioner to Pakistan (July 2003 to September 2006).

Ambassador Shivshankar Menon concedes that India ‘today lacks the power to solve its Pakistan problem,’ which he believed largely stemmed from Pakistan’s own condition

Though the book contains a huge treasure of useful information for those who wish to know how India looks at itself and at the outside world, particularly the region in which it is located and its global designs driven by its world power ambitions, it is essentially a dense book as it reads more like jumbled theses contained within the framework assigned by the Brookings Institution where the author is a Distinguished Fellow.

Suave and soft spoken High Commissioner Menon had three gruelling years in Islamabad as in that short period India had suffered a large number of terror attacks including the one on August 25, 2003 in Mumbai which took a toll of 52 lives, next on October 29, 2005 in which 70 lives were lost and third on July 11, 2006 in which 209 people died when a series of seven train bombings had occurred.

India had blamed all these attacks on Pakistan. The mood in our Eastern neighbour had seemingly gone too foul for Pakistan’s comfort. But High Commissioner Menon seemingly kept his cool and perhaps even kept an enraged New Delhi on a tight leash through the ministry of external affairs. I suspected as much at that time because at the reception he had hosted to celebrate India’s independence day on August 15, 2006 I asked him in an understandably worried tone for his opinion on how the anger in India at the July bombings was going to affect the on- going normalization process between our two countries. His answer in a tone icy calm to a fault: Mr Ziauddin we are not going to let the terrorists dictate our foreign policy. We will not let such incidents derail the normalization process.

So, one can imagine the extent of my surprise when I came to the passage in ‘Choices’ where he says (page 91): “For me Pakistan had crossed a line (26/11), and that action demanded more than a standard response. My preference was for overt action against LeT headquarters in Muridke or the LeT camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and covert action against their sponsors, the ISI.”

His suggestion was not accepted and instead India according to the book successfully exploited the incident to its own strategic advantage on the international front.

Menon concedes (page 108) that India-Pakistan relations ‘are one of the few major failures of Indian foreign policy.’

Taking a deeper look into the problem at one point (page 111) he further concedes that India ‘today lacks the power to solve its Pakistan problem,’ which he believes largely stemmed from Pakistan’s own condition.

He seems to be throwing up his hands in despair as he recalls (page 113-14) that on each occasion when’ we had a chance to change the unsatisfactory trajectory of India-Pakistan relations — the signing of the India-Pakistan Simla Agreement in July 1972, Rajiv Gandhi’s 1988 visit to Pakistan, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s visits in 1999 and 2004 and the 2004-07 process led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — domestic politics with not a little help from the great powers, has prevented us from changing that relationship.’

Further down he says: “In the forty-odd years since the Simla Agreement was signed, in July 1972, India and Pakistan have fallen into repetitive pattern or dance of their own. They engage in talks, the terms of which are the same, whether they are called a composite dialogue or by any other name, and during the talks some progress is achieved and small steps are taken, arousing popular enthusiasm and warmth. The moment there is a real prospect of major issues being solved, however, there is a big disruption, most often a terrorist incident or attack, and then the negotiations start the cycle all over again, first tentatively and then a little more surely. That stage of tentative beginning seems to be where we are again in late 2015.”

When it is time to revise the edition, perhaps the author would ruefully state that even the 2015 beginning went the way the previous ones did. Dictated by terrorism?

He asserts that for this pattern to be broken, something fundamental has to change in what creates this cycle in India, in Pakistan, in the environment. He says many have tried to disrupt the cycle, and all have failed. For him the one that came closest was Prime Minister Singh in 2004-06. Blaming what he terms as ‘Pakistan’s secular decline into irrelevance’ he warns Indian motives to address India-Pakistan issues were diminishing which he thinks is bad news. He contends that Pakistan was increasingly becoming a single issue country in Indian discourse, ‘and that issue is the zero-sum one of security’. He calls this a tragedy. As a result, it is harder and harder, he believes, to interest a young and aspirational Indian public outside the Punjab (and its colonies, such as Delhi) in the relationship with Pakistan.

So the foreign policy of an India with great power ambitions continues to refuse not to be dictated by New Delhi’s self-serving notion of terrorism.

The writer is a senior journalist based in Islamabad. He served as the Executive Editor of Express Tribune until 2014

Published in Daily Times, June 23rd, 2017.