Time to shun the past

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/14-time-to-shun-the-past-01

At the heart of Pakistan’s foreign and security policies lies India and at the heart of our India policy lies Kashmir, Pakistan’s jugular vein as the country’s founder described it.

Kashmir has bedeviled Pakistan-India relations, is the source of insecurity and instability in the region and a cause of serious concern for the international community.

India reneged on its commitments to Pakistan, the United Nations and the Kashmiris to the holding of a plebiscite in the state. Six rounds of Bhutto-Swaran Singh talks, focused entirely on Kashmir, in 1962-3, proved inconclusive. The negotiations took place in the wake of India’s Himalayan debacle at the hands of China and on the serious prodding of the United States and Great Britain.

Having exhausted the path of diplomacy with an intransigent India, Pakistan embarked on a strategy to bring India to the table in a serious and meaningful engagement on the dispute. In 1965 Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar in a bid to get Kashmiris to rise against their Indian occupiers. That did not happen. Instead, Pakistan and India got involved in a full-scale war, which neither could afford. After 17 days both were exhausted.

Whatever implications the war might have had for India, its consequences for Pakistan were disastrous. The perceived economic growth that Pakistan had been enjoying for several years and which was widely quoted as a model for Third World countries came to an abrupt halt. Western sanctions were imposed on Pakistan; East Pakistanis were extremely disenchanted leading Mujibur Rahman to launch his six-point programme and the country was engulfed in political turmoil. Six years later Pakistan was embroiled in another war with India. Its outcome was the disintegration of the country.

The East Pakistan tragedy should have prompted an earnest and urgent review of our policy towards India. The security establishment, however, was successful in having recommendations of the Hamoodur Rahman Commission report, which called for the trial of Gen Yahya and his confederacy of generals, shelved. It also managed to have high priority assigned and substantial resources allocated to the rebuilding of the armed forces. After all, East Pakistan had to be avenged.

The military, once again, began to loom large in Pakistan’s politics leading to its logical conclusion. Not only was the democratic government overthrown in a coup d’état, but Pakistan’s most popular and accomplished prime minister was dispatched to the gallows.

The Indian factor again played a major role in Pakistan’s reaction to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The military dictator, who had usurped power on July 5, 1977, enthusiastically embraced the US which lent a new lease of life to his shaky and sanctioned government. The uni-dimensional military-based relationship with the US improved the military balance vis-à-vis India.

The victory of the Mujahideen against a superpower prompted him and his coterie of generals to (a) adopt the ‘strategic depth’ doctrine by ensuring that the new regime in Kabul should be so ingratiated to Pakistan as to invariably do its bidding; (b) employ the CIA-ISI Mujahideen model, successfully used in the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, against India in occupied Kashmir. The former strategy led to the emergence of the Taliban Frankenstein; the latter to such jihadi outfits as the Lashkar-i-Taiba, Jaish-i-Mohammad and the Harkat-ul-Ansar.

It did not take long for Al Qaeda, the Taliban and others to establish a nexus for the use of terror against their adversaries. Neither were the Taliban able to provide strategic depth, nor were the jihadis able to coerce India into settling the Kashmir dispute. The policy, in fact, dangerously backfired, with these battle-hardened and self-sustaining militants posing an existentialist threat to Pakistan itself.

As if the failure of our strategy was not enough of a setback, an emboldened military embarked upon a course that brought serious embarrassment and disgrace to the country. The overthrow in October 1999 of a legally constituted, democratically elected popular government was a direct consequence of the Kargil episode — once again the outcome of our policy of confronting India.

The multiple wars and skirmishes with India (futile at best) and the ensuing instability and insecurity in the region have adversely impacted on the internal political dynamics of Pakistan. The imbalance of a powerful military and a fragile democracy has seriously undermined the political process and impaired the healthy growth of civil institutions. The pursuit of highly ambitious and inherently unrealistic policies of ‘strategic depth’ and ‘coercive diplomacy’ have overstretched our limited resources and subjected our foreign relations to avoidable stresses.

A policy of confrontation with India — and its close cousins militancy and coup d’états — contains within itself the seeds of our destruction and must be avoided like the plague. It has become a millstone around our neck.

The real threat to Pakistan comes not from India, but from militant extremism. The second biggest source of instability emanates, also not from India, but from the widespread poverty and the low levels of human development that characterise our society. We need to divert the enormous time and resources that we continue to invest in our confrontation with India towards fighting militancy and getting rid of the all-pervasive poverty, ignorance and disease.

Pakistan’s history and its present precarious condition demand a serious and honest appraisal of its traditional India policy with the objective of establishing a close, cooperative and tension-free relationship. Realpolitik and sound common sense dictate that Pakistan and India should live in peace and friendship.

The proposed change in our India policy is not tantamount to an acceptance of India’s hegemony. On the contrary, an economically vibrant, politically stable, socially cohesive nuclear Pakistan with 170 million economically empowered, healthy and educated citizens should be able to exude enough confidence and maturity to deter any entity contemplating domination.