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- May 25, 2010
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Kashmir a symptom, America part of the problem
If President Obama really wanted to help India's relations with Islamabad, he would rethink US support for Pakistan's military
US President Barack Obama's offer to help Prime Minister Manmohan Singh find a solution to the Kashmir dispute is unquestionably well-intended. But it reveals, unfortunately, Washington's over-simplified view of India-Pakistan relations.
The United States wants the two Asian neighbours to have peaceful relations, so that Islamabad can concentrate its energies on counter-terrorism activities along the Afghan border. But that does not mean, Obama has assured, that Washington will "impose a solution to Kashmir". He has merely shown willingness to mediate, if the two countries so desire.
Obama's pitch is gentle, but naive. It mistakenly assumes that Kashmir is the main bone of contention between the two nations, and that the Pakistani government of President Asif Ali Zardari is at the helm of Islamabad's policy towards India.
The continual anti-India aggression of the Pakistan army and the Inter-Service Intelligence agency (ISI) is fuelled not so much by their love for Kashmir, as by their craving for revenge for defeat in the war of 1971 which led to the secession of Bengali-speaking East Pakistan as the independent nation of Bangladesh, with India's help.
So, a solution to Kashmir which seems a distant possibility as of now will make little difference in tension between India and Pakistan. Not even if the solution were to involve New Delhi ceding control of Indian-administered Kashmir to Islamabad an outcome next to impossible.
President Obama presumably thinks that Washington's relations with Islamabad will enable him to help resolve tensions. In fact, US military and financial aid to Islamabad has, if anything, only emboldened the Pakistan army to challenge India's security forces.
Above all, it is Pakistan's military and the ISI and not the civilian government that have been the force behind Pakistan's foreign policy towards India. Apart from avenging the 1971 war, the military and intelligence establishments need to project India as a threat in order to maintain their hegemony even after the formal end of military rule in 2008. This explains the assistance of Pakistani intelligence for terror groups, such as Lashkar e Taiba, that have carried out attacks in India. An army's importance is proportional to the level of threat from an "enemy": a destabilised and militarised India suits that agenda.
This also explains why terrorist attacks in India often follow major peace initiatives between the two countries' governments. For example, when former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee began peace efforts and cross-border trade with Pakistan in 1999, the then army chief, General Pervez Musharraf, was naturally not pleased with it. He is believed to have planned the May-July 1999 war in Kargil, in Indian-administered Kashmir, which was triggered by the infiltration of Pakistani soldiers and Islamist militants over the Indian side of the border.
Showing some resilience, New Delhi continued to run the Delhi-Lahore bus service started by Vajpayee in February 1999, a sign of the two nations' resolve to foster peace and prosperity. Then followed a terror attack on India's parliament building in December 2001, which forced New Delhi to halt the symbolic bus service. More recently, the November 2008 Mumbai attacks came soon after Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari had made pro-India statements and friendly gestures. Zardari had said that India was not a threat to Pakistan, and that the real danger came instead from the terrorists at home.
Strangely, though it should know better, India's policy towards Islamabad does not reflect realities in Pakistan. New Delhi often refuses to participate in bilateral talks with Islamabad, accusing it of supporting terror groups as it makes no official distinction between Pakistan's civilian government and the military establishment; nor does it accept that Pakistan's government and people are also victims of terrorism.
So, the conflict in Kashmir is merely a subplot in this larger drama. Unless Washington and New Delhi show themselves capable, as the world's two largest democracies, of acknowledging their respective failures in achieving their strategic interests in Pakistan, then they are each in the situation of enabling the other's delusion
