India-Pakistan dialogue must avoid seduction by daydreams

Reuters

Ensconced in his midtown Manhattan hotel suite, President Asif Ali Zardari imagined a summer where India-Pakistan peace was in full flower and the Generals had lined up at the borders holding out posies to the enemy. “India has never been a threat to Pakistan,” Zardari emphatically told the Wall Street Journal. He outlined his vision of “Pakistani cement factories being constructed to provide for India’s huge infrastructure needs, Pakistani textile mills meeting Indian demand for blue jeans, Pakistani ports being used to relieve the congestion at Indian ones”.

As daydreams go, it wasn’t a bad one.

In a Lashkar-e-Taiba safehouse in Karachi, though, Muhammad Ajmal Kasab and nine other Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists were making their preparations for 26/11. The bombs and bullets claimed the lives of at least 174 people in 2008—and destroyed years of secret negotiations between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and General Pervez Musharraf over Kashmir.

***

Ever since February, when India and Pakistan reinstated the 2003 Line of Control ceasefire agreement, speculation has mounted on what the next-steps in the peace process might be: Visas, cricket, Siachen, even, who knows, open borders in Kashmir? The optimism derives from the belief among many Indian and Western analysts that Generals like Pakistan’s army chief, Qamar Javed Bajwa, can do what politicians like Zardari or Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif could not.

Last week, the world was treated to a public performance illustrating just how wrong that assumption is. Prime Minister Imran Khan, in his capacity as Commerce Minister, pushed the Cabinet to resume cotton and sugar imports from India. Then, wearing his Prime Ministerial hat, Khan rejected his own proposal. There are no prizes for guessing why: the imports had been shut down as an—ineffectual—protest against India ending Kashmir’s special Constitutional status. Khan—and his backers in the Army—faced sharp criticism from within their own ranks.

The volte-face tells us that avoiding war isn’t quite the same thing as making peace. Inside Pakistan’s Army-dominated strategic establishment, there are deep divisions on the way forward, and what price the country ought be willing to pay for peace.

***

In 2018, as first revealed by News18, General Bajwa secretly reached out to New Delhi through the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate, hoping peace would help realise his plans to cut out-of-control defence expenditure, rein in jihadist groups who were undermining the country’s own polity, and avert military crisis that scared away badly-needed investors. The secret channel was interrupted—but not derailed—by the 2019 Balakote crisis.

General Bajwa wasn’t the first military commander to conclude that Pakistan’s strategic interests necessitated peace.

In 1999, General Pervez Musharraf destroyed Prime Minister Sharif’s dialogue with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, by initiating the Kargil War. General Musharraf gambled—wrongly—that his country’s nuclear weapons would allow the Pakistan Army to wage small wars that would bring pressure to bear on India to do a deal on Kashmir.

Following a coup, General Musharraf’s ISI brought about a sharp escalation in jihadist operations in Kashmir, leading to the attack on Parliament House in New Delhi—and a military crisis that ground on from 2001-2002.

Even though Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal did deter India from going to war in 2001-2002, they imposed economic asymmetric costs on the country. General Musharraf’s advisers and the United States now pushed him to wind up the jihad in Kashmir, and take on Islamist terror groups operating in the country’s North-West. Lieutenant-General Moinuddin Haider, Musharraf’s interior minister, told the scholar George Perkovich he had bluntly warned: “Mr. President, your economic plan will not work, people will not invest, if you don’t get rid of extremists.”

Facing a debt crisis, unable to address its underperforming economy, Pakistan simply cannot afford a crisis with India.

Those negotiations came to an end on 26/11. Few in New Delhi’s intelligence community believe the attacks could have taken place with the ISI’s approval, if not direct involvement.

General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani, General Musharraf’s successor as Army chief, believed the Kashmir peace plan would have opened up a dangerous rupture between the military and the jihadist proxies he had long nurtured. He also wanted to extricate the Pakistan Army from its internal wars with jihadists, the consequence of General Musharraf’s policies.

To ensure that the political leadership could not independently move forward on peace with India, General Kayani built a system in which the Army retained firm control of strategic issues, as well as a veto over major government policies. This marked a return to the system developed after General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq's assassination in 1988, which gave way to what the scholar and diplomat Hussain Haqqani has described as “military rule by other means”.

Hasan-Askari Rizvi, among others, has noted that under General Zia the army chief became the “pivot” for the political system. The army chief, in turn, derived his authority from the corps commanders who addressed “not only security, professional and organisational matters, but also deliberate on domestic issues”.

General Raheel Sharif’s term as Pakistan Army chief, from 2013 to 2016, saw the consolidation of this hybrid-state system. The ISI served as a kind of enforcer for its decisions. When Prime Minister Sharif sought to defy his Generals, and seek peace with India, his plans were sabotaged by the Pathankot and Uri terrorist attacks in 2016. The ISI was letting India know the Army, not the Prime Minister, called the shots.

Finally, Prime Minister Sharif was forced out of office, through an election in which institutions of administration as well as the courts were stacked to favour Prime Minister Khan.

Like every political system, though, Pakistan’s hybrid state isn’t without its internal strains. There have long been reports—made, most recently, by the United States diplomat Richard Olsen to scholar Shuja Nawaz—that former ISI chief Zahir-ul-Islam plotted to overthrow Sharif in 2014, without the knowledge of army chief General Raheel Sharif. Major-General Zahirul Islam Abbasi, Brigadier Mustansir Billa and the jihadist leader Qari Saifullah plotted a coup against former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in 1995, only to be foiled by the military and intelligence services.

General Bajwa knows the risks. He has made speeches calling for New Delhi and Islamabad to “to bury the past and move forward”—phrasing some have taken to mean he wants the Kashmir conflict to end. The choice, however, is not his alone.

There has been pushback from influential members of Pakistan’s strategic community, saying peace negotiations ought not move forward without concessions from India on Kashmir. No-one knows for certain how far other Generals back Bajwa.

Leaving aside the question of General Bajwa’s real intentions—a question his public speeches will not resolve—peace on the Line of Control makes sense for the Pakistan Army. Facing a debt crisis, unable to address its underperforming economy, and dependent on the uncertain mercies of the International Monetary Fund, Pakistan simply cannot afford crisis with India. New Delhi, for its part, learned that even small-scale conflicts, like the air battles after Balakote, can rapidly escalate to dangerous levels.

General Bajwa may well conclude peace on the border is no small prize in itself; the intractable business of Kashmir could well be left to a successor. This is not necessarily bad news: there are plenty of things to discuss, from measures to reduce the likelihood of war, to nuclear weapons risk-reduction.

In September, 2022—when General Bajwa is scheduled to retire, assuming Prime Minister Khan does not give him another extension—four Generals will be in line for succession: the current Chief of General Staff, Sahir Shamshad Mirza, 10 Corps commander Lieutenant-General Azhar Abbas, 11 Crops commander Lieutenant-General Nauman Mehmood and Faiz Hameed, Director-General of the ISI.

Lieutenant-General Hameed, named by Prime Minister Sharif as the man who orchestrated his removal from power, has been seen as General Bajwa’s likely successor. He is, however, seen as hawkish on India; some suspect, rightly or wrongly, that he had some role in the Pulwama attack, and does not back General Bajwa’s peace effort.

General Bajwa’s succession, thus, will give insight into what the Pakistan Army’s consensus on India in fact is. Until then, New Delhi would be wise to keep its expectations low, and avoid seduction by daydreams.