While the Obama administration jostles with the AfPak problem, for India the problem has been just a "Pak" one. Our Pakistan policy, more often than not, in fact pretty much all the time in recent years, has alternated between pappi jhappi diplomacy and sullen cussedness. Even our best analysts dont get the point usually..
Here is a perfect case in point.
C Raja Mohan is otherwise one our brightest strategic thinkers. But as this article, pretty much symptomatic of his "line" shows, we dont yet grasp the nub of the issue. And that is the undeniable fact that Pakistan is a problem state that is destined to remain a migraine (in Hillary Clinton's words) for the world. Like all migraines, it can only be "managed", not "cured".
And managing Pakistan is not about bestowing "normality" to our engagement with it, it is about maintaining an "unbalanced equilibrium" for the Pakistani state, at all times. A Pakistan that is relatively "stable" is one that will be prompted to mount the most debilitating adventures, specifiically at India, but generally also at the rest of the world. It was a relatively "stable" Pakistan, one after Ayub Khan's "Golden decade", that launched Ops Gibraltar and Grand Slam. It was a relatively stable Pakistan under Nawaz Sharif that mounted Kargil. It was a relatively stable Pakistan under Benazir Bhutto's second regime that carried out the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. If a stable Pakistan can be such a headache, imagine what a really "strong, prosperous" Pakistan will be tempted to do?
A Pakistan that is constantly fighting its own ghosts, one that is perpetually engaged in an internal "mortal combat", but remaining just off the precipice thanks to global efforts (mostly dollars and some American military "advice") - that is a Pakistan that would be in the least propitious position to mount a serious challenge on India.
A Pakistan in a state of eternal crisis will also mean a defunct and derelict proxy for China in South Asia. It frees up the grand strategic space for India to craft its own vision of the South Asian region and play the Central Asian "great game" without being boxed in by a pretender in South Asia.
The foreign policy near consensus that a "strong and stable Pakistan is in our best interests" is therefore at best woolly sentimentalism and at worst lazy conformance to Western idioms.
The most obvious qustion is, what about terrorism? an unstable Pakistan theoretically can be a more prlific exporter of terrorism than a stable one. First, the assumption is empirically unstable itself. Mumbai notwithstanding, the levels of violence in J&K plummetted by more than half in the last 2-3 years, coinciding with Pakistan's own escalation of the problem. Obviously there is a limit to fighting the Pakistani Taliban on one hand and supporting the LET on the other - even if it makes neat strategic sense, it would be difficult to operatinalise. Second, it was a "stable" Pakistan that created India's biggest insurgency problems, first in Punjab and then in Kashmir. An unstable Pakistani state today is having to pay lip service to countering the same terrorism, and therefore earning the wrath of their own Islamist proxies. Again, the "unbalanced equilibrium" of the Pakistani state ensures less levels of terrorism for India, not more. third, and most importantly, we will best tackle terrorism from Pakistan only when we create a similar problem there. The Punjab insurgency was taken care of when India inflicted similar pain through a first class covert operation of sabotage and bomb blasts within Pakistan. It is to IK Gujral's eternal shame that the covert capabilities of RAW were wound down in his time. It is time for us to ramp up our capabilities of doing a "Kashmir" on Pakistan. More importantly, hit the establishment elites where it hurts most - in the Punjabi heartland.
Last, this whole concept of engaging various sections of the Pakistani society to achieve our goals is quite silly to be precise. Civil societies dont determine state policy, state actors do. In Pakistan, the state actors (the military primarily) are incorrigibly biased against the idea of India, and India's success only fuels fresh imagined grievances. Therefore, the only way to manage them is by managing them to a state of chaos that it is today, not to nudge them towards any level of normality.
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