Following the slow-moving peace process between India and Pakistan can be a bit like watching paint dry.  So the decision by the head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency to attend an iftar hosted by the Indian High Commission in Islamabad this week has generated much excitement.

“Lieutenant-General Shuja Pasha was among the earliest guests to arrive at the maximum-security five-star Serena hotel. He stayed nearly 45 minutes, chit-chatting with guests,” wrote Nirupama Subramanian, correspondent for The Hindu in Islamabad. “This was the first time that a serving military official, let alone the head of the country’s most important intelligence agency with a well-known dislike for India, has attended an Indian event here.”

Everyone agreed it was a positive development, she wrote. “It’s a huge gesture by him,” she quoted the former ISI Director-General, Lt.-Gen. (retd.) Asad Durrani as saying. “A very positive development.” Another former soldier, Lt.-Gen. (retd.) Talat Masood, said it was an indication that India-Pakistan relations were not as bad they looked. “It is very symbolic. It means things are improving between the two countries, and there are people who want it to improve in spite of all the tough talk going on.”

“A thaw,” said Pakistan People’s Party politician Aitzaz Ahsan.

Pakistan’s Daily Times called it “a rare gesture of goodwill”. The News described it as “a milestone in India-Pakistan relations”.

Even B. Raman, formerly from India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), welcomed the move.  Arguing in favour of a dialogue between Indian intellgence agencies and the ISI, he writes: “Whether Lt.Gen.Pasha responded to an invitation personally addressed to him or whether he represented (Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq) Kayani, who himself did not want to come, the presence of the ISI chief at the iftar reception is a significant gesture by the government of (Pakistan President Asif Ali) Zardari and has to be recognised as such. ”

“Even if a formal liaison relationship between the ISI and an appropriate Indian agency has not yet been established, India should not hesitate to take the initiative in suggesting it. An intelligence liaison relationship between two countries with an adversarial relationship can be a double-edged sword. It can be beneficial sometimes. It can also harm the national interests under certain circumstances. It is a risk well worth taking. Informal discussions between the intelligence chiefs of the two countries could produce better results than discussions between the two foreign secretaries on the issue of terrorism.”

The foreign secretaries, or top diplomats, of India and Pakistan are due to meet this month on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, ahead of a meeting between the two countries’ foreign ministers.

No breakthrough is expected in those talks in New York. India is insisting that Pakistan take tougher action against Pakistan-based militants suspected of involvement in last year’s Mumbai attacks before it resumes a formal peace process. And both countries have many in their domestic constituencies who would resist, or even sabotage, any moves towards peace.

But in the paint drying category, the presence of the ISI head at the iftar dinner was a step forward.

(Then again, here are a couple of stories which suggest more trouble ahead, on which more later:

India protests China-assisted dam in Pakistani Kashmir:

  http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-protests-dam-construction-in-Pak-Kashmir/H1-Article1-452793.aspx

Pakistan to take up Kashmir, Afghanistan issue before UN:

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/06-pakistan-to-take-up-kashmir-afghanistan-issue-before-un-rs-05

(Reuters pictures: The Taj Mahal in Agra and mosque in Lahore)

Some people in India are calling upon the new coalition government to make a series of bold moves towards Pakistan that will compel the neighbour to put its money where  the mouth is.

If Pakistan keeps saying that it cannot fully and single-mindedly go after militants on its northwest frontier and indeed increasingly within the heartland because of the threat it faces from India, then New Delhi must call its bluff, argued authors Nitin Pai and Sushant K. Singh in a recent piece for India’s Mint newspaper.

How about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, back for a second term, giving a categorical public declaration that Pakistan need not fear an Indian military attack so long as the Pakistan army is engaged in fighting with Taliban militants?  While a verbal commitment may not convince the military brass in Rawalpindi, it will likely play well in Washington as it rathchets up pressure on the Pakistan army to take the battle to the militants.

Second and to back up its assurance, India could move some of the army strike formations from the international border with Pakistan in Punjab and Rajasthan. “Such a bold, strategic move will not only make India’s verbal assurances credible, but it will also immediately result in irresistible pressure on the Pakistani army to commit more of its troops to the western border,” the authors wrote in the Mint piece.

Clearly, the aim of such a peace gamble is to expose the contradiction within the Pakistani position, force them to either go full throttle after militant groups, some of whom are suspected to be tied to its intelligence agencies, or  face America’s wrath.

Moving Indian troops back will compel the Pakistan army to act against the Taliban, and because it is incapable of doing so, will cause the United States to realise that there is no alternative to dismantling the military-jihadi complex, Pai and Singh argue.

Taking out Pakistan’s military-jihadi establishment is really what the battle in Pakistan is all about - that is the refrain you hear incessantly in the strategic establishment in New Delhi  as I did during a visit over the past few weeks, and one you can be sure it will be telling U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expected to visit sometime in July.

But in the immediate future, is such a bold gamble as troop pullback really going to work?
Two issues. One, what about Kashmir ? No pullback is proposed on Kashmir where tens of thousands of troops are massed on both sides of the Line of Control, and according to some Pakistani experts this really is where is there should be a re-deployment of forces.

Ejaz Haider in a piece for Pakistan’s Daily Times, says the bulk of India’s military deployment  iscentred on Pakistan, with 7 of the army’s 13 corps “specific to Pakistan.”  In any case, given that the Pakistan army’s numerical strength is half that of India, the deployment of the Pakistan army along the eastern frontier is much thinner than India’s.

And if Pakistan does not face the threat of a hot war from India as everyone keeps telling it, Haider says, then India too does not face that prospect.

“If Pakistan is asked by the US and other western capitals on the basis of this argument to pull out troops from the eastern border and deploy them to the west, then perhaps India should also be called upon to thin its much-heavier Pakistan-specific deployment along the international border, the Line of Control, the working boundary and the actual ground position line,” he says.

But can the Indian army really thin out of Kashmir? At this point when the threat of infiltration of militants from Pakistan is again being talked about?

And finally does Singh, even with a stronger parliamentary support after a general election, really have the people’s endorsement of cutting back troops from the Pakistan frontier. The wounds from the 26/11 attack on Mumbai for which the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba has been held responsible, remain fresh for a large number of Indians.  They are not in a mood to forgive or forget.

[Photos of Indian and Pakistani troops at a border checkpoint and the site of a car bombing in Lahore on May 27)

The United States has begun demanding rather publicly that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence make a clean break of its ties with the Afghan Taliban to help stabilise the situation in Afghanistan.

But can you force a country to act against its self-interest, despite all all your leverage, asks Robert D. Kaplan  in a piece for the Atlantic. And does it make sense for an intelligence agency to break off all contact with arguably the biggest player in the region?

Since President Barack Obama placed Pakistan at the centre of his strategy to fight the Afghan war, the debate over the ISI has gotten more open and more heated. Some Pakistani officials and experts with links to the establishment have taken exception to the United States openly painting the spy agency in enemy colours, accusing elements within it of supporting the Talibam.

Kaplan argues that Pakistan’s geography as well as a history of instability makes it almost impossible for it to cut ties to the radical Islamists. Pakistan and Afghanistan have a long and unruly border and that alone would make it necessary for security agencies to build a network of contacts with the principal players in Afghanistan.

On top of that, Pakistanis tend to see Afghanistan through the prism of the country’s unending conflict with India. “When they look to the west they envison an “islamisation” of Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries with which to face off against Hindu-dominated India to the east,” Kaplan writes.

So just as Israel will not scale back settlements in the occupied territories, frustrating U.S. peace efforts, or South Korea will from time to time extend an olive branch to North Korea, undermining U.S. efforts to contain the communist state, Pakistan, another one of America’s allies is not going to act against its core interest, he says. You can tell Pakistan to stop helping the Taliban plan and carry out operations, but you can’t tell them to cut links to the militant group altogether.

But isn’t Pakistan itself threatened by the Taliban? “Quetta Burns. Karachi on Edge. Islamabad on Alert”  ran a headline on the popular blog All Things Pakistan. Author Adil Najam says he wouldn’t recommend reading Pakistani newspapers for the faint-hearted. It’s a perfect storm, and if this doesn’t threaten Pakistan’s core interest what does?

[A protest in Karachi and Pakistan Prime Minister Gilani with chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committe John Kerry]

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has put out a paper on the need to reform Pakistan’s intelligence agencies just as army chief General Ashfaq Kayani is winning much praise for playing what is seen as a decisive role in defusing the country’s latest political crisis and saving democracy.

French scholar Frederic Grare says in the paper the reform and “depoliticisation” of the agencies, in particular the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is imperative.

Grare says there is no magic formula to transform overnight an authoritarian regime into a full-fledged democracy but says there’s no excuse for the government to sit on its hands (”patience should not be an alibi for inaction”).

(more…)

America’s ramped-up Predator drone campaign against al Qaeda in Pakistan’s northwest is starting to pay off, according to U.S. and Pakistani intelligence authorities quoted in a clutch of media reports.

Eleven of the group’s top 20 “high value targets” along the Afghan border have been eliminated in the past six months  Newsweek magazine reports, citing Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The strikes by the unmanned drones circling high above Pakistan’s rugged tribal areas have been so pin-pointed that in one case a missile fired at a hideout in North Waziristan didn’t just hit the right house, but the room in which Mustafa al-Misri (”Mustafa the Egyptian”) and several other Qaeda operatives were holed up. the magazine reports, quoting a Taliban sub-commander.

A U.S. counter-terrorism official goes so far as to suggest that the CIA-directed strikes have been so successful that it was possible to foresee a “complete al Qaeda defeat” in the mountainous region , according to this report in America’s National Public Radio.

Is that stretching the gains,  a bit too triumphalist a picture?

Al Qaeda’s leadership cadre had been “decimated” with up to a dozen senior and mid-level operatives killed as a  result of the strikes and the remaining leaders reeling from the attacks, U.S. officials say in the NPR report, adding achievements of the past several months should not be under-stated.

“In the past, you could take out the No. 3 al-Qaeda leader, and No. 4 just moved up to take his place,”  NPR quoted a U.S. official as saying. “Well, if you take out No. 3, No. 4 and then 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, it suddenly becomes a lot more difficult to revive the leadership cadre.”

(more…)

Shortly after the Mumbai attacks, I asked whether India faced a trial of patience in persuading Pakistan — with help from the United States — to take action against the Islamist militants it blamed for the assault on its financial capital. India’s approach of relying on American diplomacy rather than launching military action led to some  soul-searching among Indian analysts when it failed to deliver immediate results.  But is it finally beginning to bear fruit?

Former Indian diplomat M K Bhadrakumar writes in the Asia Times that diplomatic efforts over the Mumbai attacks are entering a crucial phase. ”After having secured New Delhi’s assurance that India will not resort to a military strike against Pakistan, Washington is perceptibly stepping up pressure on Islamabad to act on the available evidence regarding the Mumbai attacks.”

Earlier this week, Pakistan admitted that the lone surviving Mumbai gunman, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, was a Pakistani. The head of Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services intelligence or ISI, also gave a conciliatory interview to German magazine Der Spiegel.  Lieutenant-General Ahmad Shuja Pasha ruled out the possibility of war with India. “We may be crazy in Pakistan, but not completely out of our minds. We know full well that terror is our enemy, not India,” Dawn newspaper quoted him as saying.

(more…)

India continues to turn up the heat on Pakistan for the Mumbai attacks, declaring once again on Wednesday that all options were open to disrupt militant networks operating from there. And this, a day after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said official agencies must have been involved in an operation of such sophistication, a serious charge by a head of government against another state.

But is India really in a position to make good its threats against Pakistan ? The question has repeatedly come up here on this blog and elsewhere since those attacks on November 26 and now in the light of  Israel’s Gaza operation, some people are again asking why New Delhi cannot carry out punitive strikes inside Pakistan.

 Tunku Varadarajan, writing in Forbes magazine, advances five reasons why India can’t do a Gaza on Pakistan. 1) India is not a military goliath in relation to Pakistan in the way Israel is to the Palestinian territories with its overwhelming military superiority. Pakistan for all is dysfunction is a proper country  with a proper army and with nuclear weapons to boot. “Any assault on Pakistani territory carries with it  an apocalyptic risk for India.”

(more…)

It has been a tense game of poker between India and Pakistan since the Mumbai attacks. On the face of it, India had the much stronger hand -- not least because it captured one of the attackers alive and got him to confess to being trained in Pakistan.

But has it played its cards well?

Some analysts say India overplayed its hand in the initial days after the attack by saying the military option remained open.

That allowed Pakistan to cloud the issue and raise the spectre of an Indian military strike -- neatly uniting the country behind the army and against India.

One former foreign secretary told me India had made a mistake on those initial days, by making a threat it was not prepared to carry out and allowing Pakistan the chance to play the victim.

Since then, New Delhi has been much more restrained and cautious in what it has said, admirably so according to diplomats and analysts I have spoken to. On Monday it presented its carefully complied dossier of evidence to Pakistan and other countries.

But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh raised the stakes again this week by suggesting that the Pakistani "agencies" must have known about and supported the plan to attack Mumbai.

Pakistan has once again pounced on this claim, accusing Singh of engaging in a propaganda war.

Last year India had the backing of the U.S. in its allegation that the ISI was involved in the attack on its embassy in Kabul.

But this time around, diplomatic sources say New Delhi has yet to prove to them that the ISI was involved.

"In their oral presentation, Indian officials told the envoys of their belief that the ISI was indeed involved in the incident," Siddharth Varadarajan wrote in the Hindu newspaper.

"Thought his claim was not contested, at least one nation, the United States, has told India it is still not in a position to share this perception."

I wonder now if Singh might have overplayed his hand again. Should he have stuck to what can be proved in a court of law, so that he retains the moral high ground and gives Pakistan no room to wriggle out?

Or is he simply saying what everybody knows -- that the ISI has links to extreme Islamist groups and must have at least known this attack was being planned?

Do read this piece by Gurmeet Kanwal, the head of the Indian Army’s Centre for Land Warfare Studies, about how India should respond to the Mumbai attacks with covert operations against Pakistan.

He says that ”hard military options will have only a transitory impact unless sustained over a long period. These will also cause inevitable collateral damage, run the risk of escalating into a larger war with attendant nuclear dangers and have adverse international ramifications. To achieve a lasting impact and ensure that the actual perpetrators of terrorism are targeted, it is necessary to employ covert capabilities to neutralise the leadership of terrorist organisations.”

But he also argues that India’s covert capabilities in Pakistan were wound down on the orders of the Prime Minister in 1997 so as to promote reconciliation. “If that is true, a great deal of effort will be necessary to establish these capabilities from scratch. It will take at least three to five years to put in place basic capabilities for covert operations in Pakistan as both the terrorist organisations and their handlers like the ISI will have to be penetrated. The R&AW must be suitably restructured immediately to undertake sustained covert operations in Pakistan. The time to debate this issue on moral and legal grounds has long passed.”

Pakistan has long accused India of supporting militants in its Baluchistan province, among other places, in retaliation for what New Delhi sees as Pakistani support for separatist movements in Punjab, the north-east, and in Kashmir. But for a democratic government, the value of covert operations is limited. India’s Congress-led government is under pressure now to show it is standing firm against the Mumbai attacks and (leaving aside ethical questions) you can’t achieve electoral popularity with covert operations.  That’s why it’s particularly interesting that someone like Gurmeet Kanwal would suggest them.

B. Raman, a former head of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) made similar points in an article he wrote in May 2002 in response to the attack on an Indian Army camp in Kaluchak.

“The situation we face today is due to the long neglect of the need for a carefully worked out counter proxy war doctrine to be implemented consistently, intelligently and with determination,” he wrote. ”Now is the time for formulating such a doctrine and implementing it — more covertly than overtly. A counter proxy war doctrine would provide space for both overt, correct state-to-state relations and simultaneously, covert undermining of the wielder of terrorism.”

I am not entirely sure what to make of this talk of covert operations rising above the surface. Does it imply there will be more covert operations? According to Gurmeet, India’s ability to run covert operations in Pakistan is hopelessly rusty, suggesting that Pakistan’s own accusations of Indian interference in Balochistan may be exaggerated. But then again, and to the credit of both India and Pakistan, few other countries in the world debate covert operations against each other so openly. 

My own experience – and this of course is limited to one person’s view – is that India and Pakistan understand each other rather better than appears to be the case, and certainly better than most countries outside South Asia understand either of them. So does that mean we are going to see more and more “messages” delivered to either side, in the form of covert operations, which only those inside the South Asian family can decipher?

(Reuters file photo of Indian troops on Siachen/Pawel Kopzynski)  

India’s governing Congress party’s unexpectedly good showing  in a clutch of state elections should  give Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a little more breathing space as he considers a response to Pakistan for the Mumbai attacks which New Delhi says were orchestrated from there.

Imagine a scenario in which the Congress had lost all five states whose results were announced this week (results from Jammu and Kashmir, the sixth state, will be released later this month). The knives would have been out both within his increasingly restless Congress party and from the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, which has targeted him for being soft on national security, running ads with blood splattered against a black background in the middle of the Mumbai siege.

In the event, the Congress took three of the five states, including Delhi, which though small was this  election seen as a bit of a barometer of middle-class India, the section perhaps most outraged by the Mumbai attacks. Ultimately, local issues appeared to have played a decisive role as they have in most elections especially in a democracy like India’s where a large number of people depend on the government for jobs, subsidies  and general patronage.

But the anger for the attacks remains, quite apart from the bread and butter issues. Singh himself  said as much, telling reporters in New Delhi last Friday that India feels a sense of hurt and anger as never seen before and was waiting for Pakistan to act.

{Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s HQ in Muridke, Pakistan. Photo by Reuters’ Mohsin Raza]

So what will he do now ? Stratfor says given the political and national security compulsions, it’s hard to  see a path that avoids Indian retaliation for the attacks New Delhi says were carried out by members of  the Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group suspected of close ties to Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence. (more…)