Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has held out an olive branch to Pakistan by renewing an offer to talk, while also calling on it to take action against militants operating from its territory.  India’s Press and Information Bureau has the excerpts of a speech delivered in Kashmir. in which Singh held out “a hand of friendship” to Pakistan. It’s worth reading in detail because it was clearly carefully prepared, endorsed politically by Congress president Sonia Gandhi who accompanied the prime minister, and according to The Hindu newspaper. an attempt to advance the peace process with Pakistan. 

India and Pakistan, he said, had made progress in peace talks started in 2004, and had been able to open up trade and travel across the Line of Control (LoC), the ceasefire line dividing Kashmir. “These are not small achievements given the history of our troubled relationship with Pakistan.”

“However, all the progress that we achieved has been repeatedly thwarted by acts of terrorism. The terrorists want permanent enmity to prevail between the two countries. The terrorists have misused the name of a peaceful and benevolent religion. Their philosophy of hate has no place here. It is totally contrary to our centuries old tradition of tolerance and harmony among faiths.

“I strongly believe that the majority of people in Pakistan seek good neighbourly and cooperative relations between India and Pakistan. They seek a permanent peace. This is our view as well.

“The cross-LoC initiatives have been well received on both sides of the border. But I am also aware that they are not as people friendly as they could be. Trade facilities at the border are inadequate. There are no banking channels. Customs facilities need to be strengthened. There are no trade fairs. The lists of tradable commodities need to be increased. Clearances for travel take time. Prisoners of India and Pakistan are languishing in each other’s jails even after completing their sentences.

“The fact is that these are humanitarian issues whose resolution requires the cooperation of Pakistan. We are ready to discuss these and other issues with the Government of Pakistan. I hope that as a result things will be made easier for our traders, divided families, prisoners and travelers. For a productive dialogue it is essential that terrorism must be brought under control.

“We will press the Government of Pakistan to curb the activities of those elements that are engaging in terrorism in India. If they are non-state actors, it is the solemn duty of the government of Pakistan to bring them to book, to destroy their camps and to eliminate their infrastructure. The perpetrators of the acts of terror must pay the heaviest penalty for their barbaric crimes against humanity.”

India broke off peace talks after last year’s attack on Mumbai and has been reluctant to resume a formal peace process until Pakistan takes more action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group accused of involvement in the assault. But with Pakistan pursuing a military offensive against Pakistani Taliban militants in South Waziristan, and facing a wave of reprisal attacks across the country, action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba has been seen as dropping down the priority list, all the more so given that it is one of the few militant groups in the country not yet believed to have targeted the Pakistani state.

That has left both countries deadlocked at a time when the region is desperately in need of stability to stem an increase in violence and help ease tensions over rivalry between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan.

The Hindu said in an editorial that the speech in Kashmir might offer a way forward. ”What the Prime Minister has essentially done is to separate out the strands of the dialogue process as it existed prior to its suspension following the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 2008 and raised the possibility of forward movement on the ‘humanitarian’ strands even as substantive political engagement, or ‘productive dialogue’, must await the action that India has asked Pakistan to take against the camps and infrastructure of terrorist groups and other hostile non-state actors on its territory.”

If Pakistan acted against these groups, it said, then both countries could resume a peace process on Kashmir. ”And in the interim, as a demonstration of the two countries’ stated commitment to the welfare of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, discussions on making existing cross-LoC initiatives more ‘people friendly’ can begin more or less immediately.”

Can the prime minister’s gesture make a difference?

Pakistan welcomed the offer of talks, but a foreign ministry spokesman reiterated Pakistan’s position that the correct forum was the formal peace process or composite dialogue. India has so far refused to resume the composite dialogue.

And political separatists in Kashmir in the Hurriyat Conference are unlikely to want to open bilateral talks with the Indian government if there is no progress in improving relations between India and Pakistan.

While there is little sympathy for either India or Pakistan in the Kashmir Valley after two decades of separatist revolt, few believe that a solution to the long-running Kashmir dispute can be found with one country without the support of the other. And while that would not necessarily mean India and Pakistan sitting at the same table with representatives from Kashmir, there would still need to be some form of three-way dialogue to make progress.

The Pakistan government also has its hands full already without trying to work out how to respond to any Indian overture that might eventually require politically unpopular concessions at home.

That said, both countries have been trying to improve the mood ahead of an expected meeting between the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers on the sidelines of a Commonwealth summit in Trinidad in November.

Singh’s hand of friendship could help pave the way for a more productive meeting.

New Delhi said this week it will adopt "quiet diplomacy" with every section of political opinion to find a solution to the problems in India-ruled Kashmir about four years after it opened a dialogue with separatist groups there.

The response to the announcement is on expected lines -- the moderates welcoming it and pro-Pakistan hardliners reminding any effort at peace without involving Islamabad would be futile.

New Delhi has not yet made a formal offer for talks. But the timing of the development appears to be significant.

Violence is at a low in Kashmir, elections there were largely successful and last year's angry public protests against Indian rule have now subsided.

On the other hand, the security situation is at its worst in Pakistan and the war in Afghanistan appears to be in a decisive phase.

There is also growing realisation in Washington about the impact of the India-Pakistan rivalry on the Afghan war as pointed out in this Reuters analysis.

Pakistan has long demanded that resolution of the Kashmir dispute be made part of any effort to stabilise South Asia, a move strongly resisted by India.

The United States wants Pakistan to concentrate its military efforts on fighting the Taliban and other Islamist groups on its western border. For this Washington would like to see India and Pakistan reduce their tensions.

So could it be that international pressure was devolving on India to resolve the Kashmir issue and New Delhi's latest offer for talks was only aimed at deflecting that pressure by giving the impression that it was engaging with Kashmiris?

Or is it that the time is right to strike a deal with moderate Kashmiri groups? Does New Delhi believe that a Pakistan caught up in a vortex of bloody conflict would now be less attractive to the modern Kashmiri youth aware of India's rising financial and political stature in the world?

The Mint newspaper suggests if India hoped to settle the Kashmir issue it had to engage with those who want meaningful autonomy for the state and politically isolate the hardline pro-Pakistan groups

Clearly the need is for a solution that will be implementable on the ground in Kashmir and not a formula that only satisfies New Delhi and Islamabad.

Do you think New Delhi is finally moving towards that solution in right earnest?

(PHOTO: An Indian policeman stands guard after a grenade blast in Srinagar October 6, 2009. REUTERS/Danish Ismail)

A street vendor in Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, sold hundreds of framed portraits of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in the last one week.

Kashmiri separatists and many residents are all praise for Gaddafi after his maiden address to the U.N. General Assembly last week in which he said Kashmir should be an "independent state."

It was a diplomatic embarrassment for India but has Gaddafi's U.N. speech actually won him an enthusiastic fan base in strife-weary Kashmir where Muslim militants are fighting New Delhi's rule since 1989.

The Libyan leader told the U.N. General Assembly last week that Kashmir should be an independent state, not Indian, not Pakistani.

Last week, dozens of Kashmiris carried placards reading "Gaddafi The Lion of Desert II" referring to the 1981 Hollywood movie "Lion of the Desert", which is about Omar Mukhtar, who led the rebellion against Italian rule in Libya and was captured and hanged in 1931.

The movie on Omar Mukhtar encouraged rebellion in Kashmir in 1985. This is for the first time in recent times a Muslim leader outside the Indian sub-continent has advocated Kashmir's complete independence both from India and Pakistan.

The two countries claim the region in full but rule in parts.

Encouraged by the speech, separatist leaders say Gaddafi's statement in the U.N. General Assembly should serve as an eye-opener for Indian and Pakistani leaders.

Despite two wars over Kashmir, India and Pakistan have so far failed to find a solution to the more than six-decade-old dispute over Kashmir.

New Delhi has so far largely struggled to win the hearts and minds of the people of Kashmir, where anti-India sentiment still runs deep.

Gaddafi also opposed the expansion of the U.N. Security Council by including countries like India. New Delhi, which has downplayed Gaddafi's statement, has not yet reacted officially.

Has Gaddafi's U.N. speech on Kashmir's "freedom" won him foes in India and friends in Kashmir?

A single paragraph in General Stanley McChrystal’s leaked assessment of the war in Afghanistan has generated much interest, particularly in Pakistan.

“Indian political and economic influence is increasing in Afghanistan, including significant development efforts and financial investment,” it says. “In addition the current Afghan government is perceived by Islamabad to be pro-Indian. While Indian activities largely benefit the Afghan people, increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani counter-measures in Afghanistan or India.”

He did not say anything that anybody did not already know. Pakistan has long been wary of India’s growing influence in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and is seen as reluctant to turn against the Afghan Taliban and other insurgent groups as long as it believes it might need them to counter India. The fact that he said it all suggested a renewed focus on the relationship between India and Pakistan, whose confrontation to the east spilled long ago into rivalry over Afghanistan to the west.

Pakistan’s Daily Times said in an editorial the rivalry between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan highlighted the need for peace talks between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, which have fought three full-scale wars since independence in 1947, two of them over Kashmir.

“One must be clear in one’s mind that in many ways the mess in Afghanistan is actually a spillover of the Indo-Pak conflict in the region of South Asia,” it said. “Pakistan’s policy of “strategic depth”, which reached a climax with the hijacking of an Indian airliner to Kandahar in 1999, was in reaction to the unresolved dispute over Kashmir which created the “threat of India” that Pakistan felt “from the east”. Even today, as Pakistan struggles against the Taliban, 80 percent of its army is stationed on the Indian border.

Dawn newspaper said McChrystal’s words on India were ”perhaps as significant as any other in the report”.  The Americans appeared to have finally understood, it said, that the war in Afghanistan could not be won without help from Pakistan. “But that means gaining Pakistan’s full cooperation, which in turn means alleviating the national security establishment’s concerns vis-à-vis India.”

However, as discussed in this analysis, India is in little mood to move rapidly towards peace talks with Pakistan until it takes greater action against militants it blames for last year’s attack on Mumbai, although the two countries have been taking incremental steps towards repairing relations. Many argue that the powerful Pakistan Army would be unlikely to turn against militant groups it once cultivated to fight India in Kashmir, without a comprehensive peace settlement with India. (For an understanding of how complicated all this is, read this book reviewby Pakistani strategic analyst Ayesha Siddiqa.)

So, to win the war in Afghanistan, the United States needs help from Pakistan, which Pakistan in turn is reluctant to provide so long as it believes it is threatened by India to both the west and east.  From Washington’s point of view, it needs to nudge Islamabad and New Delhi towards the negotiating table, by leaning on Pakistan to act against militant groups and putting pressure on India to resume peace talks. 

Here is another catch. Although the relationship between the United States and India blossomed under former President George W. Bush, there is far less warmth in New Delhi towards the Obama administration. The relationship started on the wrong foot with India concerned about increasing U.S. economic dependence on its rival China.

Now India and the United States are at loggerheads over President Barack Obama’s nuclear non-proliferation drive.  India has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That row, in turn, complicates efforts by Washington to persuade India to talk to Pakistan.

(Reuters file photos: Obama with Karzai and Biden; a British soldier in Afghanistan; hijacked Indian Airlines plane in Kandahar)

Following up on my earlier post about what is happening behind the scenes in the fraught relationship between India and Pakistan, it’s worth keeping track of this report that Islamabad is considering appointing former foreign secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan to handle the informal dialogue with New Delhi known as “backchannel diplomacy”.

As discussed in this story there has been much talk about trying to get the backchannel diplomacy between India and Pakistan up and running again, both to reduce India-Pakistan rivalry in Afghanistan and to prevent an escalation of tensions between the two countries themselves.  So any forward movement on the backchannel diplomacy, if confirmed, would be important.

To recap (and with apologies to those who already know this), India and Pakistan have many different ways of engaging with each other.  They have a formal peace process known as the composite dialogue, started in 2004 and broken off by India after last November’s attack on Mumbai.  India has said it will not resume the composite dialogue until Pakistan takes more action against those accused of involvement in Mumbai.

Then there are Track II talks, in which politicians, journalists, administrators and others on both sides of the border meet in a private capacity to try to promote understanding between India and Pakistan.

Senior politicians also have a habit of holding bilateral meetings on the fringes of international conferences, as happened when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met President Zardari in Russia in June and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani in Egypt in July. The foreign secretaries, or top diplomats, of both countries are also expected to meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this month, ahead of a meeting between the foreign ministers.

But of all the different ways that India and Pakistan have found to engage with each other, the backchannel diplomacy carried out away from the glare of the media has arguably been the most successful. In 2003, the two countries agreed a ceasefire on the Line of Control dividing disputed Kashmir, and extended it to Siachen, where the two countries had fought a high-altitude war since 1984.

In 2007, Satinder Lambah, a special envoy to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and Tariq Aziz, envoy to then president Pervez Musharraf, etched out a set of principles meant to allow them to work towards a resolution of the Kashmir dispute (Praveen Swami at The Hindu gives the details here.)

I’m told there is no evidence the deal would ever have worked - many crucial details had yet to be negotiated. And since the backchannel talks were held in secret, it has always been unclear whether either country could win over domestic constituencies which might resist or sabotage any peace deal. But the backchannel diplomacy, and the intellectual space it opened up even to consider an agreement on Kashmir, functioned as an important ”shock absorber” between two nuclear-armed countries which have already fought three full-scale wars since independence in 1947.

The tentative “roadmap” agreement fell apart as Musharraf’s own political fortunes deteriorated, and the backchannel talks have yet to find their feet again in any kind of structured format.

The signs are that many other informal discussions are going on. As discussed here, the Pakistan Army has moved a significant number of troops away from its eastern border with India to fight the Pakistani Taliban on its western border with Afghanistan. The head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) broached what is effectively Indian territory by attending an iftar at the Indian High Commision in Islamabad. And the Indian government is trying to work out how to engage the Hurriyat, the main political separatist group in Kashmir, and that is something it can only do with Pakistani acquiescence.

But these informal contacts have lacked the structure of the backchannel diplomacy, whose main aim was to work out a way towards peace.

Until this week, it was unclear who would handle the backchannel diplomacy on the Pakistan side to replace Tariq Aziz, who was an appointee of Musharraf. On India’s side, Satinder Lambah could remain as a special envoy to the prime minister.

So the suggestion that Riaz Mohammad Khan might be appointed to fill that role for Pakistan would be a major step forward.

That said, there are plenty of spoilers in both countries who don’t believe in the peace process. So if India and Pakistan find a way back into their secret backchannel diplomacy, we might never know.

(Reuters file photos: A child at the funeral of Benazir Bhutto; Prime Minister Singh and President Zardari in Yekaterinburg; the gates closing on the india-Pakistan border; and a soldier at base camp in Siachen)

With so much noise around these days in the relationship between India and Pakistan it is hard to make out a clear trend.  Politicians and national media in both countries have reverted to trading accusations, whether it be about their nuclear arsenals, Pakistani action against Islamist militants blamed for last year’s Mumbai attacks or alleged violations of a ceasefire on the Line of Control dividing Kashmir. Scan the headlines on a Google news search on India and Pakistan and you get the impression of a relationship fraught beyond repair.

Does that mean that attempts to find a way back into peace talks broken off after the Mumbai attacks are going nowhere? Not necessarily. In the past the background noise of angry rhetoric has usually obscured real progress behind the scenes, and this time around may be no exception.

MORE TALKS

The Hindu newspaper reported on Sept 1 that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may meet either the president or prime minister of Pakistan on the sidelines of a Commonwealth summit in Trinidad in November. It said the Indian government was already working out what strategy to adopt to make any meeting meaningful, while also pushing Pakistan to take more action against Pakistan-based militant groups in order to prevent another Mumbai-style attack.

There is no confirmation of that Trinidad meeting, and nor is there likely to be for some time, but The Hindu in recent months has proved to be well informed about the prime minister’s approach to Pakistan. Singh himself laid out his plans in a speech in parliament in July in which he promised a “step by step” approach to dialogue – effectively meaning that India would talk to Pakistan while refusing for now to reopen a formal peace process broken off after the Mumbai attacks.

The two countries’ foreign ministers are also expected to talk on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York this month, although it is unclear whether this would be preceded by a meeting of foreign secretaries in line with an agreement reached in July that the top diplomats of India and Pakistan should meet ”as often as necessary”.  The Hindu said the foreign secretaries would meet in New York; more recent newspaper reports have called this into question.

DISMANTLING JAMMU AND KASHMIR?

In the meantime, both countries are edging forward in their approach to the two parts of Jammu and Kashmir which they control. (After their first war in 1947/48 the former princely state was divided into the regions of Ladakh, Kashmir and Jammu which are held by India, and the regions of Gilgit and Baltistan along with an area known as Azad Kashmir which are held by Pakistan.)

According to Praveen Swami, a Kashmir expert at The Hindu, the Indian government has been holding secret talks over the summer with the main political separatist alliance in Kashmir, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, to try to agree an approach to bring peace to the region. ”Perhaps most important,” he said, “Pakistan is being asked to endorse the talks.”

Over on its side of the border, the Pakistan government has decided to grant limited autonomy to Gilgit and Baltistan. It had previously run the region  directly from Islamabad, much to the irritation of local people who felt they had been deprived of their political rights to the kind of self-rule given to Pakistani provinces. 

To digress briefly into history, the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was created in the 19th century by Hindu Dogra rulers expanding outwards from their base in Jammu and comprising people of different linguistic, ethnic and religious groups.  Were it not for the tremendous importance given to Jammu and Kashmir by both India and Pakistan - both of which claim the state in full - it might have broken up naturally years ago.

The people of Gilgit and Baltistan never felt much loyalty to the former maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir and have long complained that they have been held hostage to the Kashmir dispute (you hear the same complaints from Ladakhis on the Indian side.)

So do the parallel moves on both India and Pakistan suggest both countries are taking small steps towards an eventual dismantling of the former princely state which would allow a settlement of the long-running Kashmir dispute? Not quite - Pakistan has been careful to say it is not giving full provincial status to Gilgit and Baltistan. There are also historical grounds for treating the region differently from other parts of Jammu and Kashmir, which date back to partition and before.

Yet given that anything to do with Jammu and Kashmir is potentially explosive, reactions to the Pakistan government’s move on Gilgit and Baltistan have so far been relatively muted. Dawn newspaper said that the decision stuck a balance between meeting the aspirations of its people for political rights and maintaining the region’s status as disputed territory. The Daily Times said that the people of Gilgit and Baltistan had been held hostage to the Kashmir dispute for long enough and should eventually be incorporated as a full province of Pakistan. On the Indian side, I’ve seen criticism from the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party but nothing from the government.

A roadmap for peace sketched out by Singh and former president Pervez Musharraf in 2007 effectively acknowledged the division of the state by accepting there would be no exchange of territory between the two countries - although both pledged to try to make borders irrelevant. That agreement was shelved when Musharraf’s own political fortunes nosedived.  But are the governments of India and Pakistan nonetheless following some of the signposts in that roadmap despite all the angry rhetoric currently dominating their relationship? And if so, how far are they exchanging information about their plans?

WILD CARDS

Just in case the above looks too rosy a view on the prospects of progress in relations between India and Pakistan, it is probably worth remembering it can all go wrong, particularly if there is another major militant attack in India.

The other wild card comes from the transformation of the political landscape in India with the implosion of the opposition right-wing BJP initially triggered by the furore over a book on Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah by former senior BJP leader Jaswant Singh. So far the jury remains out on how the political drama will play out. Analysts variously predict a collapse of the right, or its opposite - a revival of the right as the BJP returns to its hardline anti-Pakistan Hindu nationalist roots in an attempt to reinvent itself after losing two consecutive general elections. Until the political landscape becomes clearer, India’s Congress-led government is likely to tread cautiously.

(Reuters file photos: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Siachen; Singh with Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari in Russia; Dal lake in Srinagar; Drass on the Line of Control; former Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh)

Even before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Asif Ali Zardari broke the ice by meeting on the sidelines of a regional summit in Yekaterinburg, Russia last month, the real question over talks between India and Pakistan has not been about the form but the substance.

After the bitterness of last year’s attacks on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants, can India and Pakistan work their way back to a roadmap for an agreement on Kashmir reached two years ago? Although never finalised, the roadmap opened up the intellectual space for an eventual peace deal. This week’s meetings between India and Pakistan on the sidelines of a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt could give some clues on whether it has any chance of being  revived.

India broke off the formal peace process, the so-called composite dialogue, with Pakistan after the three-day assault on Mumbai blamed on the Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group once nurtured by Pakistan to fight India in Kashmir.  But even before the attack, informal behind-the-scenes talks on Kashmir held under former president Pervez Musharraf had fallen victim to the political turbulence which led to his ouster last year, and any hope of reviving them under the new civilian government led by Zardari was dashed altogether by the Mumbai assault.

Ahead of the NAM summit in Sharm el-Sheikh — during which the foreign secretaries of both countries will meet on the sidelines, to be followed by talks between Singh and Pakistan Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani - the two countries have been trying to put together the pieces of their shattered relationship.

In an unprecedented move, Pakistan has said it will put on trial five Pakistanis suspected of involvement in the Mumbai attacks, including senior Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, accused of masterminding the assault. Pakistan has traditionally refused to acknowledge in public the role of anti-India militant groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and putting on trial a commander like Lakhvi is a major departure. India had insisted it would not resume formal peace talks until Pakistan took action against those behind the Mumbai attacks.

The Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan has also held talks with the head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), according to Prime Minister Singh,  a move that would have been unheard of — at least in public — in the past when India accused the ISI of driving a separatist revolt in Kashmir that erupted in Kashmir in 1989. Pakistan Army chief General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani also suggested this month that the internal threat facing Pakistan was greater than the external threat,  a comment seen as easing — albeit perhaps only marginally — the military’s traditional view of India as its primary enemy.

And acccording to Dawn newspaper, Gilani has been seeking political consensus in the country’s approach to India ahead of the meetings in Sharm el-Sheikh, including winning support from powerful opposition leader and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Singh on his part has said he is willing to meet Pakistan more than half way, while also insisting Pakistan must take action to dismantle militant groups which target India.

So on that basis, what can be expected from the meetings in Sharm el-Sheikh? Pakistan is keen to resume the composite dialogue, but it is unclear whether India would be ready to reopen the formal peace process despite much progress since Singh and Zardari met in Yakaterinburg.

According to the Hindu newspaper, the stage is set for a re-engagement between India and Pakistan but this could stop short of resuming the composite dialogue — primarily because India does not believe the civilian government alone can commit to acting against militant groups. Any decision to take on militant groups would have to be made by the Pakistan Army and the ISI rather than the civilian government.

“For that reason, the immediate resumption of the composite dialogue is not on the cards. The most likely outcome of Sharm-el-Shaikh is the two Foreign Secretaries being tasked with reviewing the overall structure of bilateral engagement,” it said.

To a large extent however, the focus on when and whether the composite dialogue is resumed is one of form rather than substance. While it is symbolically important, the formal peace process has rarely been as productive as back-channel diplomacy. One of the bigger breakthroughs in recent years – an agreement for a ceasefire on the Line of Control dividing Kashmir in 2003 — was agreed in behind-the-scenes talks.

On matters of substance, India and Pakistan have long road ahead.

While India is looking for an eventual dismantling of militant groups like the Laskkar-e-Taiba based in Pakistan’s heartland Punjab province, the Pakistan Army is fighting militants from the Pakistani Taliban on its western border with Afghanistan - and few believe it to be either capable of or willing to take on every group at once.  On top of that, any attempt to shut down the Laskhar-e-Taiba could make it even more dangerous if it were to drive it further underground or break it up into splinter groups.

And ultimately, Pakistan is seen as unlikely to dismantle a group like the Laskhar-e-Taiba without a peace deal with India, while New Delhi will not offer a peace deal until the militants are disarmed. That’s where the intellectual space opened up by the roadmap agreement tentatively reached between Musharraf and Singh’s government in 2007 becomes interesting.  Although there was to be no exchange of territory in divided Kashmir, the two countries did tentatively agree to try to make borders irrelevant by allowing trade and travel across the two parts of the former kingdom they each control. They were also trying to agree on some form of shared supervision on issues affecting Kashmir.

Can and should Pakistan and India try to work their way back to that roadmap and then build on it? Would Pakistan’s civilian government be willing to acknowledge a roadmap negotiated by Musharraf after fighting hard to drive him out of office? At what point will India be convinced that Pakistan has taken enough action against those involved in the Mumbai attacks before it is ready to talk about peace? How will Pakistan’s civilian government be able to convince India that it has the powerful Pakistan Army on board in any negotiations? And should both countries even be aiming for an over-arching peace deal, or rather trying to progress in small steps through trade and other confidence-building measures before tackling Kashmir?

Those are all big outstanding questions. The meetings in Sharm el-Sheikh, on the southern tip of the Sinai desert, might provide some signposts.

(Photos: Zardari and Singh in Yekaterinburg; Dal lake in Kashmir; Wagah border crossing)

With the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan likely to meet on the sidelines of a summit in Egypt this month, to be followed up by talks between the two countries’ leaders, newspapers on both sides of the border are exploring the space for progress in a peace process broken off by New Delhi after last November’s attacks on Mumbai.

The Hindu says that officials in both New Delhi and Islamabad are working to prepare the ground for the meetings – expected to take place on the sidelines of a summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Sharm el-Sheikh – so that at least some progress can be made. 

“Having scaled back its initial demands for the dismantling of terrorist infrastructure as a precondition for the resumption of dialogue, India now wants evidence of Pakistan’s professed commitment to stop terrorists from staging cross-border strikes,” writes Siddharth Varadarajan in the Hindu.

He says India aims to “get Islamabad to recognise that New Delhi is serious about benchmarking the progress made against anti-India terror groups and linking that to the pace and scope of future dialogue. Thus, India would like to receive from Pakistan a detailed account of all the steps its investigative agencies have taken so far to identify and prosecute those involved in the Mumbai conspiracy case. Indian officials say they have heard about some of these steps ‘verbally’ or have seen reports in the press but would like to see things put down on paper.”

Writing in Dawn newspaper, Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar says a tentative agreement on Kashmir drawn up under former president Pervez Musharraf could be retrieved and pursued.

“New Delhi realises more than Islamabad that normalcy is not even thinkable without having Kashmir out of the way,” he writes. ”But that requires a proper atmosphere in India and it cannot be created without bringing the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack to justice.”

And he says a solution would be possible only if the Pakistan Army led by General Ashfaq Kayani were willing to support detente with India.  The meetings in Egypt ”can be successful only to the extent that Gen Kayani is willing to go. Can he look at Pakistan’s relations with India without bringing in the past? Normalcy between the two countries depends on that.”

In Pakistan’s Daily Times, Delhi university professor Alok Rai aims for an even wider view. He condemns the two-nation theory which gave birth to India and Pakistan as being at the root of a “mutually destructive cycle” between the two countries. Usually ascribed to Pakistan founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah,  Rai acknowledges that the two-nation theory was first propounded by Hindu nationalist Savarkar. 

But he adds, that “this rejection of the two-nation theory is entirely consistent in my mind with accepting the present reality of two independent, sovereign states, India and Pakistan, which should have mature relations.”

Basing his column on an e-mail exchange with an unnamed Pakistani friend, he says that the two countries must put their dispute over Kashmir behind them, a dispute that he sees as pretext for a much bigger struggle for legitimacy by Pakistan, even if this means that Islamabad must relinquish its commitment to “free” Kashmir from Indian rule.

“But my Pakistani interlocutor assures me that it is the hour before dawn that is the darkest, that the present generation, even in Punjab, is ready to move out of this mutually destructive cycle and start a new chapter in the sad history of our sub-continent. I am writing this in the hope that he is right and I am wrong. Happy to be wrong.”

Do read the articles in full because they are full of ideas that cannot easily be summarised. What does appear to be clear is that after the bitterness created by Mumbai, the journalists quoted above are looking for a way forward, whether in seeking a practical, short-term approach to talks between India and Pakistan, or seeking an accommodation with history.

Finally, a must read is this op-ed in Dawn newspaper, in which Irfan Husain writes about the victims of the Mumbai attacks and calls for an unambiguous rejection of such acts of violence.

“While Muslims argue that Islam does not condone this kind of terrorism against unarmed, innocent civilians, most do not condemn it in clear, unequivocal terms. After agreeing that such acts are un-Islamic, there is all too often a lingering ‘Yes, but…’ hanging in the air,” he writes.

“It is this ambiguity that has given terror groups in Pakistan and elsewhere the space and legitimacy they need to operate. Now that Pakistanis have seen the true face of terrorism in Swat, and have begun to support the government in its drive to rid us of this cancer, the lesson needs to be reinforced … We need to hear ordinary people who survived or lost close relatives, and see their pain. We need to see the horrors inflicted in the name of Islam.

“Above all, we need to share the agony of our neighbours.”

(Reuters photos: The Taj Mahal; the attack on Mumbai; the Marriott in Islamabad)

The suicide bomb attack on the Pakistan Army in Pakistani Kashmir on Friday was not only unprecedented; it also raised questions about the state of militancy in Pakistan.

At its simplest level, the first suicide bombing in Pakistan’s side of Kashmir was seen as a reaction by the Pakistani Taliban to Pakistan’s military campaign against them in South Waziristan. “The militants are hurting and they are reacting. And this is a reaction to the successful operations we’ve had in Waziristan and we’ve had in the Malakand division,” Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told Reuters.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, while a government official described the bomber as a Taliban militant from Waziristan.

What is puzzling, however, is the decision to target Pakistani Kashmir. While there are historical links between Pakistan’s frontier tribesmen and Kashmir dating back to partition, as discussed by Indian strategic analyst B. Raman in this article, the region has until now been the preserve of Punjab-based militant groups focused on fighting India in Indian Kashmir. The biggest of these, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), has avoided staging attacks on Pakistani targets, and of all the militant groups operating in Pakistan, it would be expected to be critical of attacks on the military.

Why, therefore, would the Pakistani Taliban attack the Pakistan Army on the LeTs home turf? And why would Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud risk alienating the LeT — blamed for last November’s attacks on Mumbai — by sending one of his men to launch the first suicide bombing in Pakistani Kashmir and then openly claiming credit for it? An accident of the mayhem spreading in Pakistan, a sign of greater cooperation between the two groups, or a deliberate message from him to the LeT?

There has been speculation in the past among security analysts about how far the Pakistan Army and its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency have been using contacts in the LeT — which the ISI once nurtured to fight Indian rule in Kashmir — to seek information to use against the Pakistani Taliban and its al Qaeda allies.  That speculation dates back to the arrest of  senior al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah in an LeT safe house in Faisalbad in 2002.

But in the murky world of Pakistani militancy, nobody has ever been able to work out exactly how the different groups fit together, and in particular on the extent to which they shift between cooperation on a shared agenda and competition between their many different objectives - from Afghanistan to Kashmir to global jihad to targetting the Pakistani state itself.

The attack in Muzaffarabad probably provides an important clue. What is much harder, however, is to work out how to decipher that clue.

President Barack Obama chose his words carefully when asked in an interview with Dawn earlier this week why the United States has been silent on Kashmir in recent months:

“I don’t think that we’ve been silent on the fact that India is a great friend of the United States and Pakistan is a great friend of the United States, and it always grieves us to see friends fighting. And we can’t dictate to Pakistan or India how they should resolve their differences, but we know that both countries would prosper if those differences are resolved,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

“And I believe that there are opportunities, maybe not starting with Kashmir but starting with other issues, that Pakistan and India can be in a dialogue together and over time to try to reduce tensions and find areas of common interest,” he said. ”And we want to be helpful in that process, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for us to be the mediators in that process. I think that this is something that the Pakistanis and Indians can take leadership on.”

During his election campaign, Obama said the United States should try to help resolve the Kashmir dispute so that Pakistan could focus on tackling militants on its western border with Afghanistan. “We should probably try to facilitate a better understanding between Pakistan and India and try to resolve the Kashmir crisis so that they can stay focused not on India, but on the situation with those militants,” he said in an interview with MSNBC in October 2008, shortly before the presidential election.

The U.S. public position changed after the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai, blamed by India on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group.  Under pressure from India, which argued that any talk of resolving the Kashmir dispute would be rewarding terrorism, the Obama administration quietly dropped any reference to Kashmir.

But has the U.S. position on India, Pakistan and Kashmir really changed, or just gone underground?

It’s hard to believe that the U.S. position has changed dramatically. As I discussed in this analysis, the Lashkar-e-Taiba – once nurtured by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency to fight India in Kashmir – is increasingly being seen as a potential threat to the West comparable to al Qaeda (scroll down on this pdf document from CTC Sentinel to see a detailed background report on the LeT and its Jamat ud-Dawa charitable wing).

Neither the United States nor Britain can afford to turn a blind eye to the Lashkar-e-Taiba when its training camps can be used by disaffected Pakistanis from the diaspora. And that suggests that the old “hands-off” approach in which the West tended to view the Kashmir dispute as a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan no longer works. It needs to convince the Pakistan Army to turn its sights on the LeT while also nudging India to resume a peace process that might — over the long term — help reduce tensions over Kashmir.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Asif Ali Zardari met at a regional conference in Yekaterinburg in Russia this month. But they remain a long way off from resuming a formal peace process broken off by India after the Mumbai attacks. While the Pakistan government has said it wants to resume the peace process — a position supported in detail in Pakistani op-eds, including by former Pakistan ambassador Maleeha Lodhi and by retired Lieutenant-General Talat Masood – India wants Pakistan to take action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba first before it will resume formal talks.

In the meantime, the Pakistan Army is engaged in what looks as though it will be a very protracted and difficult battle against the Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan. So even if it were determined to target the Lashkar-e-Taiba, it would be unlikely to do so until it has defeated the Pakistani Taliban. Yet without a reduction in tensions with India, it is also unlikely to move significant numbers of troops from the eastern border with India to use against the Pakistani Taliban on the western border with Afghanistan.

So how does the United States break the logjam?

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits India in July, and while she is likely to choose her words in public as carefully as Obama, privately she is expected to try to enlist Indian support for U.S. policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan — including by moving forward on peace talks. In advance of her trip, she has promised to “create a new era” in the relationship between the United States and India.  Given India’s reluctance to respond — or be seen to respond — to American pressure on talks with Pakistan, that’s probably the kind of language New Delhi needs to hear if it is to be won over.

The challenge for Clinton, and U.S. administration as a whole, will be in winning over India without offending Pakistan, where people are intensely wary of a U.S.-India relationship that would squeeze the country from both sides, from Afghanistan and from India.