It’s time to rethink India’s red lines on Pakistan

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama called off a scheduled summit with Vladimir Putin, because Russia won’t hand over National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, though, is reported to want to meet Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in September though cross-Line of Control infiltration is surging,  He’s even said to be willing to drop his demand for progress in the 26/11 prosecution as a precondition for the meeting. It’s left many in India wondering just what are red lines are. [caption id=“attachment_1023157” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  There’s good reason to believe Pakistan’s military establishment has a vested interest in keeping tensions with India alive. AFP[/caption] Forty former Indian military and civilian leaders have today voiced those concerns in an unprecedented  statement calling for drastic shifts in India’s policy. The signatories include two former army chiefs, an air force chief, two heads of the Research and Analysis Wing, a former director of the Intelligence Bureau, a director-general of the Border Security Force, two foreign secretaries and two home secretaries. The group isn’t an aerie of Bharatiya Janata Party-linked hawks: several were intimately involved in the dialogue process that began in 2003; others have been active in non-official India-Pakistan exchanges (full disclosure: I’ve also been involved in some of those meetings). “It is time”, the statement says, “that policies are devised that will impose a cost on Pakistan for it’s export of terror and thus change the cost-benefit calculus of these policies”. It doesn’t, though, tell what these new policies should be — and that’s why we need a serious national conversation on. Basically, the statement calls for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to hold off on the composite dialogue — the multi-layered diplomatic process that was suspended in January, following the beheading of two Indian soldiers on the Line of Control.  It also advocates that he not meet with his newly-elected Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, for now. The 1997 dialogue process, the statement notes, remained suspended until 2004— until after India received assurances from General Pervez Musharraf that he would choke-off terrorism directed at India. I’d written , earlier this week, of the complex secret diplomacy — and military pressure — through which the promises were secured. Those promises, the statement notes, haven’t been kept; there’s no actual evidence that suggests Sharif will deliver, either. Even as tensions along the Line of Control escalate and violence in Jammu and Kashmir rises — interrupting a more than decade-long year-on-year trend — the statement is an opportunity for calm, bipartisan discussion on the way forward. In the real world, talking and not talking aren’t two opposed binaries — which is why the statement doesn’t call for a suspension of diplomatic contact. Margaret Thatcher, even as she battled the Irish Republican Army, talked to it through a secret intermediary. Israel and Iran are credibly reported to have had a successful secret channel. There are plenty of examples of when talking didn’t work — the appeasement of Nazi Germany being a case in point. The point is that talking isn’t an outcome, it’s a process — and doesn’t guarantee one or the other option. History offers some intriguing lessons about when — and how — it can work.  In 1962, for example, the Soviet Union sparked off a crisis, by stationing a number of medium and intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles in Cuba.  The Soviet decision, sparked off by the stationing of similar United States missiles in Turkey, opened up the prospect of a war. Even as the two sides held out nuclear threats, President John F Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khruschev reached a public agreement that the United States would never invade Cuba— and the Soviet Union would take back its missiles. In private, the United States promised it would dismantle all Thor and Jupiter Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles stationed in Europe and Turkey—weapons that posed a threat to Moscow. The agreement worked — but only because both sides kept their word. India’s problem is, in essence, this: it hasn’t been able to make it worth Pakistan’s while to keep its word. Pakistan is either unable, or unwilling, or both, to keep its promise to end terrorism by jihadist groups operating from its soil. It won’t either hand-over or punish perpetrators of violence ranging from 26/11 architect Hafiz Muhammad Saeed to ganglord Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar. There’s good reason to believe its military establishment has a vested interest in keeping tensions with India alive, at a time when jihadists are attacking its credibility as the guardian of the Islamic Republic. It’s less clear, though, what India should do. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have both desisted from authorising the use of offensive covert means — for example, backing secessionists inside Pakistan — for fear that it will, in the short term, lead to more violence within India, rather than less. They were both loath to consider full-scale war, understanding that it would derail India’s strategic objective of as-high-as-possible growth. There’s a lot of things, though, between war in peace that could put pressure on Pakistan’s military: more aggressive retaliation against infiltration across the Line of Control; limited raids on jihad training camps; assassinating the terrorist leadership. Each has potential benefits — but also potential costs, which need to be very carefully considered. There’s no better opportunity than the ongoing impasse to rid ourselves of some the received wisdom on which the peace process rests.  It simply isn’t true, for example, that nations which trade and have high levels of citizen-to-citizen contact don’t go to war: pre-1914 Europe was bound together as never in its history, but erupted into an orgy of blood-letting anyway. That could be our fate, too — unless we think things through carefully. India’s Pakistan policy this past decade has rested on three historically anomalous circumstances: the restraining presence of the United States after 9/11, a war between Pakistan and the jihadists it long patronised, and a favourable international climate, driven by record economic growth. Those pillars are crumbling — and with this reality, our policies need to change.