Rawalpindi goes Hezbollah: India must push to label Pakistan a terror state

Pakistan now follows the terrorist playbook crafted by Hamas and Hezbollah across decades: stage an attack, threaten escalation and then seek to sidestep accountability by hiding behind the skirts of diplomats in the name of deconfliction, especially as casualties mount.

In April 1996, Hezbollah fired several dozen missiles into Israel, including 30 in a single day. Israel responded with “Operation Grapes of Wrath”, an attempt to degrade Hezbollah and drive it north of the Litani River. For days, Hezbollah suffered repeated defeats, but then, on April 18, 1996, Israeli fire struck a UN compound in Qana, southern Lebanon, around which Hezbollah had set up firing positions. More than 100 Lebanese sheltering in the compound died, sparking outrage that forced Israel to curtail Operation Grapes of Wrath and allow Hezbollah to live another day.

In July 2006, Hezbollah crossed Israel’s UN-certified border to kidnap and kill Israeli soldiers. Israel responded with another offensive to uproot Hezbollah. Again, Hezbollah shielded itself from accountability for its terrorism by manufacturing sympathy for alleged victims. After an Israeli airstrike killed 28 in a Qana apartment building, Hezbollah activated anti-Israeli partisans in the media and in European capitals to pressure Israel to stop its campaign against Hezbollah short of achieving its goals, selling photographs of alleged children’s bodies being excavated from the building only to have video and analysis subsequently emerge showing the corpses get up and walk away or be featured elsewhere.

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Ultimately, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice succumbed to international criticism and pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to curtail the Israeli efforts. Rice oversaw negotiations to make the UN peacekeeping mission more robust, in theory to prevent Hezbollah’s re-armament. In reality, it was a fig leaf to make diplomats feign serious counterterrorism while allowing the United Nations to continue to evade responsibility. Hezbollah not only regrouped and re-armed but also terrorised southern Lebanon for another two decades. Meanwhile, its sponsors in the Islamic Republic of Iran understood that they could, quite literally, get away with murder in their efforts to cripple, if not defeat, Israel by attrition.

As international diplomats scramble to win a ceasefire between India and Pakistan in the wake of the attack by Pakistan-sponsored terrorists last month at Pahalgam, New Delhi must ensure it does not repeat the mistakes of Israel. The United Nations Secretary-General and European foreign ministers will gladly take a cucumber, paint it yellow, and sell it as a cucumber. They will dress up any agreement both by praising its protection of civilians and by presenting it as a deal to end terrorism. They will simply seek quiet to last long enough so that they cannot be blamed when the violence inevitably re-erupts.

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Ideology and not grievance motivates terrorists such as those that Pakistan trains. For all they talk about the occupation of Kashmir, they ignore that by law, Pakistan, and not India, occupies Kashmir. Their problem is the idea that Muslims live under the authority of non-Muslims. Indeed, this was at the heart of Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir’s original speech in which he belittled the idea of Hindus and Muslims living together. What Prime Minister Narendra Modi understands but must convey to Washington, New York, London, and Brussels is that any return to the status quo ante will inevitably mean terrorism throughout the entirety of India and not only in Jammu and Kashmir.

In 2006, Condoleezza Rice and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan ignored a simple fact: Hezbollah was a proxy of Iran operating on the orders and authority of Iran. While the United States had already designated Iran a state sponsor of terrorism, Rice resisted further sanctions as she and her policy planning staff continued President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s efforts to try to negotiate with Iran and reach out to its supposed reformists. Had Rice, Annan, and others forced Tehran to be accountable for its terrorism, the region might not have descended into further war and terror.

Today, many Western diplomats seek a similar deal based on sleight of hand or smoke and mirrors. They want quiet and will treat Islamabad’s promises as fact, never mind that Asim Munir is no more sincere about peace than late Al Qaeda leader Usama Bin Laden.

As Indians gauge diplomacy and the international scramble for a ceasefire, the metric by which they gauge US sincerity should be simple: the designation of Pakistan as a state sponsor of terror. Indians should interpret any State Department effort to throw a lifeline to Pakistan as signs of American insincerity and outright disdain for India. Just as it is not possible to protect Israel and allow Hamas and Hezbollah to thrive, it is not possible to take India’s complaints about Pakistani terror seriously if Washington refuses to hold Islamabad accountable.

Pakistan will complain about its listing, but the answer to that is not moral equivalency but rather to speak with one voice about the unacceptability of terror. The path to ending a state sponsor designation should not be empty promises but real reform.

Indians should demand more. The family of every victim of Pahalgam deserves compensation. That money should come not from Pakistan’s treasury but rather from the personal accounts of Munir, be they in Rawalpindi, London, Zurich, or Panama. There could be no other way for Pakistan to show that it has internalised that all terrorism is unacceptable than to make its individual cheerleaders and sponsors pay. Munir, of course, should no longer need such money, as any just agreement would see him spend the rest of his life in prison as an accessory to murder.

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.