The prime ministers of India and Pakistan agreed at Thimphu, Bhutan, last week to “walk the talk” about resolving outstanding disputes. While the Indians remained circumspect, the Pakistanis were greatly pleased at the “unexpected” windfall because of India’s stubborn refusal since Mumbai 2008 to start an unconditional dialogue with Pakistan.
Clearly, there is US pressure on India to restart a dialogue with Pakistan. That is why Mr Robert Blake Jr, the US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, maintained a discreet presence in Bhutan during the SAARC Summit. As a quid pro quo, the US has given India access to David Headley, one of the masterminds of Mumbai, who is in prison in America. The US Ambassador to India, Timothy Roemer, came to Pakistan on May 4 and met President Asif Zardari, to urge him to prosecute the alleged handlers and backers of Headley and the Mumbai terrorists. Certainly, we may expect greater Indian pressure on this front after Headley has been interrogated by New Delhi and new evidence to incriminate targeted jihadi groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayba is presented.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s civilian government and military establishment seem determined to reverse one critical position of the last decade regarding Kashmir. In the 1999 Lahore Summit between prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Atal Behari Vajpayee, Pakistan stopped insisting on resolving the Kashmir dispute strictly in accordance with the UN Plebiscite Resolutions. Mr Sharif also accepted India’s notion of a “composite dialogue” in which Kashmir was relegated to being one of eight outstanding disputes for resolution instead of being the “core” issue that had to be discussed and resolved first. In exchange, India’s BJP leadership unequivocally accepted the reality of Pakistan and stopped insisting on “Akhund Bharat”. A diplomatic back channel was also opened to explore unorthodox ways of resolving Kashmir based on adjustments to the Line of Control (Chenab Formula) and management of the two Kashmirs under the joint supervision of both India and Pakistan, which Mr Sharif later insisted had all but sealed a realistic and equitable way out of the Kashmir stalemate. There was a brief reversal of this position under General Pervez Musharraf, the architect of Kargil, from 2000-2003, especially at the Summit in Agra in 2001, but General Musharraf too later adopted Mr Sharif’s flexibility, stopped funding and fueling the Kashmir jihad in 2004 and offered similarly radical out-of-the-box solutions to the Kashmir dispute based on extensive back channel diplomacy. Indeed, General Musharraf went so far as to deny “India-centricity” in Pakistan’s foreign policy, including any need or desire for “strategic depth” in Afghanistan as a result of it.
The Pakistan government now reiterates the UN position on Kashmir and repudiates any back channel progress in the last ten years. Indeed, the foreign secretary in 1999, Mr Shamshad Ahmed, blithely denies his government’s policy under prime minister Nawaz Sharif; and Mr Shah Mahmood Qureshi, the PPP foreign minister who was personally briefed by General Musharraf on the back channel’s progress, says there is no record of it in the FO. The denials are bizarre. Former foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri, and no less than General Musharraf himself, publicly insist that the back channel had produced outstanding results. In fact, an article by Steve Coll in The New Yorker last year documents the results of the back channel on the basis of interviews with the chief negotiators of that period, including Mr Satish Lambah from India and Khurshid Kasuri and Tariq Aziz of Pakistan. It should be noted that India’s prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, also claimed during the last Indian elections that the back channel was on the verge of finding a solution to Kashmir before General Musharraf was dissuaded from pursuing it further following acute political instability in 2007-08.
More significantly, the Pakistani military establishment under the army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, has reclaimed “India-centricity” and “soft strategic depth” in Afghanistan as the core of Pakistan’s foreign policy.
One reason for Pakistan’s recent backtracking has to do with India’s refusal to dialogue unconditionally after Mumbai. Another has to do with India’s alleged role in Afghanistan in funding and fueling a separatist insurgency in Baluchistan. The third is America’s failure to defeat the Al-Qaeda-Taliban resistance in Afghanistan that has increasingly burdened Pakistan with its own Taliban enemy in its tribal areas and led it to bid for a defensive strategic stake in any future political dispensation in Kabul to the exclusion of India.
Therefore, given the complexity of such regional issues impinging on India-Pakistan relations, no quick fixes should be expected in the dialogue. Walking the talk may take longer than desired. In fact, instead of talking about the eight disputes of the past, Pakistan and India may be better off focusing on the two great threats of the future: Pakistan’s developing water and energy scarcity and India’s vulnerability to foreign-inspired Islamic terrorism in terms of its impact on Indian Muslims and on its business and foreign investment environment. Under the circumstances, perversely enough, this is the moment to grasp the future on life and death issues for the subcontinent rather than quibble over the political burdens of partition.