Pakistan never seems to learn that the more it tries to harm India, the more it harms itself. The history of that country’s aggression against India provides repeated evidence of this. The 1971 war ended with Pakistan’s dismemberment, ending any Pakistani pretensions to being India’s equal in any way. The Kargil war ended with the US forcing the Pak army to withdraw, and an American president taking India’s side for the first time in the dispute over Jammu & Kashmir—effectively guaranteeing the sanctity of the Line of Control, which was India’s diplomatic objective from Nehru’s time and a key negotiating goal at the Simla summit in 1972. Then, the attack on Parliament seven years ago saw unprecedented US pressure being put on Pakistan, forcing Gen Musharraf to stop referring to Kashmiri militants as freedom-fighters and to forswear support for cross-border terrorism.
Now the Mumbai attack has brought further disrepute to Pakistan, provoked President-elect Obama to talk tough, and made Islamabad eat crow. For, as the evidence of Pakistani authorship of the Mumbai attack has mounted, the initial belligerence (“The attackers are not Pakistanis”, “We have not been given any proof”, “India should stop pointing fingers at Pakistan and look within itself at home-grown terrorists”) has evaporated, as has the hypocrisy of offering to mount a joint operation against terrorists. Even now, the action taken against the leaders of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) appears to be no more than eyewash, and reminds Indians of the supposed banning of the JeM in the past. To all appearances, Pakistan continues to do the minimum that it can get away with, even as it waits for the heat of the moment to subside and for pressure to ease. But every fresh outrage against India will only reduce further Pakistan’s international credibility and its room for manoeuvre.
Pakistan’s willingness to play a hostile game with India has been bolstered by two factors: Chinese support, and American dependence on Pak support for Washington’s Afghan campaigns. But Pakistani duplicity when it comes to both the al-Qaeda and the Taliban has meant that the country has fewer friends in Washington than ever before. China may continue to be a sheet anchor of support, but even Beijing is said to be worried to some degree about Islamabad’s sponsorship of jihadi exports. It is worth noting that when President Zardari flew to Beijing some weeks ago, seeking desperate financial aid, the money wasn’t forthcoming.
Pakistan can continue to go down this self-destructive route, as the world’s principal sponsor of jihadi terrorism and as a government that plays an endless double game with everyone it deals with—down to the ridiculous denial of providing safe harbour to Dawood Ibrahim. But it should be obvious that at some point this game will reach its limits. The country will become a global pariah, its economy is already in a mess and has been under-performing in comparison with India for a decade-and-a-half, and there is a growing divide between the aims and objects of its civil society and those of the army. So far, the army has enjoyed veto power on everything that the civilians have wanted to do but, as the fault lines start opening up, even the generals will have to ask themselves what they gain from converting the country into the kind of place which no international cricket team wants to visit or play in. Indeed, Pakistan looks less and less like a credible option to even the militants in the Kashmir valley.
The truth through all this is that there has been considerable progress made on outstanding bilateral issues through formal and back-channel diplomacy. It is also evident from every election in Pakistan that its ordinary people vote by and large for moderates and mainstream political parties, not the jihadis. These are considerable assets to build on, especially if the country drops its opposition to freer trade and allows more people-to-people contact, because the way to investment and a better life for its citizens is to behave like a nation that does not spell trouble for everyone, near and far. So far, the country’s rulers don’t seem to have got the point.
