A fork in the road for the U.S. in South Asia

President Obama can call an end to the Fourth Afghan War and allow the Pakistani Army to fill the void, or he can shift tack and push for an end to the alliance between generals and jihadis that lies at the root of the region's terror complex.



3 May 2011
The Hindu

A fork in the road for the U.S. in South Asia

Siddharth Varadarajan

In tracking down and killing Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad on Sunday night, America finally seems to have got something right.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were the result of a catastrophic intelligence failure in which different American agencies failed to connect the dots. In response, the George W. Bush administration launched not one but two wars, first in Afghanistan and then Iraq, but did not manage to capture or kill the mastermind behind those attacks. The military sledgehammer produced collateral gains and losses for the U.S. — regime change in Kabul and Baghdad but thousands of body bags too, military bases in the cockpit of Asia but international opposition and even opprobrium as well, a bonanza for its arms and contractor industries but also a fiscal deficit which helped pave the way to a full blown financial crisis.

While counter-terrorism gains such as the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were almost all intelligence driven, the preoccupation with a military approach to the ‘AfPak' region has produced the single biggest liability for Washington: a toxic dependence on the Pakistani army. GHQ, Rawalpindi's associations and entanglements with terrorist groups ensures the “war” being fought remains unwinnable. No amount of tinkering at the margins, no Petraeus or McChrystal plan, no proposal of rehabilitation and reintegration of the Taliban, has helped the Pentagon overcome this fundamental flaw.

Patience wearing thin

Though the U.S. gave Pakistan a very long rope, signs that Washington's patience was wearing thin have been multiplying in recent months. As the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and GHQ happily played both sides of the ‘war on terror' game in pursuit of their own long-term political and strategic objectives, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was quietly distancing itself from its unreliable Pakistani counterpart. The Raymond Davies affair — in which no less a person than President Barack Obama saw fit to intervene — brought this decoupling out into the open in a particularly dramatic fashion. The Abbottabad operation is also likely a product of America going solo on Pakistani soil.

Last month, Admiral Mike Mullen openly accused the Pakistani military of collusion with the Haqqani network and other terrorists operating in Afghanistan. It is safe to assume he laid this charge in full knowledge of the fact that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad, a town north of Islamabad that is a stone's throw away from the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul. The fact that the world's most wanted man could remain undetected in a small town crawling with soldiers and officers suggests either a high degree of dysfunctionality within the Pakistani system or, worse, a high degree of collusion. Plausible though the first option is, most Americans inside and outside the administration — not to speak of officials and lay persons the world over — will likely believe the second.

Mr. Obama was gracious enough to say in a general sort of way that America's “counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding” but a senior administration official who briefed reporters later on Monday was blunt about the limits of that cooperation. “We shared our intelligence on this bin Laden compound with no other country, including Pakistan,” he said.

Pakistan and Afghanistan

Where do U.S. relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan go from here? Indian officials fear there will be growing domestic political pressure on Mr. Obama to declare the ‘Fourth Afghan War' over and accelerate the drawdown of U.S. troops in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election. But just because the U.S. is waging a war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is no reason for India to fear its departure. At stake is what remains to fill the void. The insurgency in Afghanistan can only be defeated by strengthening the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), on the one hand, and expanding economic opportunities for the country's peoples, on the other. Unfortunately, the former has only recently become an American priority and even then, Washington remains unwilling to allow the ANSF to develop critical assets like an air force. As for development, it is contingent on security and stability, both of which have proved elusive.

If the Pakistani military has run with the jihadi hares even as it has hunted with American hounds, it has done so in anticipation of Washington's eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan. At the same time, this cannot be an argument for the indefinite extension of the American military presence in that country — especially when U.S. troops and aircraft have killed a large number of innocent civilians. Ten years on, it should be clear that the problems in Afghanistan do not have a military solution, at least not one the U.S. can deliver. What America can and must do, however, is to choose its friends wisely and to use its economic and political clout to ensure the Army's nexus with jihadi groups in Pakistan is weakened and destroyed. If indeed the ISI was kept in the dark about Abbottabad, this is a bad augury for the Pakistani military. But unless the U.S. is prepared to go further down that fork in the road, the terrorists who are already preparing themselves to take bin Laden's place will continue to find fertile ground inside Pakistan.

India-Pakistan talks: Two years and still counting

Further delays in the resumption of dialogue with Pakistan will not make it easier to get satisfaction on the terror front....








5 February 2011
The Hindu

Two years and still counting

Siddharth Varadarajan

An entire year has passed since the Manmohan Singh government decided it was time to find a way to break the dialogue deadlock and kickstart the process of engagement with Pakistan.

During this period, Dr. Singh has met his Pakistani counterpart, Yusuf Raza Gilani, once, Foreign Secretaries from both sides have met twice, and the two Foreign Ministers sat together once, in Islamabad in July 2010. That encounter ended inconclusively, even disastrously, with the Pakistani host compounding the visible lack of progress made in their talks with the impropriety of a public diatribe against his visitor. When the opportunity for a second ministerial meeting arose at the United Nations where both Ministers spent a week in the fall, cussedness ensured a suitable date could never be found.

At the root of the Islamabad fiasco was the fact that neither side was willing to risk upsetting political equations at home by appearing to concede too much ground to the other. Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi wanted to be able to tell the stakeholders who matter in his country — the military — that he had got India to agree to a calendar for the resumption of dialogue on Kashmir and Siachen. But India's External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna was not prepared to go that far. He wanted to calibrate any timetable for the resumption of talks on politically sensitive issues like Siachen to visible progress in the investigation and prosecution of those involved in the Mumbai terrorist attack of November 2008. What resulted, thus, was a stalemate.

On February 6, the two Foreign Secretaries will make a fresh attempt to press the reset button on the frozen process in Thimphu on the sidelines of a Saarc event. Unfortunately, they will meet under circumstances that are seemingly less propitious for a breakthrough with both leaderships under siege. In India, Prime Minister Singh is battling charges of dragging his feet in high-profile corruption cases and the Opposition's hostility towards him and his government has never been greater. In Pakistan, the killing of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer and the open sympathy his assassin attracted from religious clerics and sections of civil society have vitiated the atmosphere and put the liberals and the entire secular political class — which forms a natural constituency for cooperation with India — on the backfoot.

On paper, the government of Yusuf Raza Gilani is likely to find a second helping of whatever fare India served last July as unpalatable as the first. India, too, may feel it has no option but to spurn the Pakistani demand for a clear timeline for the resumption of dialogue in the absence of headway in the 26/11 case. And yet, a deeper look at the dynamics within Pakistan and at the core interests of India ought to give both governments cause to re-examine their attitude.

In a speech to the Research & Analysis Wing on January 21, the Prime Minister's Special Envoy for Pakistan, Satinder Lambah, spelt out the government's policy dilemma. “Engagement,” he said, “does not always assure us of a desired response, nor does it guarantee success. However, rejecting the process of engagement will not enable us to achieve our long-term goals.”

In relation to Pakistan, India's principal goal today is the permanent neutralisation of terrorist organisations which operate with differing levels of support from the establishment of that country and launch attacks on Indian targets. The second key long-term goal is the establishment of normal relations with Pakistan. In his speech, Mr. Lambah made the only public reference the Government of India has cared to make in all these years to the back-channel negotiations which took place with Islamabad from 2004 to 2007. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's measures to improve relations with Pakistan were based on the principle that “borders cannot be redrawn but we can work towards making them irrelevant,'' Mr. Lambah said, adding that a lot of progress had been made. “The ball is in Pakistan's court. We will be willing to pick up the threads.”

In my opinion, Mr. Lambah's words point the way towards the possibility of forward movement but only if both governments have the courage to acknowledge the illogicality of their current official positions.

Three paradoxes

India knows “rejecting the process of engagement” will not enable it to achieve its goals on the terror front and yet it is unwilling to talk until it sees satisfactory progress in the Mumbai attack case. A second policy paradox it must overcome is that it is reluctant to resume the harmless ‘front channel' talks on Kashmir even as it is “willing to pick up the threads” on the far more substantive back channel if Pakistan agrees. Finally, Pakistan, which has spent the better part of the past six decades demanding substantive progress on the Kashmir issue must explain why it is obsessed with the immediate resumption of the formal process (even though it knows this will lead nowhere) but is reluctant officially to embrace the back channel process and formula which offer the best chance for a speedy, win-win outcome.

For the past two years, I have been part of a Track-II India-Pakistan dialogue process that the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in Delhi and the Jinnah Institute in Islamabad have been conducting. The meetings take place in Bangkok because neither government is willing to guarantee it will issue visas for all the participants coming from across the border, but that is the subject of another article! Besides strategic analysts and journalists, the ‘Chaophraya Dialogues' have brought together senior retired military, intelligence and foreign service officers, many of whom spent their entire careers planning and executing moves against the other side. Even in the tense atmosphere which prevailed following 26/11, these dialogues always produced a broad consensus in favour of engagement. But this tended to stop short of a fulsome endorsement of the composite dialogue process and the back-channel. Indeed, several Pakistani interlocutors — whether from military or political backgrounds — seemed reluctant to endorse the back channel. The military men said the venture was General Pervez Musharraf's ‘solo flight,' the politicians felt the process was tainted by its association with a dictator.

In our most recent round, however, both sides made some progress. “The absence of a formal and sustained engagement on the full range of issues confronting India and Pakistan is unhealthy, counterproductive and dangerous,” the Indian and Pakistani participants declared in a joint resolution. “We welcome the forthcoming meeting of foreign secretaries in Thimphu and hope that the two sides will be able to prepare the ground for the resumption of a comprehensive and sustained dialogue.” More significantly, the principle which Mr. Lambah spoke of — and which Khurshid Ahmed Kasuri, who was Foreign Minister in the Musharraf years, has also spoken of — found joint support: “We agree with the broad vision of India-Pakistan relations in which borders cannot change but can indeed be made irrelevant. We resolve that a dialogue between the two countries should include discussions on Jammu and Kashmir. The formal bilateral dialogue should be complemented by back-channel contacts. The people of J&K should be appropriately consulted in this process”.

Terrorism, the resolution noted, is of deep concern to both India and Pakistan. “Indian concerns about the Mumbai attacks in 2008 have seriously affected the dialogue process. The perpetrators of the attack should be brought to justice at the earliest. Pakistan has deep concerns about the tragic loss of lives in the Samjhauta Express attack. India has to expeditiously prosecute those involved and keep Pakistan informed.”

Taken together with the views of Prime Minister Singh's envoy, this resolution, which leading members of the strategic community in India and Pakistan approved, indicates a possible way forward. What is required is a process that can build on the Indian enthusiasm for the back channel with the Pakistani insistence on resumption of the front channel. One way to do this is to examine whether, after a suitable period of time, the two channels can be merged. After all, once the back channel reaches an understanding on broad concepts, translating it into actionable parameters will involve painstaking negotiation. It is significant that Mr. Kasuri made well-rehearsed statements during his recent visit to India to the effect that the Pakistani military brass, including Gen. Parvez Kayani, who was head of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate at the time, were kept fully briefed after each back-channel meeting with the Indian side. No one in GHQ, Rawalpindi, has refuted what he said.

On terror, the aftermath of the assassination of Salman Taseer has brought home to most Indians the degree to which the Pakistani state is caught in a vortex. A system which cannot ensure justice when a high constitutional functionary is killed is unlikely to be able to offer India much relief on 26/11. This is not to say India should stop insisting on progress. But tying the future course of our bilateral engagement to this futile pursuit is unhelpful and counterproductive. Liberal Pakistanis say the resumption of dialogue with India will strengthen them in their struggle against the jihadis and the ‘establishment'. They may well be exaggerating their own influence and our own. In the worst case scenario, dialogue will turn out to be a placebo that will not help them or us. But India has nothing to lose by following their prescription.

DIPLOMATIC NOTEBOOK: For Krishna, a year of hectic travel

The External Affairs Minister has visited 27 countries in 12 months. With his frequent flyer miles has come greater confidence but Indian diplomacy is still plagued by mixed messages...





20 July 2010
The Hindu

DIPLOMATIC NOTEBOOK
In a year of hectic travel, Krishna has clocked 27 countries

Siddharth Varadarajan

Some ministers treat international travel as a “junket”, others regard it an unwelcome burden. But if there is one man whose job requires the accumulation of frequent flyer miles, it is S.M. Krishna, who has emerged as India's most mobile external affairs minister in recent years.

When he touched down in Islamabad last week, Mr. Krishna notched up his 27th country in 12 months, a punishing pace of travel that marks a dramatic change from the less frenetic — and somewhat sedate — schedules of some of his predecessors.

Mr. Krishna came to South Block in June 2009, when he replaced Pranab Mukherjee at the Ministry of External Affairs. Mr. Mukherjee's willingness to fly out was greater than that of his predecessor, Natwar Singh, but he was also overburdened with domestic responsibilities. That said, the present incumbent's record both in terms of miles flown — some of them in ‘cattle class' — and range of destinations is impressive by any standard. In the past year, he has been to Bhutan (twice), Italy, the Czech Republic, Japan, Egypt, Thailand, Singapore (twice), Australia, Brazil (twice), Belarus, Turkmenistan, the United States (thrice), Russia, Afghanistan, Trinidad, Myanmar, U.K., Kuwait, Nepal, China, Uzbekistan (twice), Kazakhstan, Iran, South Korea, Mauritius, Mozambique and Pakistan. This week, he visited Kabul again.

The past two months alone have seen him fly to southern Africa, East Asia, West Asia, North America and Central America. All told, Mr. Krishna has been to every permanent member of the U.N. Security Council (except France), as well as to countries and regions where EAMs seldom go calling. Some of these visits have been of the routine goodwill variety and some have been firefighting missions — a case in point being the sudden trip to Australia to register India's unhappiness at the spate of attacks on Indian students. But most visits have involved a substantial bilateral agenda.

Curiously, India's immediate region is somewhat underrepresented. Myanmar, Bhutan and Afghanistan have seen ministerial visits but not Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Maldives.

It may seem paradoxical that Mr. Krishna is travelling much more than his predecessors in an era when the role of the Prime Minister and his National Security Adviser as foreign policy drivers has become more pronounced. And yet, the fact is that an ever expanding calendar of multilateral events has begun to circumscribe the possibilities of bilateral diplomatic engagement at the highest level. Every year, for example, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has to attend the G-20 summit twice, the East Asia Summit, the India-EU summit and the U.N. General Assembly. Every other year there are the BRIC, IBSA, NAM, and CHOGM summits, not to speak of routinised annual bilateral events with ‘strategic partners' or thematic summits like those that were held recently on climate change and nuclear security. The pressure is such that the Prime Minister has stopped going to the UNGA every year and has no time for other meetings like those of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, CICA and G-15.

Under these circumstances, the task of holding the multilateral fort and crafting new bilateral agendas falls largely upon the shoulders of the EAM. And though a “rising” India has the ability to function as a magnet for inbound visitors, much also depends on the willingness of its foreign minister to spread his wings and take flight.

No need for minders

Diplomacy, of course, is not just about going the distance, it is also about the messages conveyed. And with Mr. Krishna's frequent flyers miles has come confidence, though, unfortunately, some officials still insist on prompting him, not always with the best of effects.

When he was first named to the job, some observers looked askance at the former Karnataka Chief Minister's lack of foreign policy experience. Though his early public interactions seemed overly scripted, Mr. Krishna's measured performance in Pakistan last week took his critics by surprise. If the visit did not yield a positive outcome, this was not for any failing on his part but because of factors beyond his control: Pakistan's attitude, the Manmohan Singh government's decision to limit the scope of dialogue, and the remarks on the ISI made before the delegation's arrival in Islamabad by Union Home Secretary Gopal Pillai.

Some opposition leaders have asked why Mr. Krishna did not contradict the Pakistani Foreign Minister when he made a reference to Mr. Pillai's remarks. Opinions can differ but Mr. Krishna made what he thought was a sensible judgment call under the circumstances: the press conference had already turned unpleasant and he decided not to prolong the encounter.

That the press conference took a nose dive towards the end was unfortunate. Just before that, Mr. Krishna had fielded a difficult and even provocatively phrased question on Kashmir. This is where his experience as a seasoned politician came in handy. He was mindful of his location and audience and spoke with great tact and precision, giving the official Indian position on Kashmir and human rights violations. Mr. Qureshi also gave an answer that reflected Pakistan's position but did not cross any diplomatic red lines. Unfortunately, an MEA official, who perhaps felt Mr. Krishna had not given the right answer, handed a note to him on infiltration from Pakistan which the minister then proceeded to read out as soon as Mr. Qureshi was done with his answer. This interruption in the rhythm of the press conference — comebacks in such events are rare and media handlers strongly discourage them because of the risk of an adversarial exchange — prompted the Pakistani minister to respond in a testy manner. From there on, matters rapidly went south.

Pillai's solo flight

The issue has acquired extreme sensitivity so no one will agree to speak about this on record but this much can be stated with absolute certainty: Home Secretary G.K. Pillai was on a solo flight when he told The Indian Express on the eve of Mr. Krishna's visit to Islamabad that the ISI was involved in the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai from “the beginning till the end.”

Though people in Pakistan saw some great design at work, there can be no question of the MEA having been consulted or even informed beforehand of the bombshell Mr. Pillai was about to drop. This is because the MEA, despite repeatedly asking the Home Ministry for details, is still completely in the dark about what Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist David Coleman Headley told Indian investigators in Chicago last month! Worse, the Prime Minister's Office, which is in the Headley loop, was also caught unaware by Mr. Pillai's statement.

Since the public airing of this accusation came barely three weeks after Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram met his Pakistani counterpart, it is likely Mr. Pillai's boss was also taken by surprise. Just as he was last year, when the Home Secretary declared that Hyderabad would be the capital of Telangana. Government officials have since publicly circled their wagons around Mr. Pillai but privately there is considerable criticism being voiced within. One source compared the Home Secretary's statement to the solo flight of Matthias Rust, the amateur German aviator who piloted a Cessna all the way to the Soviet Union in 1987. “Rust landed his plane in the Red Square. Mr. Pillai took his flight all the way to the Minar-e-Pakistan,” the source told The Hindu.

Timeline on Siachen, Kashmir talks was the deal-breaker at Islamabad

Pakistan Foreign Minister Qureshi overruled his officials over draft of common talking points ...




18 July 2010
The Hindu

Timeline on Siachen, Kashmir talks was the deal-breaker at Islamabad

Siddharth Varadarajan

India and Pakistan had agreed to a rough schedule of meetings between different sets of officials as envisaged by the composite dialogue process but the inability of the Indian negotiators to firmly commit to a resumption of Defence Secretary-level talks on Siachen led Pakistan's Foreign Minister to walk away from the deal at hand.

Nevertheless, according to sources on the Indian side, the fact that the two countries agreed dialogue was the only way forward meant the Foreign Ministers' meeting was still “positive”. Another plus was the Pakistani side's acknowledgment — for the first time since 2008 — that the gains made in back channel talks on Kashmir during the Musharraf years “were important and useful,” the sources told The Hindu on Saturday.

The sources said External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna travelled to Islamabad with a proposal that would have seen the two sides beginning talks on trade, tourism and other issues almost immediately while leaving formal parleys on Jammu and Kashmir, ‘Peace and Security', and Siachen for a later date with the foreign secretaries to be tasked with working out the modalities for that.

“We wanted to move ahead with CBMs first because they are easier,” the sources said. “We made it clear we were willing to discuss the other three issues too but said we need a certain catalysing process. They are more complex so it is better to start with what is more easily achievable.”

“Since June, we had been talking of starting meetings between various secretaries — commerce, water resources, culture — and the Pakistanis were very much on board with this idea,” the sources said.

Sir Creek

On Sir Creek, India said it was ready to discuss any Pakistani response to its last proposal and was willing to hold a meeting of the Surveyor-General from the Indian side and the Additional Secretary of the Defence Ministry from the Pakistani side.

The sources said officials from both sides worked past lunch on July 15 to produce a draft of common talking points for the joint ministerial press conference that was scheduled for later that day. Though not a joint statement, the draft spelt out a mutually acceptable framework for future meetings and included language that worked around obvious differences on a timeline for the resumption of talks on Siachen and Kashmir.

But when the Pakistani side sent the draft to Shah Mahmood Qureshi for his approval, the Minister shot it down, the Indian sources said. Pakistani officials were not available for comment.

Mr. Qureshi had an all-or-nothing attitude, the sources said. “They wanted us to accept a calendar of meetings which would have amounted to a resumption of the composite dialogue in all but name … It seems there was a lot of emphasis on optics from their side. They want to put Humpty Dumpty together again. But the fact is [he] fell off the wall. It is not as if we can immediately go back to the situation pre-Mumbai … We need progress on terrorism.”

The sources said India was proposing that action on the terror front would “catalyse” the process of talking on what Pakistan considered ‘core issues'. “But we didn't put specific goalposts other than to say action against terrorism should be expeditious and should lead to the unravelling of the Mumbai conspiracy.”

Fresh efforts were then made to rework the language of the ‘talking points'. This time, the Pakistanis wanted specific timelines for the resumption of discussion on Kashmir, peace and security, and Siachen. Since it was a given that the two Foreign Secretaries — who normally handle Kashmir and ‘peace and security' in the composite dialogue — would be meeting again, it was relatively easy to blur over the fact that India had not yet agreed formally to resume discussions on the subject. But Siachen proved a harder nut to crack. Apart from the absence of a timeline, the Indian desire to refer to future interlocutors on the subject as “relevant officials” rather than the two Defence Secretaries was another obstacle. As the evening wore on, the Indian side, which acknowledges being in touch with New Delhi on several points, categorically told the Pakistanis that their mandate did not include agreeing to a firm commitment to resume dialogue on Siachen.

Though the heights of Siachen proved insurmountable, the sources say other factors may also have been at play in ensuring the talks ended inconclusively. The Pakistani side did tell the Indians how Home Secretary Gopal Pillai's statements on the involvement of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate in the Mumbai attack had evoked anger in Islamabad.

Asked about Mr. Qureshi's claim of “instructions” being sent from Delhi, the sources said this was natural and that he too left the room with his officials at one point. “Clearly he was answering to a higher authority. And though he is a Maqdoom, that authority was not God!,” they added.

The sources said it was unfortunate that the “petulance” of Mr. Qureshi's remarks on Thursday and Friday had deflected attention away from what the two sides had discussed and highlighted only the “atmospherics”. But they said India intended to keep its own rhetoric down so as to allow temperatures to subside.

The Indian side acknowledges that as matters stand, there are no official meetings planned or scheduled between now and December, when Mr. Qureshi indicated he might come to Delhi for a return visit. But the sources hoped the Pakistani side would realise the need to continue engagement. A meeting of the bilateral judicial commission to review the question of prisoner repatriation is due and India hopes Pakistan will convene it soon.

The sources said that although Mr. Krishna and Mr. Qureshi will be in Kabul next week for an international conference, no meeting between them was being envisaged as of now.

The perils of ‘half-way house’ diplomacy

Having decided to engage Pakistan on issues beyond terror, it is counterproductive for India to artificially limit the subjects it is willing to discuss.





17 July 2010
The Hindu

The perils of ‘half-way house’ diplomacy

Siddharth Varadarajan

Future diplomatic historians will, no doubt, tell a more complex story but the broad outlines of External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna's less-than-successful visit to Islamabad seem clear enough.

Having hosted Home Minister P. Chidambaram three weeks back and heard firsthand from him exactly what India wanted on the terrorism front, the Pakistani side's expectation from the foreign minister-level meeting was that there would be discussion and, presumably, some agreement on a wider set of issues.

In the run-up to the meeting, Indian officials, too, had let it be known that they were looking at a range of subjects like trade and people-to-people contact as a way of building trust. When he arrived in Islamabad, Mr. Krishna said India was ready to discuss all outstanding issues.

Pakistan knew the formal resumption of the composite dialogue — or some updated variant of it — was still some distance away. It was also prepared to discuss the deepening of confidence building measures as a stepping stone. But it was wary of publicly accepting a formula or roadmap for engagement that frontloads not just terrorism but every other issue that India considers important while leaving issues that Islamabad considers ‘core' to an unlit backburner for future ‘warming up.'

The irony is that these issues — Jammu and Kashmir, peace and security, Siachen and Sir Creek — are subjects India and Pakistan have wasted several years of formal dialogue over without either side budging one bit.

For example, Indian soldiers remain firmly perched upon the Siachen glacier's commanding heights despite officials from the defence ministries of India and Pakistan having held several rounds of talks. Many more rounds can safely be held without our jawans being required to come down by even one metre — if that is what the government wants. Given the long-standing deadlock over proposals for verification of a mutual withdrawal, the Pakistani side knows nothing would be gained by yet another meeting of defence secretaries.

But the civilian government which is struggling to assert its authority against multiple power centres within and even outside the ‘establishment' needed something to show for its diplomatic exertions.

The Indian delegation, however, did not come to Islamabad with a mandate flexible enough to accommodate the need for these kind of harmless optics. Worse, their limited mandate was undermined from within by Union Home Secretary G.K. Pillai's accusation that the Pakistan state — with which Mr. Krishna was going to sit down and have talks — had planned the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi was undiplomatic in mentioning Mr. Pillai's unhelpful remarks in the same breath as Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed's inflammatory speeches against India.

But people on the Indian side need to ask what the home secretary hoped to achieve by saying the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate of the Pakistan army had been involved in 26/11 “from the beginning till the end.” Indian investigators had questioned Lashkar operative David Coleman Headley well before Mr. Chidambaram and Mr. Pillai held talks with their Pakistani counterparts in Islamabad last month. One can only presume this question of ISI involvement “from the beginning till the end” was raised by them with Rehman Malik.

In Islamabad, Mr. Chidambaram told reporters that India wanted Pakistan to vigorously investigate and follow up the leads available in the Mumbai terror attacks. He said he was leaving Pakistan with the conviction that “[Mr. Malik and I] have exchanged views, understood the situation and agreed that we should address the situation with the seriousness it deserves.”

Three weeks have elapsed since the Home Minister made that statement. Is that time enough to form a judgment on Pakistan's “seriousness”, let alone decide to gut the possibility of its cooperation by making a public accusation of state complicity?

At stake is not the veracity of Headley's information — though it is worth asking why the statements of a terrorist who helped attack Mumbai in order to get India and Pakistan to go to war should be taken at face value — but the utility of levelling a serious charge in public. Did Mr. Pillai or his advisers do a cost-benefit analysis beforehand and conclude that blaming the ISI in this manner on the eve of the foreign minister's talks would make Pakistan more likely to address India's concerns about terrorism?

If Mr. Pillai's comments on the ISI betray a failure of the government to think strategically, the decision to postpone any front-channel discussion on issues like Siachen and Kashmir till there is greater “trust” is also deeply flawed.

In politics, the default option is often the easiest one to take. Having suspended the composite dialogue in the wake of the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it would have been quite simple for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to keep the dialogue process under suspension indefinitely. There would be no need for him to explain anything to anybody. But just as Atal Bihari Vajpayee had the courage to invite Pervez Musharraf, the architect of Kargil, to Agra in 2001, or to travel to Islamabad in January 2004 despite cross-border terrorism not ending, Dr. Singh was brave enough to say that not talking to Pakistan indefinitely was a bad option.

The Prime Minister showed enormous political courage at Sharm el-Sheikh last year and againt at Thimphu in making a case for engagement. He knew full well that his decision would run against the grain of both hawkish political sentiment and the risk-averse attitudes of the security establishment. But in a concession to these quarters, his advisers came up with the constraining formula of 'incremental dialogue'.

In the wake of the acrimony that Mr. Krishna's visit has produced, the government's critics in the opposition and the ‘retirati' are likely to say Dr. Singh was wrong to try engagement. That would be an incorrect conclusion. Thursday's fruitless talks and the rather churlish comments of Mr. Qureshi since then are not the product of dialogue and engagement but of the half-way house that Indian officials have parked themselves in.

Dr. Singh was bold enough to steer India away from the rigid position of no dialogue but he should have been bolder still in recognising that indulging Pakistan's desire for official talks on Kashmir, Siachen and other ‘core issues' would cost India nothing and would actually be a cheap way of moving the CBMs process forward.

India's current rigidity on this question is counter-productive. No doubt Dr. Singh is wary of how a more open attitude towards the resumption of dialogue would play. All democracies — and many non-democracies — have to worry about public opinion. But in this particular case, the burden of good optics weighs much more heavily on the civilian government in Pakistan than it does on the UPA government in India.

If India looked at the problem strategically, it would recognise the importance of not allowing jihadi and extremist forces in Pakistan to depict the civilian government as an entity which meekly surrenders to Indian positions.

Anti-Indianism is the glue that the terrorists and their backers in Pakistan use to bond with a public which is otherwise under daily attack by them. The creation of a dialogue structure which allows the Pakistani side to hold its head high domestically against extremists of all hues is what India should be striving for, especially at a time when the attack on the Data Ganj Bakhsh shrine in Lahore has outraged the Pakistani people.

Mr. Qureshi may have been abrasive and tactless in many of things he said but his remarks on Balochistan and Kashmir and even infiltration (‘deal firmly with them and we will back you') led hawkish journalists to attack him as pro-Indian. India is dealing with the complexity of a sharply divided Pakistani establishment and society. It should resist the temptation of matching Mr. Qureshi's desperate grandstanding and instead think deeply about how the process of engagement which has started can be broadened and deepened.

Substantive dialogue is still some distance away

Instability on the AfPak front — and not the lack of trust — has emerged as the binding constraint on India's ability to move bilateral talks on Kashmir forward...





14 July 2010
The Hindu

Substantive dialogue is still some distance away

Siddharth Varadarajan

As India and Pakistan move the latest phase of their engagement to the foreign minister level, a curious shift in national attitudes and priorities on the bilateral front is now evident.

Earlier, it was New Delhi that expressed its inability to resume a substantial dialogue on the ‘core' dispute of Kashmir unless the terrorism issue was addressed. On its part, Islamabad treated with suspicion any suggestion that talks could be held on secondary questions first while Kashmir was postponed to a later date. So it was that a feeble attempt India made last September to talk about only humanitarian issues at the Joint Secretary level pending the eventual resumption of “substantive dialogue” never got off the ground. Nine months later, the Indian side has come around to the view that the “complex negotiations” on Kashmir which took place in the back channel with Pakistan from 2004 to 2007 were leading to a favourable outcome and ought to be revived, even if total satisfaction on the terrorism front is not forthcoming. But it is the Pakistani side which today is in no position to pick up the threads of the Kashmir dialogue.

The official Indian perception of the reason why this is so is that the Pakistani military never fully backed the Musharraf formula of leaving the territorial status quo in Jammu and Kashmir intact while evolving ways of making the Line of Control irrelevant for the people of the state. In an essay for the Harvard International Review in 2009 written before he was named National Security Adviser, Shivshankar Menon said India had two worries about the back channel — whether future governments in Pakistan would respect any agreement which emerged and whether the “internally omnipotent Pakistan Army” was on board. “The first question was never put to the test and remains unanswered”, he said. “All too soon the second was answered in the negative”.

In an all the Track-II meetings I have taken part in with Pakistani analysts, politicians and ex-officials in recent months, it has become abundantly clear that virtually no section of the political, bureaucratic or military establishment is willing to buy in to the back channel. For the politicians, the problem with the emerging Kashmir formula lies with Musharraf's paternity, which they are reluctant to embrace; as for the bureaucrats, they resent the role played by an outsider like Tariq Aziz. Each of these aversions can be remedied quite easily but unless the reasons for the military's opposition are understood, any attempt to revive the back channel is bound to flounder.

As long as the Pakistani military feels it has better options in hand, it will not support the kind of back-channel dialogue which took place earlier. One can argue that the traditional Pakistani approach of supporting separatism, militancy and terrorism is hardly likely to succeed but the metric for success the army brass is looking at is not a favourable outcome in Kashmir. What is at stake are options that help to entrench the military as the most powerful and indispensable institution in the country in the years ahead, when the demands for genuine democracy and federalism become more insistent.

For the moment, the Pakistani military's attitude towards the back channel, Kashmir and India is strictly a function of the cards it believes it holds in the wider ‘AfPak' game. This is a game full of peril and promise, where the potential for strategic gains for it are evenly matched by the prospect of catastrophe. For decades, the establishment nurtured extremist groups which acted as force multipliers against democratic forces within as well as against India and Afghanistan. If Musharraf was willing to look at the possibility of reaching an agreement with India in Kashmir, this was mainly because internal political circumstances and the Bush administration's blunders in Iraq meant the military establishment was not under pressure to surrender positions on the domestic and Afghan fronts. Both of these equations began to change from 2007 onward. The lawyers' movement, the return of civilian rule and the American surge in Afghanistan have rendered the establishment's assets and interests vulnerable all round. Under the new circumstances, a settlement in Kashmir would jeopardise the ability of the army to project itself as the custodian of Pakistan against a perpetually hostile India.

Even if the establishment had no direct hand in the November 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai, the ensuing tension was helpful because it gave the Pakistani army an alibi to resist American pressure to do more on the Afghan front. Though the Manmohan Singh government almost immediately indicated that it had no intention of taking military action, the absence of dialogue for more than a year allowed Islamabad to keep up the illusion that the primary threat confronting the country was India and not terrorism. Today, with Pakistan under pressure to open the North Waziristan battle front, New Delhi's willingness to resume sustained high-level dialogue is aimed as much at making bilateral gains and building trust as at creating a conducive regional atmosphere for military operations against the Taliban and other extremist groups.

The attempted bombing of Times Square in New York by a terrorist with links to Pakistan-based groups and the recent suicide attack on the shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore also mean the domestic and international alignment of stars is the most propitious for such an undertaking. But India has a vital role to play in not giving the Pakistani military an excuse to sidestep this vital agenda. During his visit to Islamabad, External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna should try to review the full-range of confidence-building measures India and Pakistan have agreed to in recent years and discuss ways of taking them forward. Back channel talks will have to wait but that does not mean India should resist the resumption of ‘front channel' talks on Kashmir if the requirement of domestic optics makes them necessary for Pakistan.

China, Pakistan and the NSG

Rather than objecting to what it can't prevent, India should back a nuclear deal for Pakistan structured around a package of non-proliferation commitments...







24 June 2010
The Hindu

China, Pakistan and the NSG

Siddharth Varadarajan

How would Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary have reacted to the news that a 13-year-old boy recently scaled the same peak which they were the first to conquer in 1953? Would they feel a tinge of irritation at how ‘easy' the summit has now become? Perhaps. But I am sure they would not feel their own accomplishment had in any way been diminished.

Having successfully broken the back of international sanctions on its civilian nuclear programme in September 2008, India needs to ask itself how it should look upon Pakistan's desire to follow in its footsteps and access civil nuclear technology for its energy needs. Should it stand in the way and try and block Islamabad from entering base camp as some panicky members of the Indian strategic community advocate? Or should it adopt a more mature attitude and work with its international partners to ensure the orderly incorporation of Pakistan into the global non-proliferation regime?

The question is relevant because China is likely to inform the Nuclear Suppliers Group of its decision to sell two pressurised water reactors (PWRs) for the Chashma-3 and 4 power stations in Pakistan. Virtually, every member of the 46-nation cartel believes this sale would be a violation of guidelines Beijing committed itself to follow when it joined the NSG in May 2004. China, of course, disagrees. India has so far wisely confined itself to asking the Chinese side for information about the proposed transfer. On June 22, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao fielded questions from reporters on the subject with a straight bat: “We are monitoring the debate and the developments in this regard as they relate to this subject of supply of nuclear reactors by China to Pakistan,” she said, carefully choosing her words. She did not criticise the proposed transfer or object to it, nor could she have. Three months ago, when asked about the possibility of nuclear cooperation between the U.S. and Pakistan, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had made it clear India has no locus standi. “Who am I to interfere with what goes on between the United States and Pakistan?” he said. “That's a matter for these two countries to consider.” The same logic should surely apply to what goes on in the civil nuclear field between Beijing and Islamabad.

NSG guidelines say members should sell nuclear equipment and material only to countries that are party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or who accept full-scope safeguards — that is, who agree to place all their nuclear facilities under international inspection. There are only three countries which do not satisfy this criterion: India, Pakistan and Israel. Two years ago, the NSG voted unanimously to exempt India from this restriction. In exchange, India took on a number of commitments. These included separating its civilian and military nuclear facilities and placing the former under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. India also undertook to abide by its moratorium on nuclear testing, support international efforts to negotiate a verifiable Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT), implement rigorous export control norms and not share enrichment and reprocessing technology with others. Prior to the NSG waiver, India finalised a safeguards agreement with the IAEA providing for indefinite IAEA supervision of its civilian nuclear sector.

Today, the NSG's restrictions no longer apply to India but they do still to Israel and Pakistan. When China became a member of the NSG six years ago, it made a “declaration of existing projects” in order to be able to fulfil supply obligations towards Pakistan that had been made prior to that. China and Pakistan signed agreements for civil nuclear cooperation in 1986 and 1991. The latter agreement has not been made public but two MoUs were signed in its wake for the construction of PWRs for the Chashma-1 and Chashma-2 power stations. China told the NSG that since these projects were ongoing, it would continue to supply fuel and equipment for them. Since it made no mention of Chashma-3 and 4 at the time, their inclusion is clearly an afterthought. If China persists with its export plan, this would arguably be the first time it openly flouts international rules it had voluntarily agreed to abide by. Chinese help for the Pakistani nuclear weapons programme is well known but virtually all of its proliferation activities occurred before it formally acceded to the NPT in 1992. Similarly, China has stuck to its NSG commitments since joining the cartel in 2004. Deviating from them now would raise questions about its willingness to play the role of a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system.

India is not a member of the NSG and will, therefore, not be in the room when the matter is discussed in Christ Church, New Zealand, this week. But it can respond to the new situation that is unfolding in one of three ways. First, it can go into overdrive to lobby NSG members to take on China and make sure there is no dilution of the group's rules prohibiting nuclear commerce with Islamabad. Second, it can remain quiet and do nothing. Third, it can make a virtue out of necessity and suggest the NSG start considering the need to bring Pakistan into the non-proliferation tent.

Of these, the first option is the worst from the strategic and diplomatic perspective. Trying to block something which India is in no position to prevent will exacerbate tensions with Pakistan and China and expose the weak hand the country has on this question. The only circumstance that would justify a blocking strategy is if the proposed Chinese transfer were to alter the strategic balance in the subcontinent. In fact, the supply of two safeguarded civilian power reactors will not make any difference, unlike say a transfer of unsafeguarded nuclear equipment or material or of new delivery systems for nuclear missiles. The binding constraints on the size of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal are the enrichment capacity of Kahuta, the small size (40 MW) of its heavy water reactor at Khushab and the amount of natural uranium it has access to. None of these constraints will be affected by the two new PWRs.

Given the conservatism of Indian diplomacy, the second option of silence is the one most likely to be followed. But this option is also inferior. No country in the world, least of all Pakistan or China, will believe India has no views or concerns on the transfer. Its silence will, thus, likely be seen as an admission of impotence rather than as an expression of statesmanship and wisdom. This option is also inferior because it is not in India's interest that the international non-proliferation system be tinkered with on an ad-hoc basis. The Indian exemption at the NSG may have been pushed by the U.S. but it required the active concurrence of dozens of countries. What emerged from those bruising sessions in Vienna in August and September 2008 was a careful balance of rights and obligations which benefited both the international system and India. China today lacks Washington's hegemonic ability to change the global rules. If it breaks ranks with the NSG and acts unilaterally, the after-effects could be quite destabilising.

India should, therefore, consider the third option of encouraging the international community to discuss the contours of an agreement that would lead to the orderly induction of Pakistan into the global nuclear regime. Given its population and energy needs, Pakistan needs help in developing a diverse energy portfolio. In line with global trends, it is logical that its leaders should look favourably upon nuclear power.

Thanks to its past record in proliferating weapons-related technologies, however, Pakistan will have to do much more to establish its credentials as a responsible partner in the field of nuclear commerce. Any exemption at the NSG would likely involve stricter parameters and wider commitments than were seen in the India case. And if the Indian exemption took three years and two months to fructify, it is reasonable to expect Pakistan's exemption to take twice as long. The benefits of immediate engagement are, nevertheless, overwhelming. Islamabad's opposition to the FMCT — partly triggered by irrational fears about the impact of the Indo-U.S. nuclear agreement on India's ability to produce fissile material — means the Conference on Disarmament has been unable to begin its work on the treaty. If Pakistan knows there is light at the end of the NSG tunnel, its attitude at the CD may change.

Building trust, one step at a time

India should strive for functional cooperation with Pakistan on the Mumbai terror trial. As the ‘front channel' picks up speed, so will the ‘back channel'...

23 June 2010
The Hindu

Building trust, one step at a time

Siddharth Varadarajan

The visits to Islamabad this week by Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and Home Minister P. Chidambaram will provide India and Pakistan with the opportunity of erecting the scaffolding for a dialogue process that could eventually allow the two countries to make substantial progress on their core concerns.

India's position on the necessity of dialogue has held steady since the ‘Thimphu thaw' in April, suggesting all relevant political and institutional stakeholders are on board. The foreign secretary's speech to the Afghanistan-India-Pakistan ‘trialogue' on June 13 has added greater clarity and depth, especially on the question of trust-building. Terrorism continues to be the main obstacle but the Indian analysis of the interplay between terror, Pakistan's internal political dynamics and diplomacy is much more nuanced and sophisticated today than it was a year ago.

From the open-ended, maximalist demand of a complete shut down of terrorist infrastructure, the Manmohan Singh government is today looking for incremental progress across a range of vectors. The trial of the Lashkar-e-Taiba men accused by Pakistan of masterminding the November 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai is the most important of these. But India would also like to see forward movement on humanitarian issues, as well as on the cross-border and cross-Line of Control confidence building measures agreed by the two sides in recent years. Ms Rao's remarkable speech flagged another metric, crucial to the fate of any dialogue process: “We also have to reaffirm the progress made through complex negotiations and dialogue through patient and unsung effort whether in the composite dialogue or back channel diplomacy, during this period.”

It was necessary for the foreign secretary to reiterate this point because neither the civilian government in Pakistan nor the post-Musharraf military establishment has so far shown a willingness to embrace the conceptual headway made by Islamabad and New Delhi between 2004 and 2008 on the Kashmir issue. The Peoples' Party government is perhaps wary of accepting the legacy of a dictator, and General Kayani — who may have silently gritted his teeth when Musharraf pushed his ‘out of the box' formula on Kashmir with his top commanders — thinks he has better cards to play today.

The truth is that there are no other cards. The ‘make borders irrelevant' approach is the only game in town and sooner or later all stakeholders in Pakistan will have to be reconciled to it. While Ms Rao did the right thing by flagging the importance of the back channel, India has to be patient and give the politicians and generals the time and space they need to reinvent the wheel. There is also merit in Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi's remark that the back channel cannot make headway if the front channel is stuck. If trust is required to move the front channel again, the amount of trust needed to work the back channel is much greater.

At a recent Track-II meeting of the Pugwash group in Islamabad, Pakistani and Indian analysts and former officials had an animated discussion on terrorism, Afghanistan, water, Kashmir and the nuclear issue. While the two sides disagreed and argued on virtually every subject, the discussions on terrorism produced some clarity. The Pakistani side spoke of the legal difficulties in handling terrorism cases, noting that the high-profile trials of terrorists involved in the bombing of the Marriot hotel in Islamabad and the assassination of the Surgeon-General had unfortunately ended in acquittals. A well-regarded criminal lawyer from Lahore spoke of the difficulties surrounding the trial of the LeT men accused of attacking Mumbai and made a plea for better coordination between the Pakistani and Indian authorities in that case.

The Indian side responded by noting that the fight against terror was only partially a legal one. And that what is needed is a demonstration of political will, something that is lacking in Islamabad's feeble attempts to rein in anti-India terror groups. The Pakistani participants acknowledged this, but argued that their government was weak and couldn't afford to open up too many fronts at the same time. This, too, was disputed by the Indians. At the same time, there was general agreement that the legal case against the 26/11 accused had taken on a significance of its own, that the fragile dialogue process might not survive an acquittal and that, therefore, some coordinated effort needs to put in by both governments to ensure the best possible legal case is mounted against them.

Should meet frequently

In this context, one question Ms Rao and Mr. Chidambaram should seriously examine as they prepare themselves for their visit is whether the endless and somewhat gladiatorial exchange of ‘dossiers' with Pakistan is the most efficient way of going about prosecuting terrorists accused of perpetrating a heinous cross-border crime. Granted, there is a trust deficit. But if, instead of exchanging thick manila envelopes, the officials who work on these dossiers were to meet frequently, this may well provide for more efficient if not effective interaction.

India has bad memories of the short-lived Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism and is not in favour of its revival. But functional cooperation between the investigators who have probed the Mumbai attack case on both sides will help Pakistani prosecutors make a rock solid case against Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and the other LeT men now standing trial in a Rawalpindi anti-terror court. Depending on how that process works, more structured interaction between India's National Investigation Agency and Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency should also be considered. This would be one concrete way in which the two sides try to build up a degree of trust.

Second, Pakistan will have to make every possible effort to keep in check provocateurs like Hafiz Saeed of the LeT and tamp down on terrorist infiltration from its territory across the Line of Control.

The third source of building trust is for India and Pakistan to prioritise humanitarian issues, especially the plight of juveniles and fishermen who end up spending a long time in each other's jails for crossing the border illegally because of the absence of proper diplomatic mechanisms. Activating the joint judicial commission to deal with the speedy release and exchange of prisoners who have finished serving their sentences is also an urgent necessity. Deepening existing cross-LoC CBMs, especially those relating to trade, should also be taken up immediately.

Fourth, the two sides should ensure that foreign secretary- and/or joint secretary-level discussions take place every month to resolve pressing concerns. Meetings at the official level must be held regardless of the state of bilateral relations and would be in addition to whatever formal dialogue structure emerges to address issues and disputes over Kashmir, Siachen, water or any other issue.

The goal of the upcoming round of talks as well as those between the two foreign ministers in July should be to prepare for the adoption of a structured, interim engagement process. Later this year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will have an opportunity to meet again with his Pakistani counterpart on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York in September. If India is gracious enough to invite Yusuf Raza Gilani to attend the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in October, that would provide another occasion for the two leaders to take stock of the relationship and settle on an appropriate dialogue structure. The problem of getting Pakistan back on track as far as the ‘soft borders' solution to Kashmir is concerned would still remain, of course. One proposal Prime Minister Singh could make at that juncture to demonstrate the benefit of cross-LoC arrangements would be for India and Pakistan to examine whether a single project on the Kishenganga-Jhelum-Neelum with traded electricity might be a better option than building rival hydroelectric projects.

India shifts from ‘accusatory' to ‘exploratory' mode

Acknowledging the progress made on the back-channel would be major trust building step ...

21 June 2010
The Hindu

India shifts from ‘accusatory' to ‘exploratory' mode

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: In the strongest indication to date of India's willingness to pick up the threads of dialogue blown aside by terrorists in 2008, official sources said on Sunday that “a clear signal” from Pakistan of its willingness to build on progress made by the two countries earlier would “be a big trust building step.”

Briefing reporters, official sources said the Manmohan Singh government was looking at next week's meetings between the Foreign Secretaries and Home Ministers of India and Pakistan as a trust building exercise that could allow substantial progress to be made on terrorism and all contentious issues bedevilling the relationship.

They said P. Chidambaram and Nirupama Rao would not be going to Islamabad “in an accusatory mode but an exploratory one.” Ms. Rao will meet with her Pakistani counterpart, Salman Bashir, on June 24, while Mr. Chidambaram, who is travelling to Pakistan for the SAARC Interior Ministers meeting, will sit with Rehman Malik on June 26.

“At the core of our concerns in terrorism, this is very real and has not diminished,” the sources stressed. “But as we have said all along, this is a relationship between neighbours, and dialogue becomes necessary to convey concerns and impress upon the other side where we stand on various issues.”

India remains wary of reports that there could be further attacks on Indian interests in Afghanistan or on Indian soil, emanating from terrorists in Pakistan. Islamabad has a responsibility to ensure these don't take place, the sources said, adding: “You may say the two sides should cooperate to ensure this. But at the level of institutions of government, this is where the lack of trust is a problem.”

Amplifying the bullish account of progress made between 2004 and 2007 in a recent speech by Ms. Rao, the sources said that if the civilian government in Pakistan acknowledged what had been accomplished through the back channel and various CBMs and was ready to take that process forward, this would give big boost to trust building. “We have to see if they are willing to do that.”

The sources said that while Mr. Chidambaram would focus on the action India would like Pakistan to take against the conspirators of the Mumbai terrorist attacks as well as against the wider network of anti-India terror groups, Ms. Rao would look at steps that could be put in place to reduce the trust deficit, “even if they are modest.” These would include humanitarian issues such as the convening of a meeting of the India-Pakistan judicial commission, which deals with prisoners, people to people contact and cross-Line of Control CBMs.

Chidambaram to brief Pakistan about Headley disclosures

Mandate to assess Pakistan's pledge to stop terrorists using its soil against India ...

21 June 2010
The Hindu

Chidambaram to brief Pakistan about Headley disclosures

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram will travel to Pakistan next week armed with a mandate to brief his counterpart there about some of the information Indian investigators have gleaned from their recent interrogation in Chicago of Lashkar-e-Taiba operative David Coleman Headley.

At its meeting here on Sunday night, the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) once again endorsed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's broad approach towards trust-building and dialogue with Pakistan, highly placed sources told The Hindu. Mr. Chidambaram, who will travel to Pakistan on June 25 for a meeting of Saarc Interior Ministers, will also have a bilateral meeting with the Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik on the sidelines.

“He is not going there to talk about the resumption of dialogue,” the sources said, “but the CCS has asked him to update Mr. Malik on what all has happened in India on the November 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack.” In addition, he will brief the Pakistani side about some of the disclosures Headley has made about his connections with LeT handlers and others, most probably in a one-on-one meeting without the presence of other officials.

The ‘voluminous' documentation India handed over to Pakistan last week contains detailed responses to all the questions which Islamabad had raised in a set of dossiers on April 25, official sources said. In those, Pakistan had made certain requests for information and testimony that it said were required in order to properly prosecute the LeT men standing trial in a Rawalpindi court for their role in the Mumbai attack. “We have sent them all the documentation to do with the confession of Ajmal Kasab, including from the magistrate and investigating officer, and we feel it is not necessary for them to appear in court in Pakistan,” the sources said. “Let us see what their response is.” In its latest dossier, India has also cited specific provisions of the Indian Penal Code that it believes LeT chief Hafiz Saeed has violated, including waging war.

Based on Mr. Chidambaram's interaction with the Pakistani side, the government would be in a better position to assess how sincere Islamabad is being in implementing the commitment Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani made to Dr. Singh in Thimphu in April about not allowing anti-India terrorists to use Pakistan's soil to stage attacks, the sources said.

Asked whether some kind of interaction between the National Investigation Agency and Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency could help build trust, the sources said the response Mr. Chidambaram got “would help us to focus on what steps we could take to build trust at the institutional level.” What India wanted was “productive engagement,” something that was absent from the erstwhile Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism, they added.

The sources said the Indian side was not going to Pakistan “with a digital scale in [its hand].” “We are genuine when we say dialogue should resume and concerns on terror should be dealt with … Let us not prejudge the outcome.”

Open mind

Asked about Kashmir, the sources said India had an open mind and was “fully prepared to discuss contentious issues if Pakistan raises them, with confidence.” They stressed that all issues fell within the scope of the Foreign Secretary-level discussions that would take place on June 24. “Whether it is water, peace and security, confidence building measures … We are looking at the whole relationship as an integrated subject.”

India keen to engage ‘empowered' Gilani

After Thimphu, trust building key to emerging dialogue template with Pakistan ...

2 May 2010
The Hindu

India keen to engage ‘empowered' Gilani

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: The recent empowerment of Pakistani prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and his favourable disposition towards peace were important factors in India’s willingness to put the dialogue process back on track.

Providing the first detailed account of the meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan and Mr. Gilani in Thimphu on April 28, senior officials said the question of ‘who India should talk to’ had been answered by the 18th amendment to the Pakistani constitution which enhanced the authority of the prime minister.

But personal equations between the two principals also mattered. “They do manage to communicate well with one another”, an official said. “There is a certain chemistry”. Last year, when Dr. Singh was under fire following the Sharm el-Sheikh summit, Mr. Gilani batted for him by telling reporters that what the Prime Minister had said in Parliament about the controversial joint statement ‘is what we agreed’. Dr. Singh had put an Indian spin on the terror-dialogue delinking issue but the Pakistani PM chose not to score points. “We remember that”, an Indian official told The Hindu. “He seems to be favourably disposed towards peace”.

India is prepared to move ahead on the basis of Mr. Gilani’s latest assurances because the 18th amendment had legally empowered him, the sources said. “In fact, Gilani told us, ‘I’ve come with the authority. I have the support of everyone’.” The sources also appreciated the fact that his statements on India had always been relatively restrained. “Until you show him a door, he has no incentive to start doing anything [about our concerns]. And you give your enemies the chance to say, ‘Look, India is not prepared to budge even a bit’.” Why should we allow them to fuse all Pakistanis behind them, the officials asked.

The sources said India and Pakistan came to Thimphu with constraints but agreed to lower the pitch. “We have opened the door to dialogue. The purpose is to restore trust. That’s what the foreign ministers and foreign secretaries have been tasked to do … This is not a dialogue to solve all issues immediately but to restore trust”.

The officials said Dr. Singh made it clear it is terrorism from Pakistan which has been preventing dialogue. “One of the most important things to restore trust is credible action by Pakistan”. Trust was a dynamic process, the sources said, adding that the “best scenario” would be one where the 26/11 trial ends soon with convictions, Pakistan takes “credible action” against terrorist groups and the dialogue moves alongside. “We had two choices at Thimphu. First, to have ‘talks about talks’. This was the weasel option, of endless arguments about terrorism lists, Kashmir, water etc. The second was to recognise that if the problem is lack of trust, let’s make trust the issue. It opens [things] up”.

Asked if this was a new template, the officials said, “I don’t think you can give it a name. The advantage of this is that it is open. It has potential”.

The one-on-one meeting between the two prime ministers was about clearing the air, the sources said, and not a ‘negotiations meeting’. Mr. Gilani spoke about the problems Pakistan was facing in dealing with terrorism. Dr. Singh replied that the slow pace of the 26/11 trial and the threats being issued by Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed were a source of frustration for India. Mr. Gilani said he understood India’s concerns and that his government would find a legal way to address them.

At long last, a firm step forward

The meeting in Bhutan between the two Prime Ministers has opened a path, but India and Pakistan are not out of the woods yet...







30 April 2010
The Hindu

At long last, a firm step forward

Siddharth Varadarajan

The history of India-Pakistan relations is full of examples of leaders from both countries travelling to distant points on the globe — from Tashkent and New York to Sharm el-Sheikh and Havana — to meet each other only to end up standing still. Meetings held in the subcontinent, on the other hand, have invariably led to breakthroughs, big and small. Think Simla and Lahore, Islamabad and Delhi. Each of these encounters produced conceptual breakthroughs that briefly carried some promise of momentum before being swamped by the forces of inertia, dead habit, treachery or bad faith that are the constants in this cursed relationship.

To the list of promising South Asian summits can now be added the name of Thimphu, where Manmohan Singh and Yusuf Raza Gilani met on Thursday. Defying naysayers within their respective establishments and wider strategic communities, the two Prime Ministers crafted a simple but elegant formula for breaking the current impasse, thereby ensuring that the process of engagement — stuck for several months — now has some chance of moving ahead. The Foreign Secretaries and Foreign Ministers have been tasked with meeting each other to assess the current state of the relationship and identify the reasons for the trust deficit. This is to be the first step in what will eventually lead to a dialogue process aimed at discussing and resolving all outstanding issues and disputes.

With the “composite” nature of the dialogue becoming a political stumbling block, India and Pakistan wisely decided to transcend the confines of nomenclature. The process they engage in may eventually take the form of the composite dialogue or, more likely, improve upon it. But that will depend on two factors, both equally important: the results of the review the two sides conduct, and their ability to reduce the trust deficit.

For India, the restoration of trust depends on very simple metrics. New Delhi's overarching priority is to get Islamabad to honour its commitment to prevent terrorists from using Pakistani territory to launch attacks on India. Mr. Gilani reiterated this promise in Bhutan but the Manmohan Singh government will need more than mere words in order to convince sceptics at home. It needs the seven Lashkar-e-Taiba men currently on trial in Rawalpindi for their involvement in the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai punished. And it needs credible evidence that anti-India terrorist organisations like the LeT and their leadership no longer have the freedom to operate. Infiltration levels in the valley, which have been rising over the past few months, also need to fall.

Even within the constraints of what Pakistan's increasingly independent judicial system is prepared to accept, there is a lot more that the Pakistani government can and must do to address Indian concerns. The current thaw assumes the absence of engagement is making it easier for the military establishment in Pakistan to justify the continuation of its links with anti-Indian extremists. Prime Minister Singh's decision to agree to the resumption of dialogue is based on the principle of trust but verify. If terrorist groups continue to speak and operate with impunity, chances are any substantive talks the two sides begin on issues like Kashmir or Siachen will flounder. After all, the oxygen of trust is needed to scale those daunting heights, which no leader has managed to ascend so far. As for water, it is hard to imagine India agreeing to surrender rights given to it by the Indus Water Treaty or shouldering obligations not enumerated there — which is essentially what Pakistan would like it to do — in the absence of trust and normality. Putting the terrorists out of business is, therefore, very much in Pakistan's interest.

As the two sides review the relationship, they will try and come up with a framework that can build on what the composite dialogue has accomplished so far while transcending its limitations. It is clear, for example, that bureaucrats and officials have done all they could to resolve Sir Creek and Siachen and that those discussions have reached the stage where a dialogue between politically-empowered envoys is the only way a settlement can be produced. Similarly on the “core issue” of Jammu and Kashmir, the back channel has proved to be a more effective platform for serious negotiation than the front channel operated by the two Foreign Secretaries. Should the Kashmir dialogue, too, be made political?

An obstacle here, of course, is that the Pakistani side appears to have repudiated the understandings reached between 2004-2007 on maintaining the territorial status quo, making borders irrelevant, demilitarising the area and crafting administrative links between the two parts of Kashmir. But even that is not the biggest problem since either party is well within its right to walk away from the back channel. Today, however, the real challenge in reviving and working the back channel is the lack of clarity in Islamabad about who Riaz Mohammed Khan — the designated counterpart of Satinder Lambah — will report to.

Political circumstances allowed General Musharraf to work within the dictum of l'etat c'est moi and India dealt with him as such. But today there is no clarity. Depending on how the wider internal politics in Pakistan plays out over the next year, some clarity may emerge. It is in India's long-term interest that democracy in Pakistan gets stabilised and empowered. This means, every effort must be made to work with Prime Minister Gilani and his government, while keeping lines of communication open with other political parties and leaders. There have also been suggestions in several high-level Track-II meetings that a dialogue between the intelligence chiefs of both countries could serve a useful purpose. These are issues that need to be discussed and evaluated when the Foreign Secretaries and Ministers take stock of where the relationship stands.

Alongside this evolving process, forward movement on trade, investment and energy sector cooperation would produce mutual gains that could enlarge the constituency for peace in both countries. None of this will work, however, if the leadership in India and Pakistan succumbs to the temptation of playing to domestic galleries. Going by the record of the past few years, terrorists will attempt to destroy this latest attempt to restart the dialogue. Acting with maturity and restraint in the face of provocation will pay more dividends in the long run. In Thimphu, both Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and Pakistani Foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi struck the right tone even when “nationalist” questions were thrown at them. If the dialogue process is to survive the critical early months, leaders and officials up and down the food chain in India and Pakistan need to exercise great caution.

Time to end the impasse with Pakistan

If India really believes dialogue is the way forward, it should not allow a disagreement over form or nomenclature to come in the way.








26 April 2010
The Hindu

Time to end the impasse with Pakistan

Siddharth Varadarajan

Forget Kashmir and terrorism or even Afghanistan and water, the current stalemate between India and Pakistan is all down to one word. Both countries publicly say that Dialogue is the only way forward. Yet each is paralysed by the name 'Composite'. New Delhi is so allergic to it that it will not accept its use, while Islamabad has become so attached to the C word that it insists there can be nothing else.

This Indian allergy and Pakistani attachment is paradoxical, since the composite dialogue approach has suited India more than it has Pakistan. Under the guise of moving ahead simultaneously on all issues, the framework has allowed progress on trade and other subjects considered important by New Delhi, even as the status quo on major disputes like Kashmir and Siachen --key concerns for Islamabad -- has held. Of course, the dialogue did not end cross-border terrorism or extinguish the links between the Pakistani security agencies and violent extremism as some on the Indian side might have hoped. But that was always an improbable shot given the DNA of the Pakistani establishment. Over time, India has realised the best way to deal with the threat of terror is by strengthening its internal capabilities while utilising engagement as a lever for influencing Pakistan's behaviour over the long run.

The two most important issues for the Pakistani side today -- going by its public statements -- are Kashmir and water. But here's the paradox: the composite dialogue, from its point of view, has produced no forward movement whatsoever on these two fronts. In four and a half rounds of talks within that framework, the total amount of time spent by the two foreign secretaries in discussing the Kashmir dispute has perhaps been 10 hours. During which neither side did anything beyond restating its national positions. As for water, it does not even figure as a separate head under this format. The only water-related dispute covered by the composite dialogue is the Tulbul navigation project, also known as the Wullar barrage. There, too, progress has been insignificant.

In contrast to the composite dialogue framework, the back channel between Satinder Lambah and Tariq Aziz was far more effective and productive. Between 2004 and 2007, the two special envoys, who reported directly to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and General Pervez Musharraf respectively, discussed Kashmir for hundreds of hours. More significantly, their exertions produced a framework solution that was cleared on the Indian side by the Cabinet Committee on Security and on the Pakistani side by the Corps Commanders conference, before domestic political difficulties triggered by his dismissal of the chief justice forced Musharraf to back off. As for water, the Indus Water Commissioners have been meeting continuously for more than 40 years and their forum represents the best platform for Pakistan because all the Indian projects it opposes on the Indus, Chenab and Jhelum rivers can be referred to an outside arbitrator whose decisions are final and binding. Compared to such a powerful dispute resolution mechanism, the existing dialogue framework is surely inferior. And yet, even though Islamabad's best shot at making progress on water and Kashmir lies outside the composite dialogue, it has got locked into a situation where it is refusing any form of engagement or talks other than that.

Now let's consider India. The Indian position has been in a state of flux since it suspended the composite dialogue following the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in November 2008. Broadly speaking, however, India has maintained that there can be no resumption of the composite dialogue till Pakistan moves to punish the Mumbai conspirators and dismantles the "infrastructure of terror" on its soil. In September last year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a distinction between "meaningful dialogue" on disputes, which would have to await Pakistani action on terrorism, and talks on "humanitarian and other issues." Since then, the Indian position has evolved further. When Pakistan's Foreign Secretary, Salman Bashir, was invited to Delhi in February 2010, India clarified that while its own priority was terrorism, it was ready to discuss all issues with Pakistan. That is still the official Indian position. At a press conference on April 22, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao said dialogue "represents a concrete method to move forward in our relationship ... [It] is always useful. It helps clear the atmosphere and especially between neighbours, such as India and Pakistan. Dialogue is really the way forward".

But if India believes dialogue "is really the way forward", why is it unable to accept Pakistan's call for the "composite" dialogue to be resumed? The paradox here is that from the traditional Indian perspective, the composite dialogue has worked pretty well. Discussions on Kashmir have not led to any change in the territorial status quo but have provided a cover for India to move ahead with other parts of the bilateral agenda that suit it more, like trade and cross-border confidence-building measures. And if the Indian side is opposed to talks on the 'water issue', the composite framework of dialogue is ideal because water does not figure as a standalone topic under any of the subject heads. Despite this, India is the one saying no to 'composite' dialogue.

India suspended the composite dialogue in order to get Pakistan to take action against terrorism. Some action has been taken but the Manmohan Singh government rightly believes that Pakistan can and must do more. It also knows the continued absence of dialogue is unlikely to produce greater action on the terrorism front and might even be counter-productive. Yet it fears the "resumption" of the suspended dialogue will be seen as a sign of weakness by the Opposition.

India's options have been further complicated by the hardening of the Pakistani position on cooperation and dialogue since November 2009, when Barack Obama's new AfPak policy dealt the military establishment in Rawalpindi a stronger hand in the Afghan endgame. Even as the Pakistan army has stepped up its offensive against the Tehreek-e-Taliban and, to a lesser extent, anti-American extremists on its border with Afghanistan, it has played up the 'India threat' card to balance the perception that it is too subservient to the U.S. The rhetoric on water, the Azm-e-Nau III exercises, the loosening of the leash on Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed and the increase in infiltration across the Line of Control are all evidence of the hardening of the Pakistani military's attitude. At the same time, the domestic political situation in Pakistan is fluid. The 18th amendment to the constitution has opened up the possibility of the civilian government and the provinces strengthening themselves vis-a-vis the military. The revival of the Benazir Bhutto assassination case in the wake of the recent U.N. report could also provide political ammunition against the establishment.

In the run up to this week's Saarc summit in Bhutan, where Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will meet Yusuf Raza Gilani on the sidelines, Indian officials are resigned to keeping the bilateral relationship in a 'holding pattern.' Their logic is that if relations cannot improve, then they should not be allowed to deteriorate either. As a short-term strategy, the holding pattern strategy works fine. There are always small things that can be done at that level too. But an aeroplane cannot circle the runway endlessly. The longer it is up in the air, the greater is the likelihood of a disastrous descent. That is why planning for an orderly landing is a much better strategy.

In Thimphu, Dr. Singh must try and find a way of doing that. One possibility is for the two prime ministers to task their foreign secretaries with reviewing what has been accomplished on the terrorism front as well as in the last few rounds of the composite dialogue, with a view to expediting the resolution of existing problems and disputes. Such a mandate would foreground the necessity of a dialogue addressing all outstanding issues while sidestepping, for the moment, any nomenclatural disagreement. It would accomplish the stated Indian objective while allowing Mr. Gilani to return without having surrendered Islamabad's stand on the "resumption" of the composite dialogue. Parallel to this process, the Prime Minister should meet with the leaders of all major political parties in order to explain the reasons why India and Pakistan need to end the current stalemate. Finally, a strict moratorium on grandstanding and posturing, finger-pointing and name-calling is necessary. When the Prime Minister is directly crafting India's approach to Pakistan, ministers, officials and anonymous 'sources' must not confuse the public with contradictory messages and statements.

India resigned to ‘holding pattern’ with Pakistan

On the even of the Saarc summit in Bhutan, India and Pakistan are, as Dr. Seuss, would put it, still in The Waiting Place ...

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they're darked.
A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?
And IF you go in, should you turn left or right...
or right-and-three-quarters?
Or, maybe, not quite?
Or go around back and sneak in from behind?
Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find,
for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place ...

22 April 2010
The Hindu

India resigned to ‘holding pattern’ with Pakistan

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: With the SAARC summit only a week away, and India and Pakistan still unable to agree on talks about talks, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s meeting with his Pakistani counterpart on the sidelines of Thimphu will have the limited but important aim of preventing further deterioration in an already fraught relationship, Indian officials say.

“What we are really looking at is a holding pattern”, a senior official told The Hindu, using the aviation industry phrase for when an aircraft circles around an airport at a fixed altitude awaiting clearance to land. “It is clear that they are not ready to move forward. Nor, quite frankly, are we, until we see some movement on the issues we have raised".

Pakistan wants nothing short of the resumption of the composite dialogue. It has refused to invite Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao to make a return visit to Islamabad nearly two months after its foreign secretary, Salman Bashir, came to Delhi, unless India accepts this condition. On its part, India says resumption is not possible till more is done on the terrorism front but is willing to discuss “humanitarian and other issues”. Under the circumstances, said the official, the best Dr. Singh can hope for from his Bhutan meeting with Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani is to keep alive the idea of engagement, even if Islamabad is not in a position to deliver on terrorism or discuss the possibility of incremental steps forward.

“It’s sad, really, because there are lots of little things that you could do together even now”, the official said. Indian proposals on enhancing cross-LoC trade have not been answered and meetings of business chambers from both sides have not been held. Though the Indian side has not helped matters with its non-tariff barriers, the official said Islamabad’s reluctance to let the chambers meet means solutions to the complaints of Pakistani businessmen cannot be found.

The official mentioned the ongoing visit to India of Pakistan’s population minister, Firdous Ashiq Awan. “We indicated to them that if they wanted, we were ready to build in some political content to her visit. But they were not interested. Our sense is that nobody in their system wants to take the risk of engaging with India”, he said. The official also mentioned Pakistani interior minister Rehman Malik’s recent meeting with visiting Indian journalists. “He was willing to brief them on how the trial of 26/11 suspects has progressed. But [Indian high commissioner] Sharad [Sabharwal] has not heard from him about this since September.”

But if the prospect for gains in Thimphu is close to zero, not meeting Mr. Gilani, or meeting him too perfunctorily, could actually damage relations between the two countries, another official said, explaining the Prime Minister’s dilemma. The Pakistani side has a similar assessment of what is at stake. Neither side is looking for a joint statement but some minimum preparation is considered necessary. “Both of us know the drill”, the senior official said. Asked for his assessment, a senior Pakistani diplomat said it was likely that the two foreign secretaries would hurriedly sit down before their principals meet to sketch out the ground rules.