In My View

A futile offer for talks

Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s offer to Pakistan for talks if it stopped exporting terrorism to India, might have been good for effect. But it was not designed to achieve any breakthrough. For, though his twin calls to Pakistan and all the contending parties of Kashmir could have been supremely choreographed to jive with the visit to Islamabad by the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, it still was ill-timed in terms of inspiring Pakistan’s leadership to respond to it in concrete terms.

The feudal lords who rule the country from Islamabad are too distracted and enjoy too little legitimacy to be able to engage India in any meaningful way. The country is rife with dissension about which approach to take to tackle the menace of terrorism, presently tearing asunder the fabric of its society. The country is also deeply divided about how to deal with the US, which has mostly been a friend of opportunity – goading Pakistan to do its bidding for serving the US national and global interests; and withdrawing when those necessities had disappeared.

Most of all these larger questions have divided the sole pillar of solidity propping up Pakistan’s establishment – the army. This is an army that had used the religion of Islam to not just garner support of the people of the country but also as a military ideology to motivate its ranks. It has also historically weaved in non-conventional warfare into its operational doctrine based on the ‘holy warrior’ concept. They have used military professionalism less to create a perfect war-fighting machine to take on India, but more to train ungainly ‘mujahids’ to do their job by proxy.

This army is now been asked to account for itself, with its guns turned against its own people. And the Americans believe that they are not doing the job well enough. The US strategic community is of the opinion that the Pakistan army is ill-equipped to operate on a counter-insurgency mode. They thus want the army to be trained by US experts alongwith the equipment they are supplying.

Pakistan’s military leadership is weary of that prospect. While overtly they are saying that they do not want their army turned into a counter-insurgency force as they have to be ever prepared to take on their conventional enemy, India, in real terms it could be linked to far more harsh reality embedded in the social pattern of the country.

This is a country that is heavily dominated by the Punjabis of Pakistan. If this force were to become a potent counter-insurgency force, it could very well strain the unity of the country to a breaking point as it would mean the battles within Pakistan were between the rest versus the Punjabis.

The case in point in this direction is the severe opposition within the Punjabi-dominated Pakistan establishment to let the Americans modernise the Frontier Corps. Because, the Corps, a paramilitary that has seen intense action in the anti-insurgency operations in North West Frontier Province and Balochistan, is drawn mostly from the Pushtun tribes of the same region, the Punjabi leaders of Pakistan are weary to hand over modern weapons in their hands, lest those are turned on them at a later date.

These kinds of deep contradictions occupy the minds of the Pakistan establishment to the extent of obviating any space for taking a long-term view in terms of achieving stability from a volatile current situation. They remain hostage to their past machinations and fresh survival strategies that account for most of their imagination. In that light Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s newest offer for dialogue needs to be viewed.

It is imperative for Pakistan to understand that they need to a create a regional copact against terrorism and insurgency to deal with the twin phenomenon nearer home. For that, Pakistan’s army would need to change its worldview about seeking to achieve strategic goals through illegitimate means of fostering cross-border terrorism.

Pakistan today finds disembarking from this tiger it has ridden for so many decades extremely difficult. They have a belief system based on the successes notched up in the past because of this policy. They cannot forget that they gained a huge foothold in Afghanistan – a strategic “deep country” because it helped create the mujahideen force with American resources. It cannot obliterate from its minds the initial successes of creating instability in India by infusing terrorism into the localised insurgency of Kashmir.

But today Pakistan leadership’s terrorist friends are deeply disillusioned with their former mentors. As a result the leaders have to constantly look over their shoulders each time they take a step in any direction. The people of Pakistan are bearing the brunt of past recklessness of the leaders and paying with their lives. Result: Chaos reigns supreme.

From that viewpoint, Dr Singh call for talks seem misplaced. Who should talk what? To what end? Are the present leaders of Pakistan capable of arresting the country’s slide into anarchy? If they were to talk about Kashmir – as Dr Singh has hinted and Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani have underlined in his response by referring to the “core issue” – who would listen? Would the Kashmiris pay any heed to their formulations? Would the people of Pakistan themselves listen to their leaders who have made the country descend to such destitution?