Countdown To Doomsday

In 66 years of the often toxic Indo-Pakistani relationship, one thing has changed significantly, one thing has not. What has not changed is Pakistan’s taste for asymmetric warfare: in 1947, when Pakistan sought to force the Kashmir issue, a Colonel Akbar Khan devised the strategy of sending in truckloads of armed Pathan irregulars on a supposedly spontaneous mission to “free their Kashmiri brethren”—thus giving Pakistan the fiction of deniability. Pakistani strategists developed a liking for the concept, and it has become a standard part of their playbook against India, repeated over the years, most dramatically in 2008, when it was used with chilling effect in the Mumbai terror attacks, by the ISI’s affiliates.

Bruce Riedel is a veteran CIA analyst, and he’s obviously formidably well-info­rmed. It is therefore interesting to read his take on various issues. Take 26/11, for example. According to Riedel, it was essentially an attempt by the LeT and Al Qaeda, with the active involvement of the ISI, to terminate an incipient peace process, and provoke India and Pakistan into going to war, possibly nuclear war. The only thing that prevented nuclear- tipped missiles from raining down on the subcontinent, Riedel says, was the restraint shown by India (with some cajoling by the US). Nor was this the first time that the US has helped stave off Armageddon: Riedel claims it had happened before, in 1987, 1990, 1999, 2001 and 2002 (things in 2001 being so close that experts were already calculating wind speeds to measure radioactive dispersal, and estimating the number of civilian deaths—the figure being 12 million, approximately). Nuclear holocaust in the region, Riedel suggests, is a lot more probable than we think.

While Pakistan’s taste for asymmetric conflict may not have changed, the thing that has changed significantly is, of course, the side the US has chosen to support. Historically, the West had an affinity for the affable, westernised elites and generals that ruled Pakistan, rather than the prickly, socialistic Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Added to which was the fact that, from the beginning, Pakistan worked hard to cosy up with the West. It was an enthusiastic member of the US-led military blocs, seato and cento; its air-bases were the launch-pads for the US’s vital spying missions over Russia; it was the secret facilitator in Nixon’s grand strategy to open up China (in fact, it was during an official visit to Pakistan that Kissinger feigned his famous stomach upset to make his first, clandestine trip to Beijing, being personally chauffeured by Pakistan’s air chief to an air-base in the dead of night). And, of course, it was the US’s assistant in the proxy war against the Russians in Afghanistan. But, by the early ’90s, the marriage began to fall apart. The US attributes it to Pakistan’s various fatal flaws, coupled with a natural affinity for India’s liberal democracy; Pakistan attributes it to the US’s numerous ‘betrayals’, contrasting it with its ‘all-weather friend’, China. Things have now reached a stage where a top Pakistani diplomat has advocated an official divorce from the US. Talaq, talaq, talaq.

So where do we go from here? Riedel has some thought-provoking ideas— some of which go back to the proposals Ambassador Galbraith made back in the 1960s. It’s a pity we’ve wasted half a century in making them happen.