Take That Detour, Bill

India’s diplomats did all they could to dissuade President Bill Clinton from visiting Pakistan during his South Asia trip. However, New Delhi should secretly be feeling a sense of relief that he is going there. Clinton’s decision marks a tacit acceptance of the military coup in Pakistan and a rejection of the principled but extreme position taken so far by New Delhi: that it will not talk to an illegal military regime in Islamabad. Behind the curtain of silence, though, the threat of war on the subcontinent has been rising steadily.

Not everyone in Delhi agrees that this is indeed so, but those who minimise this threat are either substituting wishes for horses or trying to deny an opening for Pakistan to internationalise the Kashmir issue. The truth, however, is that ever since the end of the Kargil war, Islamabad has been pumping jehadis into Kashmir in a reckless act of brinkmanship that has few parallels in the world. The Indian armed forces have responded by becoming more aggressive along the Line of Control (LoC). Pakistan has reacted by beefing up its forces there through the addition of a brigade and by attacking exposed Indian posts on the LoC. India has built up its forces in Rajasthan. Pakistan has built up potentially offensive strike forces in the Rann of Kutch.

To those who remember the war with Pakistan in 1965, all these developments have a familiar ring. The only difference is that this time around, we are not dealing with a Sandhurst-trained officer corps in an undivided Pakistan rendered self-confident by a decade of sustained economic progress. Instead, we are faced with a highly Islamised officer corps in a country half its original size which is at the end of its economic tether. And that officer corps has nuclear bombs in its possession now.

Some of the build-up that is now taking place on both sides is undoubtedly military posturing that is intended to avert war, not bring it on. Pakistan especially would like to raise the stakes as high as possible in order to dissuade India from a military counter-attack, while it continues to step up the level of infiltration by jehadis into Kashmir. However, after allowing for that, the irreducible fact remains that the military situation is unstable. If nothing is done to restore stability, it will tip over, sooner or later, into a full-fledged war.

The instability has arisen from the change in the nature of militant infiltration into Kashmir after the Kargil war. Till roughly the middle of 1998, the purpose of the infiltration was to prevent a return to normality in Kashmir and continue giving the world the impression that Kashmiri militancy had not subsided. This posed a political problem for India but not a military one. Since Kargil, however, the number of militants infiltrated into the Valley has risen, the new militants are more motivated and, instead of attacking soft targets like National Conference cadres, village functionaries and isolated military jeeps and trucks, they are attacking army and BFC posts and camps in the Valley. As a result, the number of casualties among the security forces has quadrupled at the very least. This is a level that the army cannot sustain indefinitely. The status quo has therefore become untenable. India and Pakistan must either move towards peace or they will move towards war.

This is the reason why India is insisting that Pakistan first end ‘cross-border terrorism’ if it seriously wants to resume talks with India. Not only will India not talk with a gun at its head but the time span within which the Indian military wants a decision is too short to permit meaningful negotiations on Kashmir and other outstanding Indo-Pakistani issues. The Pakistanis, however, feel that this will deprive them of any leverage they may have in future talks.

It is here that President Clinton could make a significant difference by meeting Gen Pervez Musharraf personally. Both White House and state department spokesmen have made it clear that one of Clinton’s main purposes in meeting Pakistan’s military chief executive is to avert a conflict on the subcontinent. Both before and after the Kargil war, and in the Blair House agreement with then prime minister Nawaz Sharif, the US made it clear that it wanted Pakistan to pull its soldiers and irregulars back behind the LoC. It cannot be Washington’s view that the LoC begins and ends in Kargil. That this is indeed not its view is reflected by the pressure it has been putting on Pakistan to check the activities of organisations like the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (formerly Harkat-ul-Ansar). It is a near-certainty that Clinton will emphasise this in his talks. He is also likely to say this in public in the televised address from the airport that is being planned as I write.

President Clinton could advise Musharraf that the only way to break the impasse in relations between India and Pakistan and check the drift towards war is for Pakistan to bring down the level of sponsored militant activities in the Valley to that which prevailed before the Kargil war. What could be offered in exchange is a resumption of talks between the two countries. This would put Musharraf’s oft-repeated offer to hold talks with India-and his admonitions to Indians to ‘trust him’-to the test. While it would not meet New Delhi’s demand fully, it might suffice to justify resuming talks with Pakistan. What such an arrangement would certainly do is to stall, if not reverse, the drift towards war. President Clinton could be the best man to take these messages to the two capitals.