India’s Real Intentions


Why did India escalate its dispute with Pakistan over the Kashmir issue to the point that a nuclear war between the two countries for a while seemed a distinct possibility? And, having taken South Asia to the edge of a nuclear holocaust why did India agree to de-escalate a bit and provide Pakistan with some breathing room? The conventional answers to these two questions are by now familiar. They have been given in the countless newspaper commentaries that have appeared over the last several months in the western, Pakistani and Indian newspapers and news magazines.


But there are also some new and, therefore, non-conventional answers. I have hinted at them in some earlier articles. Some were also given in a Wall Street Journal editorial I cited in my article two weeks ago. More interestingly, they were included in an interesting newspaper article by Henry Kissinger published recently. I will deal with the non-conventional wisdom in some detail in the article next week. In the present one, I will cover the conventional view.


The conventional view begins with the assumption that the insurgency in the part of Kashmir occupied by India has inflicted a heavy economic damage on that country. It also assumes that India could overcome this insurgency if it could somehow discourage Pakistanis from aiding the militants in Kashmir. How could this be done? India had no clear answer to this question before September 11. After September 11, President George W. Bush opened an opportunity that India was quick to grasp. It had to act since the troubles in Kashmir had begun to cost a great deal.


India has maintained half a million troops in the state, killed some 35,000 to 40,000 Kashmiris, caused some damage to its own economy and hurt the economy of the state of Kashmir a great deal more. Today the Indian economy is doing less well than a few years ago. The rate of GDP growth has slowed down as has the rate of increase in exports. Combined budgetary deficits of the central and state governments have reached to unsustainable levels. A number of foreigners have fled, slowing down the flow of foreign direct investment. The economic cost for India of maintaining a large military pressure had begun to take a heavy toll.


The situation for India began to get worse once the jihadis picked up the cause of Kashmir adding it to the several other causes they were pursuing in other parts of the world. However, as the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo settled down and as it became extremely costly to continue to challenge Russia in Chechnya, the jihadis turned even more of their attention to Kashmir. The Indian casualties began to mount. It was in this situation, growing difficult by the day, that America created a unique opportunity for India. The terrorists struck America on September 11 and President George W. Bush proclaimed what came to be called the Bush doctrine.


The Bush doctrine labeled all attacks on non-military targets and assets as terrorism. The American president invited all countries of the world to join America against the war on what he described as a global scourge. This scourge had to be eliminated no matter how much time and power was needed. His famous call to arms - “either you are with us or you are against us” - came at a very convenient time for the Indians fighting the Kashmiris in Kashmir and for the Israelis fighting the Palestinians in Palestine.


At that point India was looking for an explicit opportunity to apply the Bush doctrine to Pakistan’s support of Kashmir. That came in December. Two months after America began to bomb Afghanistan, a group of terrorists struck at the Indian parliament in New Delhi. More than a dozen people were killed in that assault and India blamed Pakistan for having supported the group that had carried it out. The Indian leadership began an extraordinary mobilization of its armed forces all along the Pakistani border. Put under an enormous amount of pressure by the Indian action that had the seeming support of the international community, President Pervez Musharraf declared his own war against the jihadi groups in Pakistan.


In a remarkable speech delivered on January 12 that was listened to with great interest not only in Pakistan but by the entire world, the Pakistani president announced that his government would actively pursue the Islamic groups that were working in the country outside the law. He also declared that Pakistan would not allow terrorist attacks to be launched from its soil. There was a clear implication that this principle would be applied to the organizations that were active in Kashmir but were maintaining training camps in Pakistan. A number of them were banned and a couple of thousand of known jihadis were arrested and put in jail.


That General Musharraf’s action would draw a negative response from the Islamic groups was to be expected. It came in the form of four attacks launched inside Pakistan against foreigners and one exceptionally brutal attack in Kashmir. The four attacks in Pakistan involved the abduction and murder of an American journalist in Karachi, the bombing of a church in Islamabad which killed three Americans, the bombing of a bus outside a hotel in Karachi that killed a dozen French technicians, and now the explosion of a car bomb, Beirut style, outside the American consulate in Karachi.


The responsibility for the latest attack in Karachi was taken by a group that called itself al-Qanoon. It issued a chilling warning to the government of President Pervez Musharraf after announcing its involvement in the attack. “America and its allies and its slaves Pakistani rulers should prepare for more attacks. [This] attack is just a beginning of al-Qanoon’s Jihad operation in Pakistan,” it said in the fractured English that has become the hallmark of the statements issuing by the Jihadi groups.


The attack in Kashmir killed more than a score of women and children belonging to the families of the Indian soldiers stationed in Kashmir. In keeping with the Bush doctrine, India increased its pressure on Pakistan. It now threatened to launch attacks on the Pakistani territory if Islamabad did not completely seal the Line of Control separating the two parts of Kashmir, one occupied by India and the other governed by Pakistan.


At one point an attack by India on Pakistan appeared imminent and Pakistan made it clear that it would react with all its might to such an action by India. The use of nuclear weapons was not initially discounted. The Americans, in order to bring some rationality into the actions and counteractions of the South Asian leaders, presented a scenario of what a nuclear exchange between the two countries would entail. Many large cities will be vaporized, said the American study, 12 to 20 million people will be killed, a hundred million more will be injured, and many parts of the subcontinent would be thrown back to the Stone Age. Economic recovery from such devastation would take many decades.


It was in this environment that an alarmed world descended on Islamabad and New Delhi, sending in senior emissaries to hold discussions with the leaders of the two governments. Pakistan came under enormous pressure from the West and Russia to accede to the Indian demand to stop the movement of jihadis into Indian occupied Kashmir. The Indians wanted not a slowing down of such a movement but a complete stop to it for all times to come. General Musharraf once again appeared on national television to address the Pakistani people and send another message to the world at large.


This time he promised to stop the crossing of the Line of Control separating the two Kashmiris for all time to come. On the basis of that promise, India began to make some minor gestures of normalization to Pakistan. It said that it would send back its ambassador to Islamabad and open its airspace to overflights by Pakistan. It also began the process of withdrawing its warships from the waters close to Karachi, Pakistan’s only port. But the Indians indicated that they will not pull back their troops from their border with Pakistan until October. Why October? In October India plans to hold elections in Kashmir which it promises will be free and fair, unlike the elections held more than a decade ago when the heavy hand of India installed a government in Kashmir that was sympathetic to its stance.


India expects that if General Musharraf holds to his promise, New Delhi will be able to reduce the level of violence in Kashmir to the point where some of the less radical groups may be able to work with it. With the participation of these groups in the October elections, India will be able to provide a sense of legitimacy to the government that will take office in Srinagar, the state’s capital.


In other words, the extension of the Bush doctrine to Kashmir would have helped solve what at one point seemed an intractable problem.


This then is a summary of the conventional reading of the latest “near-war” between Pakistan and India. Before going on to detail the non-conventional interpretation - from my perspective a more accurate reading of India’s intentions towards Pakistan - let me make one additional point by answering the following questions. Was it ever in Pakistan’s interest to obtain the accession of Kashmir by encouraging the victory of jihadi groups over the Indian forces occupying Kashmir? What would have happened to Pakistan if the Islamic groups battling the Indian forces succeeded the way the Mujahideen had triumphed against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the eighties? How would Pakistan have accommodated a ‘talibanized’ Kashmir into its body and into its own political structure?


There is the same answer to these three questions. Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan, secured as a result of a military victory by Islamic militants, would complicate enormously Pakistan’s own situation. At this point President Musharraf is engaged in a difficult project - to rescue Pakistan from the grip of the obscurantist elements in society who want the country to be thrown back into the dark ages.


He wants Pakistan to join the rest of the world by modernizing its economy, its society, and its political structure. Such a project would suffer a great set back if the jihadis were to succeed in Kashmir and bring it into the fold of Pakistan.