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The realities of 'peace' in South
Asia
By Ajai Sahni
NEW
DELHI - Pakistani President General Pervez
Musharraf's "cricket diplomacy", and before that,
the inauguration of the Srinagar-Muzzaffarabad bus
service (opening a route that had been shut down
for nearly 57 years between divided Kashmir), had,
over the past weeks, once again pushed the
India-Pakistan peace process onto the media's
center-stage.
India had been guilty of the
first phase of the frenetic media buildup, as both
the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) state government
and the central government in New Delhi enormously
overplayed the "bus diplomacy" - with a high
profile inauguration by the prime minister at
Srinagar, attended by Congress Party chief Sonia
Gandhi and a phalanx of other political leaders
(in stark contrast to the low-key inauguration by
the "prime minister" of Pakistan-held Azad (free)
Jammu and Kashmir - J&K ).
Camera
crews in India tediously covered "every inch of
the journey" from Srinagar to the Kaman Post - the
last Indian outpost on the bus route - and the
newly refurbished Aman Setu (peace bridge) that
spans the line between Indian and Pakistani
control, hysterically projecting the bus service
as a major breakthrough toward a "solution" to the
Kashmir imbroglio. Musharraf, on the other hand,
dismissed the bus service as "a small step toward
confidence building and a small contribution for
the happiness of the people".
In the
interim, the general appeared to have been
plotting his revenge, as he forced an invitation -
apparently to attend a match in the now completed
India-Pakistan cricket series - which he
tenaciously expanded into a "mini summit" with the
Indian leadership, insisting throughout that the
Kashmir issue needed to be taken up "immediately"
because "we don't have time".
He did not
elaborate on this claim, but on March 27 he had
threatened that if "new Kargils" were to be
prevented, the Kashmir dispute would first have to
be resolved, this in reference to an incident in
Kargil in 1999 that almost led to war. However, if
he had calculated on his capacity to force the
issue and secure a dramatic breakthrough, or at
least some major concessions from the Indian side
by raising the rhetorical intensity of the media
confrontation several notches before his meetings
with Indian leaders and officials, the eventual
joint statement issued by the two countries at the
end of his quick tour - during which he spent a
little over an hour actually at the venue of the
cricket match - demonstrated his failure.
Apart from the widening of
confidence-building measures along lines already
established in official-level talks - greater
"people-to-people" contacts; more trade; and
advancing of "institutional mechanisms" to focus
on various outstanding issues - nothing of
significance was wrested from talks with the
Indian prime minister, even though these extended
long beyond their scheduled half hour. Reports
suggest, further, that Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh took this opportunity to reiterate his now
clear stand that there would be no redrawing of
the Indian map, and no "further partitions".
Significantly, the Indian leadership had
sent out strong and clear signals in the days
preceding the general's visit: on April 14 the
defense minister accused Pakistan of pursuing a
"two-faced" policy on Kashmir, at once sponsoring
terrorism and engaging in negotiations for
"peace"; earlier, on April 8, the external affairs
minister had stated that "all options" were open
"except redrawing the map of India and having a
second partition"; and finally, there was the
prime minister's own lucid and exceptional address
at the Conference of Chief Ministers on April 15,
in which he articulated an utterly uncompromising
vision on terrorism and its sponsors, just a day
before the general's arrival in Delhi.
The
general's failed gambit was located in hard
calculations that provoked his observation that
"we don't have time". Transformations in the
external and internal environment impinging on the
sustainability of Pakistan's enterprise of terror,
as well as on Pakistan's own future, have now
demonstrated clearly that the military and
terrorist adventurism of the past is no longer
sustainable. To the extent that strategists in
Pakistan have long been convinced - and rightly so
- that without violence or the threat of violence,
India will never concede anything on Kashmir, and
the increasing difficulties of calibrating
violence at a sufficient level within J&K, it
is clear that the Pakistani strategy is running
out of time. This is enormously compounded by
Pakistan's rising internal difficulties.
For one thing, Musharraf's efforts at
political management of increasing internal
discontent and strife are not fructifying. His
efforts to arrive at a deal with the Pakistan
People's Party (PPP) self-exiled leader, Benazir
Bhutto, appears to have fallen through (though
Islamist extremist elements of the Muttahida
Majlis-e-Amal, increasingly restive with the
passage of time, insist that Asif Zardari,
Bhutto's husband, is being "built up" through the
orchestrated arrest of PPP cadres, and his brief
detention on his return to Karachi, as part of
such a "deal").
In Sindh, again, the
Mohajir Quami Movement (MQM) - currently a member
of the ruling coalition - is straining at the
leash. On April 11, Altaf Hussain, the founder of
the MQM, demanded a "new constitution for
Pakistan" based on "evolving geo-political and
geo-strategic realities and the ground realities
in the country". He also sought a review of
center-state relations and the devolution of
finances to the states, claiming that provinces
other than Punjab were being discriminated against
under the present system, and further threatened
that his party would walk out of the government if
military operations in Balochistan did not end,
and the proposal to build new cantonments in that
province were not abandoned.
There are
reasons to believe, moreover, that any effort to
move ahead on the proposed Kalabagh Dam -
essential to deal with the impending water crisis
in the country - may plunge Sindh into widespread
and violent protests and even the possibility of
civil war. The Awami Tehrik had organized a major
demonstration on March 31 against the building of
the dam, and the Pakistan Oppressed Nations'
Movement had also called for strikes to protest
the proposed dam, the presence of the army and the
establishment of cantonments in Balochistan.
Potential political strife in Sindh would
overlay the extended troubles in Balochistan and
the North West Frontier Province, as well as the
increasing restiveness of the radical Islamist
elements within and outside government. Incidents
of violence continue in Waziristan, despite the
claims of a "settlement", and Balochistan has been
destabilized to a point where it became impossible
to go ahead with the scheduled inauguration of the
new port at Gwadar by Chinese Prime Minister Wen
Jiabao during his visit to Pakistan on April 5-9.
There is, moreover, a real and increasing
problem in the Northern Areas, where protests
against school curricula imposing "Sunni beliefs"
on the predominantly Shi'ite population, the
demographic re-engineering of the region, and the
issue of identity cards, are mounting, even as
state repression intensifies, with several
incidents of firing on unarmed protesters reported
over the past months.
Significantly,
"elections" to the Legislative Council of the
Northern Areas - at best a toothless body - were
held in October 2004, but a cabinet is yet to be
constituted, because Islamabad will not allow even
this figurehead to be constituted. It is
inevitable that other issues will gradually
surface in the Northern Areas - long neglected and
forcibly kept out of the reach of the national and
international media - as a discriminatory policy
is pursued with regard to the other and relatively
favored division of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir
(PoK).
Thus, while qualified enthusiasm
has greeted the Srinagar-Muzzafarabad bus link,
and tentative agreement appears to have been
reached regarding the "operationalization of
additional routes including that between Poonch
and Rawalakot", as well as the re-establishment of
the Khokhrapur-Munnabao route, there is a studied
silence on the Kargil-Skardu route that would
bring two Shi'ite-dominated areas closer. The
sense of discrimination in the Northern Areas is
accentuated by the fact that, while Muzzaffarabad
is now linked to Srinagar across the Line of
Control, the road between Muzzafarabad and Gilgit
- both in PoK - lies in a state of disrepair, and
the journey must be undertaken via Attock or
Mansehra.
Overlying all these are the
broader economic, social, political, demographic
and resource crises looming in the near future.
While Kashmir is an "emotional issue" for the
jihadis and for many ordinary Pakistanis,
strategists recognize that the critical conflict
is over the region's water resources. Projections
suggest that Pakistan will suffer an acute
shortfall of water well before 2010, unless new
resources and reservoirs are made available, and,
on the bounteous Chenab, these can only be safely
and advantageously constructed in Indian J&K.
In addition, the "miracle" of Pakistan's
projected 7% rate of gross domestic product growth
is widely thought of as being hollow - reflecting
massive aid inflows and marginally improved
utilization of existing capacities, but no
creation of additional capacities or augmentation
of investment flows. There has been no decline in
poverty levels, and little by way of institutional
reforms in critical areas such as education, which
could impact positively on future growth. With one
of the fastest-growing populations in the region -
the country's population is expected to grow by
nearly 100 million in 2020 from the 2002 level of
about 148 million - Pakistan's developmental
future is, at best, troubling.
Finally,
the external environment is also changing
dramatically, and even the qualified "tolerance of
terror" extended by the US is now being diluted,
as America seeks radically improved relations -
military, economic and technological - with India.
Similarly, there is reason to believe that China's
incentives to encourage Pakistan in its mischief
are being progressively diluted by growing
interests in trade with India, and in regional
stability, as Beijing single-mindedly pursues its
goal of economic reform and expansion.
These factors are now increasingly
recognized by the thinking Pakistani, and are
acutely confining Musharraf's room for maneuver.
The Kashmir front is no longer sustainable, as a
multiplicity of internal fronts open up. That is
the key to Pakistan's increasing reasonableness.
It is a key India will do well to explore and
exploit - especially if acts of terror increase
with the melting of the snows in J&K.
Ajai Sahni, editor, South Asia
Intelligence Review; executive director, Institute
for Conflict Management, a non-profit society set
up in 1997 in New Delhi committed to the
evaluation and resolution of problems of internal
security in South Asia.
Published with
permission from the South Asia Intelligence Review
of the South Asia Terrorism Portal
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