One can only hope that the deaths of the five Indian soldiers as a consequence of a Pakistani breach of ceasefire along the Line of Control near Poonch might produce a suitable concentration of mind amongst key policymakers in New Delhi about the possibilities of continuing a meaningful dialogue with Pakistan.
The current regime, and especially Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, has persisted with a dialogue with Islamabad despite domestic opposition and continued intransigence from across the border.
The premise of this endeavour is quite straightforward and has a number of votaries both at home and abroad. It holds that if a civilian regime in Pakistan can be bolstered, the military establishment, over time, can be marginalised and constituencies for peace within Pakistan will then be slowly but surely strengthened. This position has much intuitive appeal but simply fails to pass the tests of both theory and experience.
A small but significant body of literature in the field of international politics has dwelt on the value of making unilateral concessions to an adversary with the hope of promoting trust and, eventually, eliciting cooperation. An American political scientist, Robert Axelrod, had pioneered this approach and it has subsequently attracted other adherents. However, even those who have sought to build on Axelrod’s initial proposition have recognised the limits of his path-breaking analysis.
At the outset, states are often deeply divided and fragmented entities. Even if an elected regime may have an interest in promoting cooperation and peace it is far from certain that an entrenched military will allow such a policy to come to fruition. Furthermore, it is not always clear what an adversary deems to be a concession is necessarily construed as such. Finally, as a colleague and international relations scholar, Kanti Bajpai, has suggested, that states frequently face the “shadow of the past”. The history of past dealings, which were quite problematic, often casts a dark penumbra on future interactions.
In the Indo-Pakistani context these problems are magnified. Both civilian and military Pakistani regimes in attempts to shore up domestic support and legitimacy have long demonised India, have nursed both real and imaginary grievances and above all have abjectly failed to come to terms with their own malfeasances. For example, despite the creation of the Justice Hamadoor Commission to examine the civilian-military debacle in 1971, few, if any, within either Pakistan’s state or society have come to terms with the genocide in Bangladesh. Even Pakistan’s most prominent security analysts cannot forthrightly discuss the complicity of the state that led to mass killings in East Pakistan. Instead every effort is made to dwell on India’s military intervention in East Pakistan and its supposed design to dismember Pakistan. Given this “shadow of the past” that is so deftly adumbrated and exploited both at official and societal levels, it is difficult for any regime in New Delhi to promote a climate of trust in Pakistan.
This, however, is not the only hurdle. It is almost a bromide that no civilian regime in Pakistan, barring that of the mercurial Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, after the disastrous 1971 war, has really been the master of its own house. The watchful military and security establishment has ensured that the Pakistan foreign office remains mostly a paper tiger with real power remaining firmly ensconced in Rawalpindi. Consequently, no regime in New Delhi can conduct diplomacy with a reliable, unitary actor who is in a position to make credible commitments. Only with the significant expenditure of the diplomatic resources of a third party has Pakistan been able to credibly commit to a policy shift. For example, it was when the World Bank under the leadership of Eugene Black used its considerable clout that the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 was realised. Despite occasional complaints from Islamabad about India’s apparent cupidity in the water-sharing arrangement, the terms of the treaty have been largely upheld.
Recent experience with Pakistan also belies any hope of cooperation emerging from unilateral concessions on the part of New Delhi. Despite its willingness to resume a dialogue even after the emergence of substantial evidence linking the Pakistani security apparatus with the swarming terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, Islamabad has evinced little interest in addressing India’s concerns about its continuing dalliance in terror. Instead Lashkar-e-Tayyaba chief Hafiz Saeed remains happily situated in his lair in Muridke, continues to spew venom against India at prayer meetings and the regime in Islamabad takes refuge in legal niceties about its apparent inability to act against this mastermind of terror.
Nor for that matter have the persistent attacks on Indian diplomatic outposts in Afghanistan, most recently in Jalalabad, shown a sign of any intent on the part of the Pakistani security order to soften its stance towards India. Instead, as the drawdown of US and Allied Forces in Afghanistan approaches, it is reasonable to conclude that it will simply instigate further acts of terror on the part of its scrofulous proxies. Any Indian policy that fails to recognise the hard limits of a strategy of unilateral concessions in effect constitutes a fool’s errand. Until and unless the Pakistani military recognises the strategic myopia of its choices, the prospects of meaningful cooperation between New Delhi and Islamabad will remain a mirage.
The writer is the director of the Centre on American and Global Security at Indiana University, Bloomington