Why India Pakistan
could be a big headache for the next US president
By Barkha Dutt October 25 at 12:27
PM
Barkha Dutt is an
award-winning TV journalist and anchor with more than two decades of reporting
experience. She is the author of “This Unquiet Land: Stories from India’s Fault
Lines.” Dutt is based in New Delhi.
In an election campaign that has made Donald Trump
look like a crazy, self-imploding clown, here are two statements the Republican
presidential nominee has made that are indisputably true. The first was his
observation that airports in the United States are like those in a (so-called)
“Third World country.” The second was his comment that the India-Pakistan
equation is a “very, very hot tinderbox.”
Indians and Pakistanis who agree on nothing these
days found themselves nervously giggling in unison at Trump’s offer to
“mediate” between the two countries. But unwittingly the bombastic candidate
actually flagged one of the foreign policy challenges that could necessitate
the next U.S. president’s early attention.
In the likely event of a Hillary Clinton win, her
administration will no longer be able to count on New Delhi displaying what is
known as strategic restraint; Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has
dramatically altered the traditional Pakistan doctrine with several high-risk
firsts. None of the old rules apply.
Modi’s electoral campaign in 2014
mercilessly mocked India’s previous Congress government for being too soft on
Pakistan and promised a muscular response to Islamabad-backed terrorists; his boasting of
having a 56-inch chest came to be the ultimate metaphor for his government’s
machismo. But armed with the largest political victory by any
prime minister in 30 years, Modi in fact ended up displaying an
audacious appetite for gambling on peace instead.
In May 2014, in a historic first, Modi invited
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to his oath-taking ceremony. In December
2015, he showed the kind of dramatic gumption no leader before him had when he
made a surprise unscheduled visit to Lahore to wish Sharif well on his
birthday. When this trip was followed by a terrorist attack on an Indian air force
installation, he held his nerve and allowed Pakistani investigators, including
one from the Pakistani spy agency ISI, to visit the military base- another
contentious first.
After these initiatives failed, Modi
channeled the same capacity for taking perilous but strong-willed chances by
turning hard line on Pakistan. The policy shift came earlier this year during a
two-month period of civilian unrest in the Kashmir Valley spurred on by the
killing of a local militant, Burhan Wani. The Modi government saw the internal
dimension of anger and alienation as distinct from Pakistan’s fueling of the
fire. A ratcheted-up campaign by the Sharif government to present Wani on the
international stage as a sort of victim-hero prompted a furious India to
underscore human rights violations by Pakistan in its own province of
Baluchistan. Modi railed against these atrocities while addressing the nation
on India’s Independence Day in the presence of the global diplomatic corps.
This was a radical departure from the policy of all previous governments; India
was challenging not just Pakistan, but China as well — the province is critical
for Beijing’s proposed $46 billion
economic corridorthat seeks to connect Xinjiang to the Gwadar port
in Balochistan.
Then came the attack on an army camp
in Kashmir in which 19 Indian
soldiers were killed. Eleven days later, in the first such
acknowledgment of its kind, the Modi government went public with the fact that special forces
commandos had crossed the line of control (a military control
line that serves as the de facto frontier separating Kashmir on the Indian side
from the Pakistani side) to conduct surgical strikes on terror launchpads from
where the Pakistani military facilitates the crossing over of armed
infiltrators into Indian territory.
This is now India’s new normal — an attempt to
increase the cost of terrorism for Pakistan and call out what many in Modi’s
party called the “nuclear bogey.” The conventional wisdom of ‘nuclear
deterrence’ — that fears of escalation between two nuclear powers would hold
back India from an officially owned punitive response to terrorism — has been openly
challenged.
India’s message was not just for
Pakistan but also for countries such as the United States that have long
counted on the deterrence theory to manage regional tensions. Writers including
George Perkovich and Toby Dalton (“Not War, Not
Peace“) have argued that that a military counterattack by India
could escalate to “destruction beyond imagination” but that has not happened —
at least so far. The theater of conflict is currently confined to Jammu and
Kashmir along the 124 mile-long international border and the 450-mile stretch
of the line of control where a 13-year-old cease-fire is under threat. Mortar
fire has returned to areas where even small-arms weapons had fallen more or
less silent.
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How will (and should) the United States respond if
the Indo-Pak border flares up further? Another terror strike on India’s
mainland could send all calculations awry.
In contrast to Trump’s vague generalizations,
Clinton has a keen understanding of how Pakistan’s “deep state” has for decades
used terrorism as a virtual weapon of asymmetric warfare against India. In June
2014, Clinton told me in an interview that elements within the Pakistani Army
and its main spy agency, the ISI, “were under the mistaken view that having
these kinds of proxies vis-à-vis India, vis-à-vis Afghanistan was in Pakistan’s
interests, not just the military’s interest, but in their sovereign interest.”
She went on to compare this to “keeping poisonous snakes in your backyard
expecting they will only bite your neighbor’’ as a commentary on how jihadists
and obscurantists had begun to devour Pakistan from the inside.
As secretary of state, Clinton
announced a $10 million bounty for information leading to the arrest of Hafiz
Saeed, key architect of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai on Nov. 26, 2008 and
the Pakistan-based head of the Lakshar-e-Taiba.
One-hundred and sixty-six people were killed in the 72-hour siege, including
six Americans. Clinton told me she was struck by how “difficult” it must have
been for India to show “restraint” after the attacks.
That restraint can no longer be taken for granted —
that’s India’s messaging to Washington. Given Clinton’s proud mention of
monitoring the operation that took out Osama bin Laden from his hideout in
Pakistan (“While you were hosting ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’ Donald”), there is an
expectation in India that she will bring some of her famed hawkishness to her
administration’s Pakistan policy. No blank checks on military aid; stringent
economic pressure to shut down terror groups; and a foreign policy grammar that
doesn’t club India and Pakistan together, or worse, separate them only by a
hyphen.
In September, in a closed-door Virginia fundraiser,
Clinton warned of the dangers of a jihadist coup in Pakistan and the
possibility of “suicide nuclear bombers.” She gets it. Which means in her early
days in the Oval Office, Clinton may need to do some plain-speaking with
Pakistan much sooner than she had bargained for.
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