Once more with honesty

Official Pakistan is still inflexible on the Kashmir issue and maintains that the only support being given is ‘moral’. There is no attempt to come to grips with the reality, that in many ways, the tools used to ‘bleed’ arch enemy India are now haemorrhaging the Pakistani state. It is both ironic and irrefutable that the Pakistani military leadership that had internalised the covert operation using irregulars and the mujahideen (derived from the success of the ISI during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan), and later used this strategy against India by stoking religious radicalism and jihadi fervour from the early 1990s, is now unsuccessfully grappling with the very genie it has nurtured.

But discerning Pakistanis have been candid in their assessment of what the K commitment has cost their nation. In an objective editorial, the Daily Times, Lahore, February 6, noted: “Early lineaments of Pakistani nationalism were created by the ‘unfinished business’ of Kashmir, forcing it to become a revisionist state in the Cold War era… Pakistan became a national security state dominated by the army which overthrew elected governments, protesting breach of national security. Military rulers rode the crest of Pakistan’s textbook nationalism to arm-twist politicians and divide them against one another. Military budgets were kept away from the scrutiny of parliament in order to boost ‘the national effort’ to keep the Kashmir cause alive.”

On the covert support to militancy and terrorism, it says: “Pakistan’s revisionism of the weaker state inclined it from the beginning to use private warriors in Kashmir. Its rulers decided to rely on a low intensity cross-border conflict inside Kashmir while developing a nuclear deterrent to keep India from choosing to fight a conventional war across the national boundary. This began a new trend in Pakistan’s nation-building process which has brought it to the crisis of today simply because the strategic elite in Islamabad did not think through the sociological and political impact of such an option. Religion was used to buttress private jihad, unleashing an internal debate over the nature of the Islamic state in Pakistan. As hard Islam was adopted through laws in Pakistan, it was also projected into Indian Kashmir through the mujahideen, creating an environment of intimidation the same way as it is being spread in Pakistan today.”

As it prepares for a national election on February 18 that it hopes will usher meaningful civilian rule, what Pakistan sorely needs is a clinical and ruthlessly honest review of the dominant discourse about Kashmir that its elites have so carefully nurtured and determinedly disseminated. Predicated on this anti-India discourse, the military has been able to commandeer the state unto itself and has in the process stunted the growth of an equitable and robust institutional eco-system wherein the legislature, executive and judiciary complement each other. Clearly one section of the Pakistani media has shown the courage to pick up the gauntlet on Kashmir. The challenge is for General Kayani to initiate the catharsis.

The writer is a defence analyst cudayb@gmail.com