Talks before withdrawal

The successful elections have opened up new opportunities for managing the challenges in J&K. At the same time, elections in Pakistan are over and they have led to Islamist parties, sympathetic to the Taliban-Al Qaeda, acquiring majority status in the western provinces, besides an influential role for themselves in the governance of the country. This portends new uncertainties about the direction of Pakistan’s policies about jehad and related violence inside and across the borders. The most likely scenario, even without the Islamic parties gaining so much ground, was an even less co-operative leadership in Islamabad than the current dispensation which had itself stonewalled all pressures to implement its promises made to India, the US and the international community to end jehadi terrorism.

After ten months of troop deployment on the borders, it is clear that India’s posture of coercive diplomacy produced valuable results forcing Pakistan on the back foot, as well as getting it to commit to an end of terrorism. By implication, Islamabad also had to admit that it had been supporting cross-border terrorism. Yet, the incidence of terrorism and of infiltration from across the frontiers do not seem to have come down. Besides the daily bloodletting of innocents in the name of religion, we have been victims of major symbolic terrorist strikes at frequent intervals, the military posture notwithstanding. Some of the de-escalatory steps like reopening the airspace for Pakistani over-flights have not been reciprocated by Pakistan or even accepted for action. There was no appreciation in Islamabad when the naval fleet was pulled back from forward positions; and nor did it seem to improve the climate of tension.

The purpose of the deployment was to indicate that New Delhi would be willing to use that military power across the borders to raise the cost of Pakistan’s ‘low cost’ policy of terrorism. There is nothing to indicate that such a realisation has sunk in. It would, therefore, be premature to think of military withdrawal. But we need not maintain a high level of battle readiness and normal leave, and so on, should be feasible without any degradation of options. After all, if force were to be used, it would essentially be at our initiative. Raising the alert status would constitute another step in escalation dominance that we must retain. The next step should focus on political-diplomatic measures consistent with the prioritisation so far; and military withdrawal should be the last step in the process of normalisation. We should offer to hold a dialogue with Islamabad at the officials’ level, possibly taking off from where the agreement on working groups left off. Meanwhile restoration of communications, diplomatic representations, and so on, could be started if Pakistan is willing for phased, step-by-step normalisation.