The other line of control

For decades, New Delhi has had two simple assumptions about Pakistan — that it is immune to democratic transformation and that its hostility towards India is immutable. Put simply, the argument goes, Pakistan is a black-box whose innards are of little relevance to India’s policy.

These assumptions would suggest that Musharraf’s ouster might at best lead to a rearrangement of the pieces within Pakistan rather than a restructuring of its internal power balance, which is historically skewed in favour of the army. That Musharraf could not have been pushed out without support from his successor as army chief, Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, might also confirm the proposition that the military will continue to reign supreme in Pakistan’s politics.

According to Western reports, Pakistan’s intelligence arm, the ISI, has used the internal chaos of the last few months to strengthen its ties with extremist groups in Afghanistan and renewed its encouragement to

terror outfits in J&K. The civilian government’s attempt to bring the ISI under political control has been clumsy and unsuccessful.

All this, however, does not mean the last word on Pakistan’s civil-military relations has been said. Bringing the armed forces under civilian control, many in Pakistan believe, is one of the principal tasks in the democratic transformation of the nation. For India, which has seen the army and the ISI wrecking the peace process in the last few months, a change in Pakistan’s civil-military relationship holds the key to a sustainable bilateral engagement.

Is reversing Pakistan’s entrenched civil-military equation a credible policy objective for India?

Sceptics would point to the fractiousness of the ruling coalition in Islamabad. The serious differences between the two men who run the country’s politics — the Pakistan People’s Party’s Asif Ali Zardari and the Muslim League’s Nawaz Sharif — are public. They disagree on Musharraf’s personal future, the restoration of judges sacked by the former president, and the commitment to pursue the war on terror. To be sure, the PPP and the League had agreed in the past to limit the ISI’s manipulation of domestic politics and bring the army under civilian control. Both parties, however, have a record of using the ISI for their own short-term ends and aligning with the army to outwit their political opponents.

The army’s role as a referee between wrangling political parties meant its effective control of key national security policies — on nuclear weapons, Kashmir and Afghanistan — will persist even under civilian prime ministers. The pessimists make a point that those who know the history find difficult to contest. The army sees itself as the sole guardian of Pakistan’s national interests and the civilian leaders have rarely challenged this tradition. More often than not, the civilians went along with the army’s adventurism against Afghanistan and India.

India’s optimists, the few that there are, have a basis for their argument that a change in Pakistan’s civil-military relations may be difficult but not impossible. The logic of change, the optimists would say, is rooted in the security challenges that Pakistan confronts on the Durand Line.

Given the rapidly mounting international stakes in cleansing Pakistan’s tribal belt of the Taliban and al Qaeda, something will have to give in Islamabad. The status quo, where the Pak army and the ISI play both sides of the war on terror, is no longer sustainable. If it continues to encourage militancy in Afghanistan, Islamabad risks attacks from US and NATO troops across the Durand Line. If Pakistan opts out of the war on terror, as many civilian leaders would prefer, Islamabad will lose badly needed international support, sink deeper into an economic crisis, and worse still, cede its current tenuous control over its trans-Indus territories to the Taliban and al Qaeda. If it enthusiastically joins the war on terror, Pakistan will face a vigorous political backlash at home.

Change then is inevitable in Pakistan, whichever course post-Musharraf Pakistan might adopt towards Afghanistan. That change would necessarily involve a redefinition of civil-military relations.

For nearly three decades, it is the army that has set Pakistan’s policy objectives in Afghanistan. And in pursuit of these goals — often summarised as the search for “strategic depth” by supporting extremism and terrorism across the Durand Line —the army has brought Pakistan to the brink of disaster.

To be sure, this is not about marginalising the Pak army. Pakistan needs its army more than ever before to regain control over its tribal regions and restore order at home. The change is about the civilian government establishing the right to define Pakistan’s national interest and its military objectives.

The struggle to change civil-military relations is not just a question of Pakistan’s domestic politics. It is one of the most pressing international security issues today. The question that the US President George W. Bush asked Pakistan’s premier, Yousuf Raza Gilani, last month — “Who is in charge of the ISI?” — is also one that animates European capitals and India.

Beyond South Block’s formalism — it described Musharraf’s resignation on Monday as Pakistan’s “internal matter” — India must do what it can, both unilaterally and in cooperation with other great powers, to help Islamabad’s civilian leaders gain ascendancy over the military.

Encouraging Pakistan’s democratic evolution, in that sense, is in India’s own national interest.

The writer is a Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore express@expressindia.com