Opinion A tale of two visions in Pakistan

But three things went wrong: the terrorists failed to sink the hijacked fishing trawler Kuber: Qasab was captured alive and,sometime after they holed up in the Oberoi and Taj hotels,the terrorists began to realise that they were never meant to escape and that the plan they had been fed,of taking hostages to negotiate their way out of India,was bogus. Qasab and the recovered trawler provided virtually incontrovertible proof that the attack had originated in Pakistan. A flurry of discussions between the terrorists and their handlers on the fate of the hostages enabled the IB to trace the handlers and conclude that,as in the case of  the  attack  on the Indian embassy in Kabul last July,serving officers of the ISI were involved in the attack on Mumbai.

The dossier India gave to Pakistan did not contain any evidence that directly implicated the ISI and the army. But had New Delhi’s suspicions been unfounded there would have been no dog-fight within the Pakistani state. The Zardari government’s immediate and unconditional offer of cooperation on November 27 was powerful evidence that it had had no hand in the attack. But by the same token,the army chief’s unshakable determination to deny the  involvement of any  Pakistanis and,later,to prevent  any  investigation that it could not control,  provided equally strong evidence of its complicity.

Gen. Mahmud Durrani’s decision to throw the glove down before his former colleagues reflected the intensity of his resentment. As a key adviser to Zardari,Durrani felt all of the pressure the latter was under. But as a military man and an ardent nationalist,he was not prepared to remain party to a set of lies that were making Pakistan look increasingly ridiculous and putting it in dire peril. 

The conflict between the civil and military state in Pakistan is not,however,the only reason for the stiffening of the Gilani government’s stand after its initial eagerness to cooperate. The other is the hawkish cries that were let loose in India by the media and its talking heads,and echoed by some in the government who should have known better. These gave the Pakistan army just the shield of fear and nationalist fervour that it needed to deflect the Pakistani public’s attention away from what it had done.  The media-stoked reaction in India therefore ended by weakening India’s friends and potential allies in Pakistan.

If the Gilani-Zardari government persevered nevertheless,a large part of the credit goes to the extraordinarily courageous support it received from the most liberal and democratic elements in Pakistan’s civil society. The Pakistani media were the first to welcome their decision to send the ISI chief to India and their offer to cooperate  in the investigation. They were the first to criticise the government when it went into its mercifully short period of blind denial. And it was Pakistani and Pakistan-born journalists who exposed,at considerable risk to themselves,the attempt to make Qasab and his parents ‘un-persons’.

New Delhi now faces a stark choice: it can continue to treat the  Pakistani state as an undifferentiated whole and  mistrust its motives,or it can recognise the epic struggle that its civil society is waging  against the military establishment,not to do India  a favour but to save the kind of country they want Pakistan  to be. That should also be New Delhi’s aim.

The writer is a political commentator