Opinion The great Game Folio

That the army’s General Headqaurters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi controls Pakistan’s key national security accounts — Afghanistan,nuclear weapons,the United States,China and India — is well known. But it is not often that an army chief openly conducts diplomacy when a civilian government in charge,even if notionally. When he was in command,Pervez Musharraf wore all hats — army chief,chief executive and presiden. When functioning with (but never under) the civilian governments,Pakistan’s army chiefs tend to control key policy decisions from behind the scenes.

Given the high stakes in the Afghan endgame,Kayani has no time for such subtlety. Nor would it be wrong to say that the current civilian dispensation in Islamabad does not inspire either fear or respect in Rawalpindi.

Washington once used to commend his ‘professionalism’ as a soldier and a commitment to take the army back into the barracks after Musharraf,but Kayani now does all the heavy political lifting on Afghanistan. The Obama administration negotiates with him directly. All American visitors to Pakistan these days spend quality time with Kayani while doing the protocol with the civilian establishment.

Kayani’s shadow will loom also large over the US-Pakistan strategic dialogue next week,where the army is expected to lay out its demands for further cooperation with the United States in Afghanistan. When he went to Pakistan last week,Afghan president Hamid Karzai had talks with Kayani,who has positioned himself as the principal interlocutor between the different factions of the Taliban in Pakistan and the rest of the world.

As Karzai seeks a political solution to the civil war in Afghanistan,he now has no choice but to deal with the Pakistan army that had been so hostile to him all these years. Days before Karzai’s Pakistan trip,Kayani was in Kabul calling on the president and visiting the headquarters of the international forces in Afghanistan.

If Kayani has become so central to the decision-making on India and Afghanistan,does it not make sense for Delhi to reach out directly to the GHQ? Why does New Delhi not extend an invitation to the Pakistan army chief to visit India?

New Delhi’s conservatives will say Kayani will never accept such an invitation; New Delhi,however,loses nothing with an offer to host him and honestly address whatever concerns his army has about India’s military doctrine and its many fears about India’s presence in Afghanistan.

Punjab’s plea

Besides his new hat as Pakistan’s most important external interlocutor,Kayani has to bear the traditional burden of disciplining the politicians who often come under the army’s foot and complicate its grand strategy towards Afghanistan,the United States and India.

Within hours after appealing to the Taliban to “spare” his province from terrorism,the chief minister of West Punjab (the most populous province of Pakistan),Shahbaz Sharif was summoned to the GHQ probably for a dressing down.

After the horrible multiple bombings in Lahore last week,Sharif declared that his party,Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz),shares a common cause with the Taliban in opposing Musharraf’s divisive policies and in resisting the political dictation from the United States. Therefore,Sharif urged that the Taliban must leave Punjab alone. Sharif had to quickly backtrack as the implications of his proposal for a separate peace between Punjab and the Taliban began to sink in. Meanwhile the GHQ had every reason to frown at Sharif’s remarks which were playing into the hands of the Taliban. The main political objective of the Lahore attack was to get the terrorised civilian population to press the army to stop the military campaign against the Pakistani Taliban.

Saran’s wrap

The role of Shyam Saran,the former foreign secretary and prime minister’s special envoy until the weekend,in the remaking India’s foreign policy is widely acknowledged.

Less known,however,is Saran’s extraordinary effort in getting Delhi to end its prolonged neglect of the nation’s borderlands. Saran’s relentless pursuit — first from the Foreign Office and then from the PMO — resulted in many decisions to modernise India’s decaying military and commercial infrastructure. This column doffs its cap to Saran for persuading Delhi to think strategically about its frontiers and for reviving the Great Game tradition that once thrived in Kolkata and Delhi and defined the geopolitics of India’s neighbourhood.

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