Opinion Message from Wagah

The bomb that ripped through the lives of so many Pakistanis at Wagah border this Sunday will have been heard all the way in Rawalpindi, in the homes and offices of Pakistan’s all-powerful generals. The suicide-bomber carried not just plastic explosives packed with ball-bearings, but also a message: that terrorists will seek retribution for Operation Zarb-e-Azb, the Pakistan army’s first major campaign against jihadists in the country’s north-west, on the plains of Panjab. Fitful and ineffectual as it has been, Zarb-e-Azb held out hope that Pakistan’s strategic establishment might, at last, have become willing to correct course away from the suicidal path that has led the country to the edge of the abyss. For jihadist groups, this is a real threat — so Pakistan can be sure more bombings will follow, each intended to exert pressure on both the state and civil society to cede power to religious reaction. The bombing will make some citizens question how credible the Pakistan military, in fact, is, if it cannot defend citizens at Wagah — the symbolic site on which it displays its machismo each evening.

As it rises, the tide of terror will impose ever more pressure on the generals to stop their war, or be swept aside. From the point of view of jihadists, victory is within reach: ill-trained insurgents, after all, forced away a United States-equipped professional army in Iraq.
New Delhi should also be listening hard to the message from Wagah. For decades now, Indian policy has been predicated on the assumption that the power of jihadists in Pakistan was a function of state patronage. For Indian doves, this meant providing Pakistan’s state with the right incentives to stop nurturing jihadists; for hawks, the right kinds of coercive responses. It is increasingly evident, though, that large parts of the jihadist movement have now irrevocably broken with the state. Indian policy, thus, must now be tempered by the stark reality of how little that besieged and flailing state can in fact deliver.

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Flexing muscle on the border or diplomatic disengagement might play well with domestic audiences. Neither, though, will make India safer from terrorists over whom Pakistan has ever-less control. It will, moreover, corrode the Pakistani state’s legitimacy even further. This isn’t an argument for giving the Pakistan establishment a free pass on groups it does support, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi needs to pause, reflect and then step forward carefully, knowing that neither strong words nor a big stick are of much use in a minefield.