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C O M M E N T A R Y
The Pakistani trap
Manmohan Singh is being set-up by Islamabad, and the Congress leadership must gently extricate him from the Pakistan dialogue, writes N.V.Subramanian.
8 February 2010: It is now becoming apparent that prime minister Manmohan Singh is almost alone among his senior cabinet colleagues who is pushing for a dialogue with Pakistan. Although they cannot go out and say so, it appears that P.Chidambaram, who has single-handedly and single-mindedly contained post-26/ 11 Pakistani terrorism against India, has deep reservations about opening a dialogue with Pakistan at this sensitive juncture when he is almost getting a upper hand of the terror, and in his leeriness, he looks being joined by the finance (and former foreign and defence) minister, Pranab Mukherjee, who has been remarkably quiet about it all. (Don't be surprised if this commentary forces pro-dialogue sentiments from a reluctant cabinet.)
On the PM's side would appear to be the foreign minister, S.M.Krishna, but he counts for little in cabinet weight, being singularly lucky to hold his job despite contributing so little to it. Pushing the PM's plans for Pakistan is the former foreign secretary and the present national security advisor, Shiv Shankar Menon, who also, in the final analysis, counts for as little as Krishna, because, after all, he is an official, with no political accountability for his actions. After M.K.Narayanan's free and damaging run of/ with the NSA's office, no (elected) cabinet minister, and markedly Chidambaram, is in a mood to allow Menon an expansive role. But this requires fuller treatment in another commentary.
Which leaves, of the other weighty cabinet ministers, A.K.Anthony. Anthony got the defence portfolio because of his clean image and on account of his closeness to the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi. From the inputs that Anthony receives from the armed forces, he cannot be very comfortable with opening a dialogue with Pakistan just now, especially with terrorist infiltrations spurting in Jammu and Kashmir and with the Af-Pak region entering a new phase of dangerous flux. Plus, because of his closeness to the Congress leadership, he must be aware of the leadership's sensitivities to talks with Pakistan, especially after the Sharm-el-Sheikh fiasco. Upto now, it would therefore appear that three of Manmohan Singh's frontline cabinet ministers are not keen on his Pakistan initiative. (As this is written, the BJP leader, L.K.Advani, who the PM perhaps has consulted, has raised the red flag.)
But more than this hesitation/ quiet disapproval of the cabinet ministers, there also appears misgivings in the Congress camp about the talks. No one will publicly say this, but with events progressing smoothly for the Manmohan Singh government, except the price-rise situation, which is alarming, few want a risk with Pakistan, which most likely, and very conceivably, will boomerang, and leave the party leadership as red-faced as in the Sharm-el-Sheikh affair to advice the PM privately but firmly to recant. The terrifying fear that perhaps straddles both the top government hierarchy and the party leadership is that Manmohan Singh is stepping into a Sharm-el-Sheikh-like minefield and that he won't be able politically to survive a second disaster.
From this writer's analysis of the situation, it is clear that Pakistan is leading India into a trap, a trap which is similar to and simultaneously different from (because of different objectives) the one it has successfully sprung on the US and the West in the London conference on Afghanistan. Pakistan's single-point agenda is to crown a Taliban/ Al-Qaeda government in Kabul. This will not happen in a day. It will begin with, as it already has, the outlandish scheme to buy off the lower tier of Taliban fighters, placate the middle tier with secondary political offices, and avow a determination to fight the Al-Qaeda/ Taliban/ Haqqani network/ Quetta Shura, etc.
It will be in Pakistan's interest to fail this effort, as it will anyway fail. Pakistan won't obviously contribute to this failure, but through its ISI channels instigate the Taliban and other top Afghan terrorist leaders to reject it, as they already have begun to. From this failure will begin a second level of Pakistan-launched mediation, to get the US and the West to accept the Taliban and others in a so-called reconciliation package number two. This won't happen now but probably closer to president Barack Obama's July 2011 withdrawal date from Afghanistan, when Obama will be pressurized by his own reelection issues and by the further declining popularity of the Democratic Party. The Pakistanis would calculate that a softened Obama would agree pretty much to any deal in Afghanistan that gives him a minimum face-saver. With the Taliban installed, Pakistan's military and intelligence establishment will pursue to gain strategic depth against India.
The only objector to all this so far, commencing with the whole London conference concept of a good and bad Taliban, was India. Under US pressure, and probably from his own impulse, Manmohan Singh is now ready for talks with Pakistan. Once India gets across the table with Pakistan (aside from whatever concessions on J and K are extracted, which will be addressed in a separate commentary), it becomes complicit in the good Taliban-bad Taliban plan, and then it gets steadily sucked into the final inauguration of the second jihadi, blood-thirsty Taliban regime in Kabul. By doing so, India forfeits its principal strategic weapon in Afghanistan against Pakistani machinations, which is creating and managing Northern Alliance II alongwith Russia, Iran and the other anti-Taliban states. This is the clear and present danger confronting India, and it would not be presumptuous to say that probably nobody in the government has analyzed from this angle.
The danger to the United States from an installed Taliban government is manifest. The Al-Qaeda will come on board sooner or later to assist to set up an Islamist Caliphate, and the US would by then be so turned off by and weary of Afghanistan that it would acquiesce in the development -- until a second 9/ 11 occurs. As for India, with a Taliban/ Al-Qaeda regime riding in, all its national territory including J and K will stand grossly imperiled. Pakistan is already acting triumphalist post the London conference on Afghanistan. And the Manmohan Singh government, by conceding to the dialogue, or rather, seeking and embracing it, is contributing to Pakistan's jihadi victory in Afghanistan.
Everything that India gained after the November 2008 Bombay carnage may soon be lost.
N.V.Subramanian is Editor, www.NewsInsight.net, and writes internationally on strategic affairs. He has authored two novels, University of Love (Writers Workshop, Calcutta) and Courtesan of Storms (Har-Anand, Delhi).
Please visit N.V.Subramanian's blog http://courtesanofstorms.blog.com/ and write to him at envysub@gmail.com
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