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Five Indian soldiers were killed early Tuesday in Jammu & Kashmir, in the Poonch sector just within the Indian side of the Line of Control between India and Pakistan. Slammed for not being able to stave off the attack and yet hoping to restore the dialogue with Pakistan, stalled after another incident in January,
when an Indian soldier was decapitated, the Indian government is now mulling over whether it wants to follow through with an earlier Pakistani proposal to hold a bilateral meeting between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, when they both attend the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York in September. The Indian Parliament has seen outrage and uproar over the attack, with the opposition accusing the government of being “too soft” on Pakistan.
The pre-dawn ambush Tuesday took place in Poonch district, the same area where an Indian soldier was killed and beheaded in a similar ambush in January. These two flare-ups on the Line of Control, roughly six months apart, played out almost identically.
The Indian government claims that militants dressed in Pakistani army uniforms carried out the attacks; Pakistan has denied the allegations and also accused India of cross-border incursions by its special forces. The opposition has accused the UPA government of providing the Pakistan government with “an escape route” by not directly accusing the Pakistani army for the incident.
Sources in the Indian armed forces have alleged that the ambush could not have happened without active connivance of the Pakistan army, which is seeking to re-assert its authority over the civilian government led by recently elected PM Nawaz Sharif, by attempting to place its proxies in positions of power in Kabul and by raising the ante in J&K by pushing in terrorists to foment trouble in the border state.
Regardless of whether India engages in a dialogue with the Pakistani leadership, India is likely to face a higher threat of attacks in the coming months and years as militant flows in the region adjust to a U.S. exit from Afghanistan.
According to Stratfor’s Reva Bhalla, the 2008 Mumbai attacks forced India to acknowledge a very uncomfortable reality: that Pakistan had lost control over many of its key militant proxies and could thus no longer be held solely responsible for attacks against Indian interests that emanate from Pakistani territory.
Pakistan at the same time had little interest in provoking a major confrontation with its larger Indian neighbor. It faced an immense challenge already in trying to manage growing internal militancy and contain elements sympathetic to various militant groups from within the Pakistani security and intelligence apparatus.
The mutual concerns over the degradation of Pakistan’s control over its militant landscape nudged both sides into a dialogue, which now occurs in fits and starts. Both sides still have plenty of reason to maintain that line of communication and avoid significant state to state confrontation, but a credible and substantial peace negotiation that adequately addresses India’s core security concerns over Pakistan-based militancy is probably out of the question for now.
Many of the constraints to the peace process can be traced back to the situation in Afghanistan. As Taliban leader Mullah Omar continues his efforts to carve out a prominent political space for the Taliban following the U.S. withdrawal, Pakistan is working to ensure Islamabad’s influence in Kabul grows in parallel with the Taliban.
While Pakistan tries to shape the political evolution in Afghanistan, it will also need to manage a festering domestic jihadist insurgency at home as militants search for new battlefronts. Pakistan will have a lot on its plate, but it will have a better chance of success if it can manage to also downgrade its long-standing conflict with India by at least engaging in peace talks.
But India is legitimately concerned that a shift in militant focus from Afghanistan will raise the threat of militant activity in Kashmir. India is in fact getting hit on both ends of Pakistan. Just two days before the cross-border attack that killed five Indian soldiers, the Indian Consulate in Jalalabad was hit by suspected Pakistani terrorists, killing at least a dozen Afghans, many of them children.
Evidently, there are multiple elements intent on derailing negotiations between Pakistan and India, as well as between Pakistan and Kabul. Now, India can try to hold Pakistan accountable for these attacks, but it also can’t avoid the question of whether Pakistan, in its current distracted and fractured state, has control over these groups and whether it would be able to enforce any security commitments it makes.
Courtesy: STRATFOR (www.stratfor.com)
IRGA adds: A strong civil society movement has been urging both the Indian and Pakistani governments to embark on an uninterrupted dialogue to normalise bilateral relations.
At a recent event in New Delhi, Sherry Rahman, Pakistan’s former Ambassador to the United States and former Federal Minister of Information and Broadcasting spoke of a time of multiple transitions in the South Asian region, particularly India and Pakistan.
Delivering a lecture on “Transition and Opportunity: Regional Peace and the Strategic Imagination” she said that while the relationship between the two countries face challenges in the name of policy making, public diplomacy, a moment of colossal change has come, where the situation can either be missed or leveraged in our favour. Ms. Rehman spoke of the future of South Asia, “civil society has a growing voice,” she said. She stated that women play a huge part in this change, quoting the example of Malala Yousafzai, a young student and education activist from the small town of Mingora.
Ms. Rehman also spoke of Afghanistan, a country rife in transition. “Afghanistan is for the Afghans to run, we can and will support them,” she said. She was of the opinion that 2014 would cause them a plethora of challenges. “Any kind of volatile action/ event in Afghanistan surges into Pakistan,” she said. She stated that terrorist outfit Al-Qaeda had been defeated because of Pakistan’s pursuit.
Pakistan is faced with the huge task of dealing with terrorism, of state and society. Despite this, Pakistan is witnessing a transformation in terms of leadership, where religious parties, once in the forefront are now being slowly voted out of power.
Moreover, in the last five years, it has been seen that government officials have moved towards neutrality, not favouring any political party. She said that the general elections held in May 2013 witnessed an unprecedented turnout, where the citizens braved the TTP threat. Ms. Rehman said the government will run Pakistan by democratic consent.
Moving on to the India Pakistan relationship, she stated that both the countries need to secure their future collectively. She listed out opinions from important spaces, namely the younger lot, who see Pakistan as a nuclear irritant and engage with them only at a certain bandwidth, the business community who want to see more dialogue happen with Pakistan and the larger socio-economic group who also see a brighter and peaceful future.
“Pakistan has a new and fragile democracy,” Ms. Rehman said. She expressed that they have a history of delayed yet strong expectations. She said that dialogue between India and Pakistan suffer from too many conditions. “Public poll does not show India as an enemy anymore,” she said.
While this can be seen as a positive sign, there needs to be a model for dialogue between the two countries. This is despite the two countries eyeing each other with military suspicion. “Every conversation is embedded in 2 steps forward and 1 step back,” she said.
Ms. Rehman highlighted a point about trade, stating that bilateral trade will help the two countries move on since seldom do two countries engaged in trade go to war. She also said that as a goodwill gesture, India should answer Pakistan’s on-going water crises.