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Kashmir: The Dictator In His Labyrinth
Praveen
Swami
Now
that the prospect of an India-Pakistan nuclear conflagration has
vanished off the front pages of newspapers, the international
community seems to have decided it can safely go back to pretending
nothing is particularly amiss in Jammu & Kashmir.
Two
leitmotifs have dominated recent western diplomatic activity in New
Delhi and Islamabad. First, Pakistan's military ruler, General
Pervez Musharraf, must be made to further realise his promises to
end cross-border terrorism. Second, India must recognise the efforts
made by Musharraf, and pull back the troops massed on its western
borders. All of this is premised on the assumption that Musharraf is
at least half-serious about de-escalating violence in Jammu &
Kashmir, a conviction that a section of the Indian diplomatic and
security community seems to share.
Publicly
available data does nothing to affirm this happy belief. In January,
India's Army chief General S. Padmanabhan had announced, in the wake
of the previous month's terrorist attack on Parliament, that his
troops were ready to go to war. From that month to the end of June,
well after Musharraf made his promises, 456 civilians were killed in
terrorist-related violence, up from 445 during the same six months
of 2001. Terrorists killed fewer police officers and troops, but the
number of attacks on Indian security forces did not decline
significantly.
Neither
was there any meaningful reduction in overall levels of terrorist
violence.
Key
to the debate is whether or not Musharraf is committed to stopping
the movement of terrorists from their training camps in Pakistan
across the Line of Control. At first glance, Indian intelligence
estimates do seem to suggest a sharp fall in the numbers of
terrorists making their way into Jammu & Kashmir. These
statistics seem to have shaped the thinking both of western
diplomats, as well as much of the Indian media and several important
political figures.
Three
points, however, seem little understood. First, estimates of
trans-border movement are exactly what they purport to be:
estimates. Collated from fire contact, sightings, source reports and
interrogations, infiltration estimates can and are routinely revised
days and even weeks after they are issued. The presence of new
groups who have crossed the Line of Control may become known only
when they surface in interior regions of Jammu & Kashmir. As
such, intelligence estimates cannot be used to accurately gauge
short-term trends, much less the strategic intent of Pakistan's
intelligence community.
Second,
there is little sign that Musharraf is indeed committed to actually
terminating the activities of terrorist groups based in Pakistan.
Only two leaders of terrorist groups active in Jammu & Kashmir,
the Lashkar-e-Taiba's Hafiz Mohammad Sayeed and the Jaish-e-Mohammad's
Masood Azhar, are under arrest. Both of them have been held for
domestic dissent directed at Musharraf, not the terrorism charges
India has long demanded they be tried for. The 14-member United
Jihad Council, which coordinates the terrorist campaign in Jammu
& Kashmir, continues to function freely. Their chairpersons, the
Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin’s Mohammad Yusuf Shah, better known by his nom
de guerre Syed Salahuddin, and al-Umar’s Mushtaq Zargar, have both
issued media-delivered threats against those who might wish to
participate in the coming elections in Jammu & Kashmir. Zargar
is believed to have ordered the recent assassination of the centrist
political figure Abdul Gani Lone, after the latter engaged with the
Indian government in a dialogue on possible participation in the
elections.
Third,
it seems to have escaped notice that the fall in infiltration
detected through June was preceded by unusually high levels of
cross-border movement from March to May. The number of terrorists
now present on ground, the figures on violence indicate, allow
Pakistan's intelligence establishment to sustain violence in Jammu
& Kashmir at levels it believes can sufficiently serve its
military purposes. It is also important to note that signals traffic
from control stations in Pakistan continues more or less unabated.
The sharp fall in the numbers of terrorists killed by Indian
security forces suggests efforts are being made to avoid fire
contact in order to conserve cadre for larger objectives.
What
might this larger objective be? The figures again tell the tale. It
is no coincidence that the killings of civilians have escalated to
new heights. Many of the victims have been middle-level political
functionaries of the pro-India political party which holds power in
Jammu & Kashmir, the National Conference. Functionaries and
supporters of other pro-India organisations have also been targeted
for assassination. So too have those who won seats in village-level
local bodies which were held in phases from mid-2000. In short,
there is a systematic effort to intimidate civil society ahead of
the elections, scheduled to be held in October. This alone renders
absurd the debate on whether those elections will be fair or unfair:
no election can be truly fair when participation entails a credible
risk of getting killed.
Unless
there is a demonstrable ground-level reduction in killings, the
entire debate on whether or not cross-border movement has declined,
and whether or not training camps have been closed or relocated,
will remain pointless. This, sadly, is profoundly unlikely to occur.
The contours of international engagement with India and Pakistan
this summer have affirmed Musharraf's convictions that there is no
substantial price to be paid for backing terrorism in Jammu &
Kashmir. The General's pronouncements in a series of recent
interviews have made transparent his belief that Pakistan's nuclear
capabilities will deter a full-scale Indian military response. As
such, the Pakistan military-intelligence establishment remains
content to tie down Indian troops, drain its resources, and hope
continued violence will eventually leverage a settlement in its
favour.
The
July 13 massacre of 28 workers and their families near Jammu city
has been interpreted as the work of those who wish to spark off an
India-Pakistan war. It could, just as easily, be read as an
enterprise to determine how India might now react to a major outrage
of the kind that nearly led it to war this summer. This time, India
did nothing. Sooner or later, however, some government is bound to
discover that the political price of inaction outweighs the
indisputably calamitous risks of war. The best way of making sure
this outcome is never realised is for the world to ensure that
Musharraf reins in the Islamic Right's storm troopers: the sooner,
the better. Whether it has the will, the vision or the ability to do
that is, of course, another question altogether.
By
special arrangement with Institute for Conflict Management, New
Delhi. (South Asia Intelligence Review)
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