The agreement by India and Pakistan to resume high-level talks has been heralded as a potential turning point in bilateral relations. But the structural factors that derailed the last major dialogue have neither dissipated nor look likely to be addressed by Pakistan, indicating that the breakthrough should be viewed as positive rather than path breaking.
By Shashank Joshi for RUSI.org
Parleying for peace
The eight member states of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) - including their newest member, Afghanistan - convened their annual meeting between 28-29 April in Bhutan. Every year, it is unfailingly overshadowed by whatever ferment happens to surround the India-Pakistan relationship at that time. SAARC is an anaemic institution, crippled by the two enduring rivals at its centre. It has thus far produced little more than a free trade agreement hardly worth the name and a slew of hollow communiqués. Nor did the inevitable diplomacy at the summit's periphery appear to hold out much promise for this round.
Last week, a second secretary in India's High Commission in Islamabad was arrested on charges of spying for Pakistan. During the course of that national drama, the Islamabad station chief of India's foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), also had his identity divulged to the press by an astonishingly leaky domestic bureaucracy. B. Raman, a former counterterrorism chief for RAW, lamented the state of India's counterintelligence and the unprofessionalism of the foreign and home ministries. That the spy was an Indian national may have drawn the sting from Pakistan, but that did not stop speculation that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistan counterpart, Yousaf Raza Gilani, would no longer meet in Thimphu, Bhutan.
And yet the meeting, the first meaningful engagement between the two since controversial discussions in Sharm-el-Sheikh last July, somehow produced what passes for success in this relationship. High-level talks - the so-called 'composite dialogue' - had been terminated by India after the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008, despite relentless American pressure on New Delhi to restart these, apparently in the convoluted and dubious belief that an Indo-Pakistan détente would ease Pakistan's battle against militants in the west and thereby stabilise Afghanistan. These now look set to resume, with India's foreign secretary acknowledging that  'all issues of mutual concern' - including Kashmir, if one reads the diplomatese - would be on the table for the future.
The US expressed a self-satisfied contentment at the outcome, while the predominant reaction from the Indian public and press was an accustomed wariness. Nonetheless, the official response was absent of the acrimony that ensued after ministerial talks in February. The breakthrough came on the heels of the news that Pakistan had redeployed 100,000 soldiers from its border with India to meet the militant threat in its western tribal areas, a shift it had long claimed was impossible due to tensions with India. Is this normalisation of relations a harbinger of a renewed peace process, or a charade fraught with predictable traps?
The limits of dialogue
The first point of note is that peace, as opposed to fleeting amity, cannot be willed into existence by the sheer force of optimism. Recall the most far-reaching talks in recent South Asian history, the back-channel negotiations over Kashmir that by early 2007 had become 'so advanced that we'd come to semicolons', according to Pakistan's then foreign minister. These advances were predicated on an earlier process, beginning as early as 2004, in which a domestically confident President Musharraf was able to at least semi-credibly promise to restrain India-centric terrorist groups. C. Raja Mohan, an influential Indian analyst, writes that 'Musharraf's successors - in the army and on the civilian side - have refused to reaffirm the core commitment on preventing the use of Pakistani territory for terror activities against India'. In fact, the situation is impossibly far from mere reaffirmation.
In February 2010, the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, told the US Senate of 'Islamabad's conviction that militant groups are an important part of its strategic arsenal to counter India's military and economic advantages'. His testimony must be taken seriously, for US military and intelligence organisations have been loath to publicly criticise Pakistan while relying so heavily upon it for local intelligence. Most gallingly of all for India, the group assuming centre stage in that 'strategic arsenal' is Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET), responsible for the Mumbai attacks. The court that released Saeed noted in passing that 'the security laws and anti-terrorism laws of Pakistan were silent on Al-Qa'ida being a terrorist organisation'.
A Pakistani trial of five of its operatives has proceeded at a desultory pace and Hafiz Saeed, the group's de facto leader, was remarkably released for apparent want of evidence. He remains free, in Lahore, to exhort jihad. India's imminent sentencing of Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving Mumbai attacker, underscores the lethargy of Pakistan's own counterterror efforts. But Islamabad's sin is one of commission as well. Ashley Tellis, a former senior US official, told a Congressional hearing in March 2010 that 'LET remains primarily Pakistani in its composition, uses Pakistani territory as its primary base of operation, and continues to be supported extensively by the Pakistani state'.
India broke off the composite dialogue in 2008 because it deemed that negotiations over territory ought not to take place under the ongoing, even if semi-direct, threat of violence. It is starkly clear that Pakistan has not, and is not interested in, seriously curbing and, ultimately dismantling, anti-Indian terrorist groups. That conclusion may be glossed over easily in the West, but it cannot be so easily ignored closer to the epicentre. The argument that a settlement on Kashmir (and by implication, Indian concessions to that end) is a sine qua non for Pakistani action is a carelessly repeated canard. LET is more akin to Al-Qa'ida than locally focused groups. That much is evidenced by its genesis during the Mujahedeen campaign against the Soviet Union and its operations ranging from Afghanistan to Denmark. It is quite difficult to see where Kashmir fits into this. Regardless of the attitude one takes towards the appropriate status of the disputed area, the obstacles to peace lie in Rawalpindi - Pakistan's military centre - and a resumption of talks cannot by itself eliminate this serious and central source of instability. Washington, accustomed to focusing on the symptoms rather than causes of enmity, would do well to hold this in view.
Disempowered doves
It is also worth recalling that the Musharraf-era Kashmir talks, which held such promise, withered as the military regime ran out of steam and into co-ordinated domestic opposition in the autumn of 2008. If it took a Nixon to go to China, then it took Musharraf's administration - itself a fervent state-sponsor of terrorists and insurgents both before and after the major standoff of 2001-2 - to undertake a process of such risks, shield it from domestic scrutiny and criticism, and sell it to the sprawling security apparatus that dominates and frequently supplants the polity in Pakistan. Prime Minister Gilani, who attended the SAARC summit, has nothing of that domestic standing.
Historic legislation enacted in March 2010 restored an element of parliamentary empowerment to Pakistan, and clipped President Zardari's wings. But this should not be overstated. Zardari remains influential in his capacity as head of the ruling Pakistan's Peope's Party. In any case, his powers were questionable to begin with. In matters of national security - itself a concept interpreted by the army in the most expansive terms possible - he remained emasculated. Tellingly, it was the chief of the army, Ashfaq Kayani, who led a major delegation to Washington to demand money, materiél and a nuclear deal. The recently released UN report on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto spoke explicitly of the unrestrained powers of the military and its principal intelligence agency, including their influence in the political realm. To the extent that Gilani has limited sway over that pivotal constituency, he is poorly placed to credibly re-extend Musharraf's reassurances and carry forwards the initiative heralded in Bhutan.
The risk premium on political capital
Nor is this undertaking a one-way bet for India. Manmohan Singh has staked his political capital on the prospect that a dialogue will bear fruit. He has done so at a time when that capital is shrinking. His ruling Congress Party is beset by challenges ranging from a wiretapping scandal, spiraling inflation, and allegations of corruption in the high-profile Indian Premier League (IPL). His restraint after the Mumbai attacks - compounding the Indian government's unwillingness to strike after mobilising half a million soldiers in 2001-2 after a previous attack - drew opposition from domestic hawks. His opponents were further angered by his conciliation after last year's summit in Sharm-el-Sheikh, when his mention of Balochistan - a restive province of Pakistan, in which Pakistan alleges Indian support to separatists - was, quite unfairly, perceived as tantamount to an admission of guilt.
A repetition of Mumbai might place Singh in an untenable position, and would presage the ascendance of less compromising minds. The trajectory of dialogue must also be overlaid with the ongoing assaults on Indian interests in Afghanistan that have occurred over the past several years, and look set to intensify as the Obama administration seeks to empower Pakistan and some of its non-state affiliates, to facilitate the prospective US drawdown in time for the 2012 elections. There is little reason to suppose that India will take that lying down, generating friction that will spillover into wider Indo-Pakistan relations.
In 2004, the composite dialogue was restarted after Musharraf issued a promise that Pakistani soil would not be used to launch terrorist attack against India. That did not hold. The structural reasons for it not doing so remain largely untouched, and will stay that way until major and presently unforeseeable changes occur inside and between the byzantine arms of the Pakistani state. Dialogue ought never to be unwelcome in this mercurial relationship, of course, but only a keen sense of realism will guard against hopes that are habitually confounded.
Shashank Joshi is a Graduate Student at the Department of Government, Harvard University. http://shashankjoshi.wordpress.com/