Author: Udayan Namboodiri
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: October 8, 2006
Those who believe in making the naughtiest
boy the class monitor forget that to make it work, you need a headmaster who
is sincerely interested in maintaining order. It's all too plain to see that
the "headmaster" in charge of the war on terror is just not interested
whether or not Musharraf walks the talk on reining in terror directed against
India
New Delhi's decision to forge a bilateral
anti-terror mechanism has roused conflicting passions and forms the focus
of Saturday Special this week. Security expert Ajai Sahni *(see main article)*
writes on General Pervez Musharraf's chicanery, while commentator Abhay K
Upadhyay *(The Other Voice) *wants to give the mercurial leader the benefit
of the doubt.
A lot of people think Foreign Secretary Shiv
Shankar Menon has done right to make the naughtiest boy the class monitor.
That's OK till the point when you realise that naughty boys show uncanny responsibility
and possibly undergo metamorphosis only when the headmaster of the school
is sincere. In this case, the headoo is America. And the less said about Uncle
Sam's honesty the better.
In 2002, when the American people were presented
incontrovertible evidence of Musharraf's chicanery, a famous columnist recalled
the words used by Franklin D Roosevelt in justification of his policy of underwriting
a Panama dictator. "He may be a *** of a *****", FDR had famously
stated, "but he is our *** of a *****". While this policy may work
for a superpower like the United States, it would be puerile on New Delhi's
part to imagine that Musharraf suit any Indian design. In fact, he got his
foreign office to categorically rule out any scope of repatriating those whom
India alleges had planned and executed the Mumbai train bombings in July.
Moreover, there are lessons to be learnt from
the experience of those who had placed their trust in Musharraf. The mind
travels back to December 2002. Hamid Karzai had just been installed as interim
President of the new, post-Taliban Afghanistan. Which was the country he decided
to visit first? Why, Pakistan, doubtless at the hectoring of his American
patron. There was a cloud of apprehension over the future of bilateral Pak-Afghan
ties. Could Karzai forget all about Musharraf's support to the Taliban which
was the source of all the hardships suffered by the Afghan people for the
preceding five years? But, forced by circumstances, Karzai had no choice but
walk into Musharraf's embrace at Islamabad's airport.
Before long, evidence arrived that the ISI
was not the least interested in giving up its "strategic depth"
(which formed the bedrock of its Afghan policy through the 1990s) theory.
Karzai was presented, via independent channels of proof of Pakistan-sponsored
Taliban revival based on its soil. Yet, like all leaders who had drunk the
heady cocktail of US-Pakistan joint resolve, he opted for discretion. In fact,
his first Foreign Minister, Abdullah Abdullah, had to be shunted to the less
high-profile Department of Education lest Washington felt reflected embarrassment
from Islamabad.
Today, however, Karzai regrets having trusted
Musharraf - showman, deceiver *par excellence* whose own people call him the
biggest speaker of untruths they have seen. We saw a pretty good exhibition
of that in Washington last month when the two were there at the same time.
Bush had to call the two to his iftar party, but the body language displayed
afterwards at the joint press conference scarcely concealed the dramatic transformation
of ties. This week, there was further exacerbation when Kabul held out, for
the first time ever, real time proof of the existence of terror training camps
in Pakistan. These are not the usual ones meant for terrorism in the east,
that is, in Jammu and Kashmir. Afghanistan's spokesman for National Directorate
of Security, Sayed Ansari, paraded before the world press based in Kabul 17
terrorists, all of whom admitted to have been trained in mass murder in Pakistan.
Delhi's lack of institutional memory is indeed
baffling. In January 2004, the same Musharraf who now denies harbouring the
most dangerous terrorists of South Asia, had, in fact, admitted to as much.
At the SAARC Summit, he had even declared that Jammu and Kashmir was a bilateral
problem, that "terrorism" was happening there and, what's more,
agreed to folding up the camps to pave the way for a new chapter in Indo-Pak
relations. Had he been true to his word, the tide of the war against terrorism
would have changed. Perhaps there would have been no Diwali bombing, the London
blasts may not have occurred, not to speak of the host of other terror strikes
that one can link directly to Musharraf's doublespeak.
There are many theories bandied about to explain
New Delhi's inconsistency. One arm of the Government disbelieves Pakistan,
while the top calls Pakistan a "victim" of terrorism. There may
be a psychological explanation behind this. Perhaps official India is suffering
a bout of Stockholm Syndrome, the condition in which a tormented person begins
to empathise with his tormentor. In the middle are people who are basically
cheerleaders of this Government. A motley lot of leftists, *jholawallah*s,
secularists and party hoppers who change colour with every regime. These people,
having expended all their intellectual faculties attacking Pakistan over the
past decade, are now at a loss to explain the new situation. So, the most
they can say in Mr Manmohan Singh's support is: "He has an 'out-of-the-box'
solution". And, finally, there are those who still, a fortnight since
Havana and a month to go before the Foreign Secretary level talks, can believe
that this is happening.
