Author: Ayaz Amir
Publication: Dawn, Karachi
Date: July 28, 2000
ANYONE using the term 'core issue'
which has been made current and fashionable by a generation of tight-minded
diplomats and security experts (God save us from them), deserves to receive
a kick on his shins. If Kashmir was solved tomorrow would Pakistan
and India rush into each other's embrace and forget the atavistic memories
of the past? Kashmir is not the core issue between us. Size and geography
are and will remain so 500 years from now.
Not out of any innate wickedness
but because of its sheer weight, and the sense of false destiny which afflicts
a country when it moves from one stage of development to another, India
will want to exercise hegemony over the subcontinent. This is the
nature of power and has nothing to do with morality.
In the subcontinent, after all,
India holds the position which the Soviet Union held in Europe after the
second world war, which China has in East Asia today, which Napoleonic
France had on the continent after the wars of the French Revolution.
Size, numbers, the computers of Bangalore, a mythologized view of its past
and the long-legged beauty contestants (ravishing so many of them) who
give India's rising middle class the illusion of first world rank and mobility
will all fuel India's drive towards regional bossdom. It will remain
in Pakistan's abiding interest to resist this ambition.
How we resist it is up to us.
We can do this crudely as we have been doing for the past 52 years, achieving
little in the process except international fatigue and opprobrium, or,
calling up a wisdom which has yet to be discovered, we can do it subtly,
keeping India hard-pressed and occupied (to the extent that we can achieve
this) while avoiding at all costs getting caught in a corner. India
is the elephant of the subcontinent. We should be the gnat buzzing
round its ears.
So far of course the genius of our
higher military command has seen to it that it should be the other way
round: India reaping the rewards of subtlety while we have been getting
the country into pitched elephant battles. The 1965 war, the '71
imbroglio, the involvement in Afghanistan with our eyes closed (which means
that whereas we should have been involved, we should not have been blind
to our long-term interests), and Kargil: even Ares, the god of war, inured
to the spectacle of human folly, would be aghast at the stupidity pitch-forked
into these ventures. From the British our military command inherited
a conventional mindset. Although we call the Chinese our friends,
from them we have learned nothing of Maoist warfare.
American military aid in the fifties
is partly to blame for the military attitudes we adopted, American tanks
and planes giving our political and military leadership the illusion of
superiority over India. Of the atmosphere reigning at the time, Brian
Cloughley, no enemy of Pakistan, in his informative and well-written account
of the Pakistan army has this to say: "...the army had a high opinion of
itself without having done very much except expand a bit and conduct some
mediocre training with its new American equipment."
Partly of course we were victims
of our own myths, seriously believing at one time (although mercifully
no longer) that one Muslim was good enough for ten Hindus. Hard though
it may be to believe this, in the order for Operation Gibraltar signed
by Field Marshal Ayub Khan (who deserved his rank about as much as Uganda's
Idi Amin did his) it was said that as a rule Hindu morale could be expected
to crack under the impact of a succession of hard blows.
This was then; it should be different
now but it isn't, Kargil being the decisive proof of the military command's
continuing love affair with set-piece thinking. The folly of Kargil
lay not in betraying the Lahore Declaration or breaching any other barrier
of abstract morality. The prosecution of war can dispense with such
niceties. Its folly lay in the fact that it committed Pakistan to
a battle which it could not, under any circumstances, win and which was
unrelated to any political objective.
You fight a war to achieve a political
aim. What were we hoping to achieve in Kargil? Forcing India to the
negotiating table? Internationalizing the Kashmir issue? Kargil has done
more to obscure the Kashmir issue and damage the cause of the Kashmiri
people than anything else in recent memory. A few more internationalizations
like this and Kashmir will be swept into the rubbish-can of history.
The best thing going for Pakistan
was the uprising in occupied Kashmir. At relatively little cost to
us, a goodly part of the Indian army was tied down in Kashmir. We
should have kept it like that without resorting to loud rhetoric, at which
we as a nation excel, or acquiring too high a body profile. Indeed,
instead of appearing obdurate, which also comes easily to us, we should
have espoused moderation and the virtues of dialogue, all the while keeping
our head low and extending, as we have been doing since 1989, practical
help to the Kashmiri struggle for freedom. Our moral and diplomatic
support the Kashmiris can do without. It is our practical help that
is of any use to them.
But holding on to these different
strands would have required the subtlety and quickness of the gnat.
We went for elephant tactics and ended up with Kargil. Our image
took a battering and what had been an intelligent and, until then, a sustainable
policy of inflicting maximum damage at little cost became a millstone round
our neck, the freedom struggle in Kashmir becoming confused with "cross-border
terrorism".
What did Assad do in the Levant?
While avoiding war with Israel he kept the Israeli army bogged down in
Lebanon. The Hizbul Mujahideen of Lebanon were the Hizbollah, funded
and armed by Syria and Iran. Through the Hizbollah and not directly
was relentless pressure kept on the Israelis, ultimately compelling them
to vacate South Lebanon. This did not prevent the Americans from
talking to Assad. In fact, much as they disliked him (for he was
a hard nut to crack) they had to take him seriously. Globalization
or not, steeliness pays.
But Assad never made a pantomime
of the Lebanese resistance. The Maulana Masood Azhars of Lebanon
did not have the freedom of Syria, going about toting guns and making vitriolic
speeches. Resistance to Israel was serious business conducted seriously
without any of the crass irresponsibility and empty showmanship which have
cast Pakistan as the prime villain of fundamentalism in the western media.
Even the Hizbollah cultivates a
careful and restrained public image. Some of the Kashmiri fighters,
or at least those who periodically appear in Pakistan, the Mast Guls and
the Syed Salahuddins, look like dangerous buccaneers. This does their
cause no good. To some extent this is a denominational difference.
Throughout the Islamic world the Shia beard, which is what we see in Lebanon,
is closely cropped. The Sunni beard which is to be seen in Afghanistan
and Kashmir is fuller and often more threatening. Image being king
in the global village, some change is called for here if only to deny grist
to the mills of western sensationalism.
A few words finally regarding the
Hizbul Mujahideen announcement of a ceasefire in occupied Kashmir.
I don't know all the facts and so I could be wholly wrong but I cannot
see the Hizb making this announcement without Pakistani approval, tacit
or otherwise. What lends support to this impression is the restrained
and sensible reaction to the ceasefire announcement from the Pakistan government.
Had the Hizb pulled this off on its own, panic buttons would have been
pushed in ISI headquarters in Islamabad.
But if Pakistani approval is there,
American involvement cannot be far behind. It all fits in then, doesn't
it? General Musharraf cosying up to the religious parties by allaying their
fears over the anti-blasphemy law and then, to the dismay of the spineless
liberati, incorporating the Islamic provisions of the suspended Constitution
into the interim 'military' constitution. All this done so as to
protect the government's flanks and prepare the stage for the props being
rolled out in Kashmir. We seem to be getting subtle after all.
Already, at a stroke, the spotlight
has shifted from the issue of cross-border terrorism to the Hizb announcement.
This is the first smart move from this side after a year of floundering
during which Pakistan's stock touched rock-bottom, what with our nuclear
firecrackers and the folly of Kargil.
