‘Why can’t we just be friends?’
You’ve written a wonderful book but it must have made you Public Enemy No. 1 in Pakistan? I have been public enemy number one for some time in Pakistan. Creating a narrative of hate always involves distortion of facts. So when someone says the narrative has to be reviewed minus the rhetoric of hate, those who are voicing the rhetoric feel threatened.
That said, conflicts don’t take place because of mistakes made by just one side.
That’s the basic point I am making in the relationship between India and Pakistan.
Once the creation of Pakistan was announced, India had the option of listening to Mahatma Gandhi who called it an agreed separation between brothers in a joint family and said “let us treat Pakistan as the brother who leaves a joint family to set up his own home”. But India chose the option of berating and putting down the brother who left the joint family. This helped hardliners in identifying India as the existential enemy and set the scene for the relationship.
It did not help that Pakistan’s share out of Partition comprised 21 per cent of British India’s population and 17 per cent of its revenue but as much as a third of the armed forces that had been raised by the British during the Second World War. Under the terms of the Partition, Pakistan received 30 per cent of British India’s Army, 40 per cent of its navy and 20 per cent of its air force. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan was forced in 1948 to allocate 75 per cent of Pakistan’s first budget to cover the salaries and maintenance costs of this huge force.
So Pakistan was not like other countries that raise an army to deal with the threats they face. It had inherited a large army that needed a threat if it was to be maintained. India became a convenient excuse. Then there was the issue of the states. Fourteen out of 562 princely states had Muslim-majority populations and were contiguous to or located within the territory of Pakistan. It wasn’t just Kashmir but also Junagadh. Pakistan made a contrary argument over Kashmir.
But the Indian side also missed certain opportunities in the earlier years. In the autumn of 1947, the chief engineers of India and Pakistan had signed a Standstill Agreement which froze water allocations until 31 March, 1948. India discontinued the delivery of water to two major canals for a month on the day the Standstill Agreement expired, demanding a new permanent settlement. The delivery of water was resumed a month later, after an Inter Dominion conference and India agreed it would not withdraw water delivery without allowing time for Pakistan to develop alternative sources. Pakistan’s leaders however, saw this not as a technical matter but as part of India’s plan to cripple agriculture in Pakistan. In your book you have related some amazing anecdotes. I refer to the conversation you recount at your official residence in Washington as ambassador, between you and Gen Shuja Pasha, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) chief in which he said, about Mumbai 2008 : “Log hamare the lekin operation hamara nahin tha”…(the people were ours but not the operation) (nods) …to which I replied: “agar hamare hi log hamare qabu mein nahin hain to aage kya hoga”. (if our own people are not in our control what will happen in the future). I have been extremely careful about cross-referencing conversations and anecdotes so that Pasha can never say I tried to get even with him (recall the “Memogate” controversy). This is not just Pasha saying this to me. Written and published accounts by Michael Hayden, chief of the CIA, and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice say exactly the same thing in different places. Soon after the Mumbai attacks, Rice told Pakistan’s National Security Advisor, Maj Gen Mahmud Durrani, in my presence that Pakistan had all the information it needed to shut terrorist operations down forever. After all, ISI knew who it had trained and equipped for terrorism. “I realise that there could be instability if you go after the jihadi groups”, she observed, “but you will be consumed if you do not’’.
My own reaction to this is simple. Why should Hafiz Saeed, who has never been elected as a municipal councillor, let alone anything else, be allowed to hold a veto over Pakistan’s relations with India? You also relate a published conversation between an American journalist, Peter Landesman, and Brigadier Amanullah in
which the latter says nonchalantly that Pakistan should use the bomb against India. Do many in Pakistan talk in this vein?
You will be surprised how many people talk like that. I have used this anecdote which has already been published, and cannot be contradicted. But many talk like this, casually, recklessly. I am always alarmed that neither India, nor Pakistan, two nations with nuclear arms, have a public nuclear shelter. This can mean two things: either that neither believes there can ever be a nuclear exchange so there is no point in investing in such a shelter; or that if it happens, it is no big deal.
Nuclear weapons are supposed to deter war and freeze the status quo. The reason I cite the brigadier story is that it points at how some people on the Pakistan side want to challenge this notion. In my book I also cite the verbatim conversation, as quoted by former CIA analyst Bruce Reidel, between Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and President Bill Clinton in 1999. Both conversations indicate a slightly greater willingness to take a risk.
But the world is changing and this kind of loose talk…
That’s my hope: that the world is changing and both India and Pakistan cannot be stuck in 1947 forever. In a recent interview, Prime Minister Modi, who has pursued a relatively independent line on Pakistan, seemed to slip back into known territory when he asked the rhetorical question: “talk to Pakistan, yes. But to whom’’. If you were advisor to our prime minister, whom would you advise him to engage in a conversation? I am very glad that I am not an advisor to any PM anywhere. I have no role in any government and that gives me freedom of mind. All I can say is: sometimes, engaging without illusions is a good policy. All these media-generated cycles of impending breakthroughs followed by breakdown… I think we need to look at it in a slightly longer term.
The December visit by Prime Minister Modi was a mistake — not in terms of engagement, because two neighbours must talk to each other, they have no choice; but in terms of raising expectations that all problems will be solved. Between 1947 and today, there have been 55 summit-level engagements between the Indian and Pakistani sides. If 55 have not resolved the problems between them, then how can the 56th? You end your book with a slightly depressing poem by a Pakistani poet, addressed to India: “tum bilkul hum jaise nikle”… I did not mean it in literal terms, but as a word of warning. The last thing India needs is to turn, like Pakistan, into an ideological state. Its great strength is its pluralism. A plural India is able to win much greater global support. As an ideological state, in 1957, Pakistan could say many countries support its UN stand on Kashmir. In the last UN General Assembly, Nawaz Sharif was the only one who raised the issue of Kashmir. I just wanted to sound a note of caution.