‘US should resist the itch to mediate between India, Pak’

The United States should not entertain thoughts about inserting itself into the India-Pakistan conflict with a misplaced expectation of effecting a benign result, and should give up routinely exhorting the two South Asian neighbours to talk, a leading South Asia expert has suggested.

If it “must inject itself” into the situation, it “should lean on Pakistan to rid itself of its jihadi instruments so that US does not become an accessory to Rawalpindi’s strategy of extortionary engagement”, Ashley Tellis said in a new report, referring to the city that hosts the Pakistani military’s headquarters.

In the report, Tellis talks about two centres of power in Pakistan, the other being Islamabad, home to civilian authority that has been held by men in uniforms for long enough to be called Rawalpindi Extension. The report comes at time when there has been some renewed interest in the notion — and not strictly in the administration —that US could coax a peace settlement out of the two nuclear powers engaged in an intractable, complex dispute that has evaded resolution for decades.

“My purpose in writing the report was really to make the larger point that US policy makers often lose sight of: that IndiaPakistan differences are not as negotiable as is sometimes thought because they are rooted in deep-seated grievances that Pakistan cannot easily let go of,” Tellis told Hindustan Times.

Tellis argues in the report that India is happy with the status quo and “sees Pakistan’s antagonism and its support for terrorism as distractions that consume resources otherwise better spent on fuelling its ascent on the world stage” and describes it as an “intensifying international embrace”.

Pakistan, on the other hand, wants to change the status quo, consumed by a combination of a cynical desire for revenge—for the 1971 war that led to the creation of Bangladesh—claims of being a peer, without merit, and seeks to use jihadis as an instrument to weaken India and seek political concessions.

And its military is able to perpetuate its political and economic dominance by flogging a longdrawn out, ideologically justifiable Muslim resistance against a Hindu India.