India and Pakistan again face a familiar crossroads situation – a militant attack threatening to roll back peace hopes between the two nuclear-armed countries. The January 2 Pathankot airbase attack – which India alleges has links to Pakistan-based militants – has raised a question mark over future of January 15 peace talks planned after a meeting between Indian and Pakistani prime ministers in Lahore on December 25, 2015.
But the South Asian history and examples from other regions show that the two neighboring countries must persist with diplomatic path for their mutual benefit.
Hans Joachim Morgenthau — a German-American expert, whose work belonged to the tradition of Realism in International Relations and Political Science theories, in the post-World War II period, emphasized the importance of diplomacy in his seminal book, Politics Among Nations.
“Of all the factors that make for the power of a nation, the most important — however unstable — is the quality of diplomacy. All of the other factors that determine national power are, as it were, the raw material out of which the power of a nation is fashioned. The quality of a nation’s diplomacy combines those different factors into an integrated whole, gives them direction and weight, and awakens their slumbering potentialities by giving them the breath of actual power”. Then Dr. Morgenthau highlighted the importance of diplomats, “The conduct of a nation’s foreign affairs by its diplomats is for national power in peace what military strategy and tactics by its military leaders are for national power in war.”
Although, the late British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain’s ill-fated Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler in September 1938, has become the metaphor of choice for all who prefer confrontation to mediation, reality is that large number of strategic issues between nations could not move toward any resolution as long as those nations resorted to military conflicts. In 1946, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called for a “United States of Europe”, to be created in his speech at the University of Zurich. Robert Schuman, as Prime Minister of France and later Foreign Minister, worked hard to change the “Gaullist” policy, which aimed at weakening Germany and permanently taking over part of its borderlands. Those efforts led to the formal establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951 by the Treaty of Paris and signed by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands and West Germany. Shaman, as French Foreign Minister, proposed the ECSC in 1950, as a way to prevent further wars between Germany and France.
In South Asia, the paths of diplomacy and negotiations have been jilted frequently. After their independence, both India and Pakistan, time and again, resorted to the armed conflicts to resolve their strategic issues. However, water distribution issue – a strategic bone of contention between India and Pakistan – was settled through diplomatic negotiations, and not on the battlefield. The Indus Waters Treaty, which was agreed and signed by Jawaharlal Nehru and Ayub Khan in 1960 — although brokered by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now the World Bank) and it is controversial to this day — averted another potential conflict which had the capability to last for decades.
Just after the peace initiative of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in February 1999, when he drove to Lahore on a bus and signed the Lahore Declaration with Nawaz Sharif, the world took a sigh of relief and expected that two nuclear neighbors would initiate the peace process to resolve their strategic issues. However, Pakistan’s miscalculated Kargil adventure, ratcheted up political and security temperatures in the region once again, and both countries got engaged in the bloodiest military conflict after the 1971 war.
Even after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when most of the countries of the world started repositioning their foreign policies to deal with the common threat of terrorism, India and Pakistan have oscillated between talks and hostilities. Rather, soon after the 9/11 incident New Delhi felt it had an opportunity to give Pakistan a bloody nose. India tried to frame Pakistan in the September 2001 Parliament attack and moved half a million soldiers to India-Pakistan border and boundary line in forward positions, pushing the whole region to the brink of a nuclear war.
However, when the military adventure began to bite India’s economy and the human rights groups started raising questions about the story told by the Indian agencies, India decided to pull back. After the military pullback, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee overrode the establishment and extended a “hand of friendship” to Pakistan, and the world witnessed an era of peace between the two hostile nuclear neighbors in subsequent years.
Former Pakistani Foreign Minister, Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri (2002-07) claimed in his book ‘Neither A Hawk, Nor A Dove’ that there was a “secret” agreement between Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh and Pakistan military ruler General Pervez Musharraf regarding Kashmir resolution. Then the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, later traced back to the Pakistani-based militant groups, brought both countries to a standstill.
In 2014, Narendra Modi’s election campaign was supported by the religious right, powerful business community and the corporate lobbies. A large part of electronic media which is strongly influenced by the rich corporate lobbies of India, boasted about Modi’s development credentials, although, some of the voices in Indian intellectual community like Hartosh Singh Bal, raised serious questions about such attestations. After Modi took over the PM office, he began delivering on the voices of religious right, allowing them to assert their extremist agenda. This policy bruised his mandate in Delhi and Bihar. Then there were some heavy 2015 skirmishes along the Line of Control in the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region. The December 25 meeting in Lahore between Prime Ministers Modi and Sharif came as a hopeful development.
After the Pathankot attack, which by no means has been established to have a Pakistani security establishment link, the question now facing the two countries is the same – what should be the way forward?
History tells that both countries achieved nothing through wars, hostile diplomacy or use of proxies to destabilize each other. Every single issue that has been resolved between the two nuclear powers has been routed through diplomacy. The common belief that strategic issues like Sir Creek and Siachen are easy to resolve is somewhat misguided and misleading. It must be kept in mind that both the countries have strong positions in those issues as well. When Dr. Manmohan Singh, as prime minister of India, tried to make progress on Sir Creek, Narendra Modi, who was the Chief Minister of Gujarat wrote him a letter and warned him against moving forward. On Siachen, Pakistan wants India to move back to its position of 1984, when Indian Army launched Operation Maghdoot and took control of Siachen Glacier and Saltoro Range, while India wants to declare the AGPL (Actual Ground Position Line) as a permanent line-of-control. These two issues must also be resolved by negotiations and both parties must be ready for the give and take instead of a zero-sum game.
To advance peace, both neighbors should take steps. Pakistan must show seriousness to bring Mumbai attacks perpetrators to justice. Pakistan’s former Law Minister and expert on the International Law, Ahmed Bilal Sufi insists that Pakistan government is doing everything in its capacity but for some unknown reasons, Pakistan has not been able to update about all the progress on continuous basis. It does not help Pakistani position when the world witnesses Hafiz Saeed leading processions and addressing thousands of people on the platform of “Difa-i-Pakistan Council”. On the other hand, India must also show progress in the case of 2007 Samjhota Express arson, which took so many Pakistani lives on Indian soil. The self-confessed Indian perpetrator behind the Samjhota Express Swami Aseemanand – a former Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) activist — is walking free. Many RSS and other extremists targeting Muslims also escape justice while Kashmiris continue to face Indian repression.
Now, the two countries should raise awareness that the entire region would benefit from peace between the two rivals. Pakistan wants to clean up its Western Afghan border regions of terrorists and bring peace to all four provinces to materialize the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Modi’s “surprise” visit to Lahore must not be seen with suspicion. However, only the policies of the two countries can decide fate of the region. Whether Modi’s visit goes down as one of the many moves like cricket diplomacy, bus diplomacy and handshake diplomacy or it turns out to be a watershed event in Pakistan-India relations, it all will depend on how far peace diplomacy turns out to be meaningful.
