India should never fear to negotiate with Pakistan but should negotiate from fear: Prime Minister Narendra Modi was right to do so. What went awry with his latest endeavour were the tactics surrounding his decision and not the deed. The cloak-and-dagger publicity, the sudden descent on Lahore for a birthday bash at Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif household and the high octane rhetoric on a purported ‘breakthrough’ when no such thing had occurred was brutally exposed. The serious intent behind the exercise evaporated as soon as the Pathankot jihadi attack got underway. Lahore diplomacy was perceived as a BJP gimmick, where it should have been viewed as a matter of the gravest national interest. Indian politicians and the country’s political class expect high powered diplomacy to be televised entertainment, as it was with Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s ‘peace’ journey to Lahore in early 1999, until it ended in a vale of blood and tears in Kargil. The hijack of an Indian Airlines plane to Afghanistan and an audacious assault on the Indian Parliament followed in due course. Pathankot, true to form, should not have come as a surprise. That it did bears witness to the void that exists in India’s Pakistan policy is scarcely deniable.
So how should India go about framing a policy that works The first thing to do is set out a realistic timeline in the light of past failures. That said, the country must be prepared for the long haul:: nothing below 50 years. Anything less is best regarded as a bonus. This should be followed by serious reading on the subject. It would be wiser to peruse Hussain Haqqani’s two seminal titles: Pakistan between Mosque and Military, and Magnificent Delusions, a study of Pakistan-US relations; Christine Fair’s Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way to War, and Ahmed Rashid’s Pakistan on the Brink, to be followed by Andrew Small’s The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics.
Having read these works and cogitated on their contents, Indian policymakers in the bureaucracy and outside should set out the options before India, beginning with a list of areas where India is best positioned to apply its strength on Pakistani vulnerabilities. Second, India must bring China and the US, Pakistan’s two principal benefactors, into the loop. For instance, it could be pointed out to Beijing that in the event of a Pakistani nuclear attack on India, the Indian second strike response would likely include Chinese cities as well, hence it was in China’s interest to keep its Pakistani client in check. As far as the US is concerned, India should concentrate on a calibrated media blitz in America itself, targeting Congressmen and Senators signing up to military deals and cash flows to Pakistan, emphasizing Pakistan’s role in Jihadi terrorism in America, including 9/11.
The Pathankot situation and the aftermath, it now transpires, reveals the Pakistani military telling Nawaz Sharif that it would not interfere with Kashmir-based jihadi operations against Indian targets. Bruce Riedel, the former security advisor and CIA analyst in the George W Bush and Clinton administrations, has said the jihadi attack in PPathankot bore the signature of the Pakistan military’s Inter Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), thus endorsing the findings of the Indian intelligence agencies. How ISI machinations are handled is the Pakistan government’s responsibility.
North Korea raises the nuclear stakes
North Korea, long perceived as a rogue state by the international community, claims to have tested a hydrogen bomb. Whether hydrogen or atomic, each is massively destructive. India has joined the five permanent members of the UN Security Council in condemning the North Korean action. North Korea acquired its nuclear weapon technology from Pakistani rogue scientist, Abdul Qadir Khan, who purloined the technology during his time working at the Dutch centrifuge plant in Holland. He subsequently set up a clandestine network for its export with the full knowledge and cooperation of the Pakistan government, with the US a passive spectator, hence culpable too. Pakistan supplied North Korea with the technological know-how for a nuclear bomb and was rewarded with North Korean missile technology. Pakistan and China (as the source of a readymade bomb to Islamabad) were thus proliferators, not that anyone would notice, such being the thunderous silence from Washington. The chickens are now coming home to roost.
However, the original sin of the nuclear bomb rests squarely with the US decision to drop the atom bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to bring the war in the Far East to an end and save lives, as the American narrative would have us believe. President Harry Truman sanctioned their use in the delusional belief that Russia was too backward to reply in kind with a bomb of its own. So began the arms race and Cold War. Truman’s reversal of President Roosevelt’s wartime Grand Alliance between the US, UK and USSR had disastrous consequences. Anthony Eden Britain’s Foreign Secretary during this period was to remark later: ‘Had Roosevelt lived and retained his health he would never have permitted the present situation to develop. His death, therefore, was a calamity of immeasurable proportions.’
Indian American scientist honoured
US President Barack Obama is to present the National Award Medal of Science to Professor Rakesh Jain (and 15 other scientists) of the Harvard Medical School and director of the tumour biology laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, Professor Jain took his first degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, before moving to the United States, where he earned his PhD degree at the University of Delaware.
A White House announcement described the medals as ‘our nation’s highest honours for achievement and leadership in advancing the fields of science and technology….Their work is a testament to American ingenuity.’ Professor Jain is a member of National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences. He is one of America’s foremost ontology specialists.. He has done India and America proud.
