Regarding talks with Pakistan, India is blinded at three levels. At the strategic level, it doesn’t have the facts; at the tactical level, it doesn’t have a response to Pakistani aggression; and at the operational level, it doesn’t have the infrastructure to reliably operationalise its decisions
The Six Blind Men of Hindoostan is one of those classics that verges on a boilerplate simply because it can be applied to almost every situation in India. The aborting of the National Security Advisor level talks is no exception to that ‘blind men’ rule.
India has three levels of blindness to get into these talks — strategic, tactical and operational. Strategic blindness comes about because of the lack of fact-based analysis and a consequent lack of anything that remotely resembles a long-term strategy.
Take any permutation or combination, you simply cannot arrive at a coherent pattern — talks, no talks, talks announced not conducted, talks go badly, talks go well — they all seem to lead to Pakistani attacks either direct or through proxies.
Every peak in India’s recent diplomatic engagements — when talks seem to be going well with Pakistan, have resulted in Pakistan-sponsored terror attacks in India. This was the case both in the 1999 Kargil War and 2008 Mumbai attack. On the other hand, if talks don’t go well, there seems to be a spike in the attacks as well — this was the case after the failure of the 2001 Agra summit.
If talks are announced, there is a spike in attacks as was the case in the 42 days between the Ufa summit and the aborted NSA talks. If talks don’t take place as was the case after Agra 2001, attacks happen irrespective.
Probably it is this erratic record, why no academic seems to have attempted to put together statistics comparing attacks and talks. leave alone performing regression on those statistics, one has yet to come anywhere close to proving correlation, leave alone causation.
The only thing that we can be reasonably certain about is that any form of normalisation or even a lull in the purported India threat is unacceptable to the Pakistan Army. If talks go well, they have to sabotage it lest it goes too well. If talks goes bad, they have to prove to India that “they have other means” of coercing India. If talks don’t happen at all, they have to prove to their own people that they have the means to force India to the negotiating table, and that Kashmir isn’t stuck in a limbo; and worse, if India ignores them altogether, they need to get India riled up to present a credible military threat to Pakistan to justify their plunder of national resources.
Effectively, while the overwhelming majority of published or telecast opinion in this country can agree on the motivations of the Pakistan Army, they are incapable of building a fact-based cause and effect of terror attacks or ceasefire violations by Pakistan. The main cause for this is that no amount of appeasement deterrence or ignorance of Pakistan, seems to suit the Pakistani game-plan. But this also means that our ‘strategy’ whatever it is, is based not on facts — but rather on non-factual opinions and a ‘tactile’ feel of Pakistan.
This confusion then manifests itself in operationalising of policy. A former Ambassador to Pakistan described as a ‘dove’ has come about with a novel and convoluted way of using the Atlantique Judgement (which went against Pakistan) to effectively support the Pakistani interpretation of the events leading up to the cancellation of talks.
Another former IFS officer, presumably a ‘hawk’ on the other hand, has been doing Press rounds, seeing Pakistani malignancy in every act since Ufa, but unwilling to pronounce judgement on the utility of these talks, while yet another of his colleagues rejects the whole process outright.
In many ways, this is characteristic of both — lack of coherence and heavy personalisation of policy and its application that happens at the Ministry of External Affairs, depending on what the structure of Pakistan’s decision making hierarchy. Needless to say, one simply cannot determine to any level of accuracy if any element of this fiasco was on based on the MEA’s advice or against it.
Either way, the MEA stands dammed that their advice was deeply flawed or that they were unable to convince the political leadership of the merits of their case. If the latter is the case, this begs the question: How can someone represent India abroad effectively, if their skills of persuasion failed at homeIJ
Since everyone seems just as confused about what exactly is going on, those known to butter both sides of their toast have come out with explanations seeing deep retrospective profundity in the Government’s Pakistan policy where such profundity may not exist. Another set of experts who see fault in the policy, advise a ‘multipronged strategy’ conveniently leaving out the contours of these prongs as well as their expected outcomes — presumably because abstraction never needs to be bogged down by detail and has the advantage of sounding profound.
Finally, we come to the tactical aspect — specifically the military aspect of our ‘six blind men’ of Hindustan approach to Pakistan. While every Indian can agree that the Pakistan Army is perhaps the most malign tumour in the India-Pakistan relationship, our attempts at dealing with the militarily has been less than spectacular and much of this has to do with the deep rot within the military.
Its attempts at developing variable force packages (jargon for hitting Pakistan in a manageable fashion) have failed — coming up with strategies like cold start. Cold Start which was meant to be a scalpel, turned out to be an unwieldy sledgehammer. The only real calibrable response in modern warfare is air power.
Though India cannot use this because of the Air Forces failure to internalise modern technology and doctrine and consequently condemned to playing second fiddle to the Army and its clumsy lumber World War II style of fighting. Yet, we keep hearing what effects amounts to “if only our military had been deployed” — the regret of not using the only option that has to date never been used — even though that institution is in just as shambolic a state as every other element of our Pakistan ‘policy’.
Forget about figuring out Pakistan, we’re yet to figure out our own limitations. The net result is: We don’t have facts, we don’t have a strategy, we do not have an infrastructure that can reliably operationalise decisions, and at a tactical level, we do not have any responses to Pakistan. And yet, every time something bad happens in this bilateral relationship, we invariably get to same end stanza of the poem. “And so these men of Hindoostan, disputed loud and long, each in his own opinion, exceeding stiff and strong, though each was partly in the right, they all were in the wrong!”
(The writer is Coordinator of the National Security Programme at the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi)