The Pakistani Prime Minister has lost control
It is difficult to believe in the leading Pakistani daily, Dawn's report that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has directed the Army to stop shielding terrorists (read, those targeting India), and asked the authorities to expedite the probe into the 26/11 and Pathankot attacks — the first has been stalled and the second only supposedly ongoing. Had he indeed developed spine overnight, there would not have been a quick rebuttal from his office, which termed the media report as “factually incorrect” and an “amalgamation of fiction and half-truths”. The newspaper report and its rejection lead us to two surmises. The first is that there is some friction between the civilian Government in Islamabad and the Pakistan Army over the roadmap the Pakistani establishment must adopt on cross-border terrorism, given that it has been isolated both globally and regionally in Asia, following the attack by Pakistan-based militants on an Indian Army camp in Jammu & Kashmir's Uri. This has seriously hurt Prime Minister Sharif's image internationally, and he is desperate for a course-correction.
The second surmise is that the Prime Minister gave no instructions of the kind reported in the daily and that the report was indeed “speculative”, as his office said. Admittedly, Sharif's track record does not match up to the possibility that he can direct the powerful Army. Only recently he read out from what was widely seen as his Army's script, his speech at the United Nations General Assembly, where he hailed Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Burhan Wani, killed by Indian security forces in J&K, as an innocent youth leading a “peaceful Intifada”. All through his current tenure, Sharif has turned a blind eye to the activities of anti-India terrorists such as Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar, and their organisations. Indeed, these entities have been openly conducting campaigns and addressing rallies in Pakistan, calling for violence and vengeance against India. Further, the fizzling out of the Pathankot attack inquiry from the Pakistani end has been generally interpreted as a signal from the Army that it is not keen to establish the truth because that truth will expose it.
The theory floating around is that with Pakistan Army chief, General Raheel Sharif's tenure ending in November, the Prime Minister believes it is the appropriate time to assert himself. The exit or arrival of an Army chief has not slackened the hold of the Pakistani military on the elected Government's India policy before; there's no reason to believe things will be different now. After Gen Sharif replaced Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani in end-2013, many experts had expected a new chapter to begin. Gen Kayani was believed to be soft on terrorists, and Gen Sharif, in conjunction with Prime Minister Sharif, was supposed to recalibrate Islamabad's India policy. Instead, the new Army chief took off from where his predecessor had left. The Pathankot and the Uri attacks, besides the most recent terrorist attempts on Indian military positions, have happened during Gen Sharif's tenure and in Nawaz Sharif's prime ministership. The Pakistani Prime Minister is under tremendous pressure. He is seen as a pawn in the Army's hand. His Army's misadventures and his own pusillanimity have ring-fenced his nationglobally. He stares at a grim future and a grim legacy as well.