Former White House official and CIA analyst Bruce Riedel is convinced that the terrorist attack on the Pathankot air base is the handiwork of Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence in a bid to prevent an Indo-Pak détente in the wake of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent peace initiative.
Using Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), a terror outfit that it created 15 years ago, the ISI could launch more attacks with little notice, at some point prompting a vigorous Indian response, thereby derailing a potential thaw in Indo-Pak relations, writes Riedel in The Daily Beast.
“The attack is designed to prevent any detente between India and Pakistan after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surprise Christmas Day visit to Pakistan,” he says, noting: “The escalating violence between the two nuclear-weapons states, which have already fought four wars, threatens to get worse.”
An advisor on South Asia to four former US presidents, Riedel writes about the Pakistani Army’s long distrust of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and its belief that any diminution in tensions with India could risk its lock on control of Pakistan’s national security policy.
“His (Sharif’s) warm embrace of Modi on Christmas Day in his home in lahore undoubtedly angered the generals,” he notes, recalling how Sharif’s earlier advocacy of détente with India ended up in an army coup in 1999 that sent him into exile in Saudi Arabia for a decade.
The attack in Pathankot last Saturday as well as the one at the Indian consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan a day later have been carried out by JeM, writes Riedel, basing his assessment on “well-informed press and other knowledgeable sources”.
The Pakistani Army, which controls the ISI, justifies its large budget and nuclear weapons programme by “citing the Indian menace”, says Riedel, who also notes how the army “continues to distinguish between “good” terrorists like JeM and leT and “bad” terrorists like the Pakistani Taliban, despite decades of lectures from American leaders”.
Significantly, Riedel, despite his long association with successive US administration, has criticized the United States as well for “coddling” the Pakistani Army. “Washington put JEM on the terrorist sanctions list years ago — but it continues to coddle the Pakistani army,” he writes, noting how Army Chief Gen. Raheel Sharif “got a warm embrace from the Pentagon last fall — despite the ISI’s support for the Afghan Taliban’s offensive against the Kabul government and despite the Pakistani military’s backing of terror groups like JeM”.