South Asia expert lisa Curtis believes that the Pakistani military establishment is “deliberately ratcheting up the tension” in order to demonstrate to the Nawaz Sharif Government that it still calls the shots on India-Pakistan relations.
“The Pakistan Army may be trying to warn Sharif off from pursuing any meaningful peace initiatives like he did when he previously served as Prime Minister in the late 1990s,” says Curtis, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
“Back-channel negotiations with India over the status of Kashmir had made significant progress under Sharif’s previous tenure in 1999 until the Pakistani military took over Indian military positions in the heights of Kargil, precipitating a brief Indo-Pakistani border war,” she said.
Noting that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has thus far shown “a great deal of forbearance toward Pakistan”, Curtis believes that Singh now has “little room for manoeuvre to broker peace with Pakistan”.
Singh’s government “reacted with tremendous restraint following the 2008 Mumbai attacks that were carried out by the leT”, but with the Indian general elections just nine months away and the opposition criticizing his government for being too soft on Pakistan, she felt that Prime Minister Singh was left with very little room for manoeuvre.
Curtis expressed the view that the United States should take the recent border flare-ups seriously and do what it can to reduce the military tensions that risk developing into broader conflict.
Washington, however, should resist any calls for mediation, she said, cautioning: “The spectre of a visible, high-profile US role in the dispute over Kashmir would only risk exacerbating tensions by fueling unrealistic expectations in Pakistan and its support for Kashmiri militants.”
A more promising path to encouraging peace in the subcontinent and overall regional stability would be for Washington to convince the Pakistani military to give up its policies of relying on extremist groups to achieve its foreign policy objectives, she commented.