AFGHAN WAR DIARY: TIME TO GET REAL ABOUT PAKISTAN

When I wrote on July 22, 2010 that the audacity of a small country like Pakistan to take on two much bigger countries for such a painful ride for so long with barely concealed disdain and deceit needed to be admired, I had no way of knowing that within a week, a mountain of explosive US military classified data would appear on Wikileaks as Afghan War Diary 2004-10. At that time, to some what I was saying looked to be just another conspiracy theory. No fault of theirs; for decades they had been fed on poppycock drenched in criminal denial and vain hope that their poorly informed and strategy-blind leaders had it in them to move Pakistan to give up its violent, congenital agenda on the strength of the calls of their weak hearts alone.

A few weeks back, Headley's disclosures that Pakistan's outstanding covert operations outfit, the ISI, controlled and directed the 26/11 attack on Mumbai right from the beginning, had rocked the Indian establishment. The revelations not only raised very serious questions about the credibility and competence of India's spy agency, RAW, but also about the role of India's national security apparatus that is clearly not organised, structured and staffed to deal with and respond to an adversary who is not only waging war but is also determined to settle all matters in its favour, all means fair.

As subsequent developments showed, deeply entrenched interests and ossified experts who have made a living out of leading India down the wrong road, were not going to throw in the towel so quickly and admit that they had screwed up and screwed up real bad. Some, quite predictably, questioned the veracity of Headley's disclosures; such was their abiding love for and faith in Pakistan.

Wikileaks, notwithstanding doubts about the manner in which so much of information has been leaked, leave no room for doubt that Pakistan has been using the ISI, whose DG Kiyani was before he became Army Chief and real ruler of Pakistan, to defeat the Americans in Afghanistan through the Taliban, and also get the Indians out of there. All this has been known to the US for long. But it has chosen to look the other way primarily because 70% of the supplies to the 1,50,000 troops in Afghanistan go through Pakistan and because an open war with it is not yet a practical option for many reasons, including the fact that it will not be easy to sell such an idea to the American people unless there is another 9/11 type attack.

As far as India is concerned, the damning evidence that has come out is that the ISI paid the Haqqani network to attack Indian consulates and road construction teams more than two dozen times and that the Taliban attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul in 2008 was also organised with the help of the ISI. In isolation, this may not appear very grave. In fact some die hard Pakistan-loving Indians will still refuse to shed their blinkers and, as always, dismiss it by saying that Pakistan has legitimate concerns about India's intentions in Afghanistan and is, therefore, entitled to take steps to safeguard its interests in it backyard where India has no business to be. And, having done that, they will restart the usual clamour about talking to and trusting Pakistan.

As I had written earlier, we need to understand clearly that the Pakistanis see the ISI as their first line of defence and that for them Pakistan includes Afghanistan and Kashmir. If the ISI is doing what it has been right under American noses in Afghanistan to evict the Indians, can there be any room for doubt, even without the mountain of evidence that has been collected in the Valley over decades, that it has been doing and will continue to do worse in Kashmir which "flows in it blood", till it succeeds in throwing the Indians out?

Even Fareed Zakaria, who has for long been saying that a solution in Afghanistan will have to be coupled with concessions on Kashmir by India, and who only a few months back said that the tide was turning for the better in Afghanistan, has been forced to do a rethink. Taking part in a discussion on Face the Nation program on CNN IBN on July 27, he acknowledged something that the Indian establishment and intelligentsia have been deliberately glossing over for decades. Pakistani terrorism, said Zakaria, was the result of "forty years of bad habits entrenched and institutionalised...this is an existential problem for Pakistan: what does the Pakistan Army do if it does not engage in this kind of business?" It is worth adding that even Pakistan's civil establishment faces the same problem: the military-civil divide is ideologically artificial, and is cleverly played up to deny culpability and fake hope.

Are we to believe that those who run our national security apparatus and those responsible for gathering intelligence about a neighbouring country that is culturally very similar have for years failed to collate the mass of information being virtually slapped into their faces every single day, to fail to arrive at this elementary conclusion that one can barely escape even if one tries to? Or is it that they have for long been in the know but have been willfully misleading the country, with the help of the media and intelligentsia, about the war that India is fighting and the serious threat that it faces from a rogue army waging a deniable war? Why have they been doing so? Is India paying an unacceptable price of turning its national security machinery into another committee of secretaries, babus who have little knowledge of and interest in anything else except capturing all power turfs no matter what the cost to the nation? In which other big nation, forget one which has been at war for two decades, are generalist civilian bureaucrats in near-total control of national security? How long are we going to keep paying the price of political apathy and bureaucratic empire-building? How long are we going to keep selectively picking and ignoring developments to fool ourselves?

Would there have been an Indian surrender at Sharm-el Sheikh after 26/11 had Dr Manmohan Singh received honest, professional advice about the extent of involvement of Pakistan's military in that attack and others? Would he, an economist, been parroting the defeatist no-option-but-talk mantra had hard facts and available options been placed before him in no uncertain terms? Would Pakistan's nonsense about non-state actors have ever been bought if RAW had done its job properly and the then NSA been interested in and competent enough to do anything more than tapping phones and worrying about security of the Gandhis? Would paid journalists have been asked after 26/11 by vested interests to sell to Indians the preposterous idea that it was in India's supreme national interest to strengthen Pakistan, and not weaken/destroy its ability to continue to wage war against India? Would the Islamabad fiasco have taken place had diplomats unschooled in strategy and security not been allowed to let their craft take precedence over the result that India should have demanded from Pakistan after the Headley disclosures that put their ruler in the dock? Would Vajpayee have been allowed to fall into Musharraf's trap, despite the enormity of Kargil, to virtually surrender Kashmir had he too been properly briefed directly and daily by upright professionals and not sycophants who gave wind to his vision but failed to ask him look at the slippery slope that he was standing on, on very weak knees?

Headley's disclosures and Wikileaks are, in a way, heaven-sent blessings for India. They will force India's inept leaders to get real about Pakistan. Hopefully they will also compel them to do what they should have done much earlier to make India more secure had they not been advised by generalists who have been repeatedly exposed to be blind amateurs who cannot see even what is placed in front of their eyes. It is not that these guys would not have been warned by multiple agencies that Pakistan is playing a dangerous game of such high stakes that not only can it never be seen to be defeated on the negotiating table but that it is well past the point of rolling in its terror network or reining in the ISI. They would probably have been inundated with such warnings. But, the fact that they have deliberately chosen to ignore them for many years and put the nation on a path that has left it with no option but to become helplessly dependent on the goodwill of a much smaller nation that is soaked in hostility, is a damning indictment of frightening proportions. One cannot but have serious apprehensions that the ISI has powerful moles deep inside India's babudom as also in its intelligentsia and media. It is simply not possible that otherwise intelligent individuals could have been innocently getting it so wrong for so long, to the detriment of India's national interest and to the furtherance of Pakistan's.

The Americans are not going to be in Afghanistan forever. The hearts-and-minds strategy that they are talking about with usual swagger is going to be a bigger failure than their military one: they only have to look at Kashmir to understand that with Pakistan in business, that is doomed. Notwithstanding the Wikileaks, it is also unlikely that Obama will order any punitive action against Pakistan or degrade the combat potential of its military. The reverse may well happen to enable the US to cut its losses and pull out. What Pakistan will do in Afghanistan after that is something that the Americans need to worry about. What Pakistan will do to India then is what should give Manmohan Singh sleepless nights. It is not going to be pretty and it is not going to be short. If anything, it is going to to be far worse than the PM's advisors have been leading him to believe. The only way to counter it is to prepare for it resolutely on ground, defensively and offensively, and bring about radical, sweeping changes in the national security structures to make them contemporary, professional, and, above all, apolitical.

It is time to shed the idiotic notion that India can win on the table what it has not in war. You win on the table when you have a clear upper hand on the ground and the other party can see defeat on that path. India, as I said earlier too, has lessons to learn from history if it wants to get Pakistan to walk. Let us not continue to delude ourselves into believing that Nobel-seeking midgets can achieve what Mahatma Gandhi, undivided India's tallest leader, a man of impeccable moral strength and courage, failed to.

NO ANSWER TO PAKISTAN'S FORMIDABLE FORCE MUTLIPLIER

One has got to admire Pakistan. Is there any other example in history where a small nation has simultaneously taken on two much bigger countries, one a super power and the other deluding itself into believing that it going to become one along its present trajectory, for such a painful ride, for so long, with barely concealed disdain and deceit?

Pakistan's audacity backed by sheer brilliance in execution is the stuff history is made of. That it has been able to pull off a seemingly impossible double is as much a tribute to its leaders, both military and civil, as to the one instrument without peer that they have created: the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). This covert arm of the military has been developed and honed, with some help from the CIA in 1980s, to become a huge force multiplier that has almost re-written the rules of war. It is this institution alone that has given Pakistan the luxury of playing the Jekyll and Hyde game on battlefields of its choosing in a manner that it wants, without exposing its troops to danger and its culpability to the enemy.

Pakistanis see ISI as their first line of defence. What is often overlooked is that their Pakistan includes Afghanistan and Kashmir too. So for them, the ISI is not engaged in any hostile or offensive actions there, like the American and Indians believe. It is only legitimately defending Pakistan against their aggression and is doing all that is needed to defeat and throw them out. Add to its armoury the powerful tool of jihad and you have brilliant and motivated minds employing perfectly brainwashed foot soldiers itching to fight to death or blow themselves up for a cause they are made to see as religious and holy, not political.

When the US invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, it probably thought it was going for a stroll in a park bombed flat by it. Actually it would have. But it failed to factor in Pakistan's tenacity and duplicity, or may be chose to ignore it because expanding the war was not an option. Either way, the Pakistanis assessed the situation far more accurately than the Americans thought they were capable of, put the ISI on the job, and the net result is that the Americans have got into a deep hole and are now desperately looking for a way to get out without loss of face.

Thanks to manner in which the ISI sheltered, trained, equipped and controlled Talibanis have hounded American troops and ground their offensive to an embarrassing halt, the US is now ready to hand over power -- shared if you find that uncomfortable -- to the very guys that it sent its troops to defeat and destroy. Laden and Mullah Omar remain untraceable still. Hillary Clinton can keep saying that she believes that elements in the Pakistan government and military know their whereabouts. Pakistan not only does not give a damn, at the end of the day it even gets a $500 million cheque from her! That is how confident Pakistan's leaders are of the ability of the ISI to conceal elephants right under America's nose.

The US is not losing its Afghan war to the Pathans who, as per lore, have never lost to an aggressor. This is a myth being propagated and lapped up to obfuscate reality. It is being defeated by a very clever and determined Pakistan. The divided Pashtuns were trounced by the ISI after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, without a bullet being fired. From wanting to wrest from Pakistan Pashtun areas on its side of the Durand Line, Afghan Pashtuns have become Pakistan's pathetic pawns, thanks primarily to the violent extremist Islamic ideology that the ISI sowed in them when the Soviets invaded their country and the manner in which the ISI deeply infiltrated into and controlled the Taliban. That helped defeat the Soviets alright but, more significantly, placed Afghanistan firmly into the Pakistani lap, giving it the strategic depth that it was looking for then and is well on the way to recreating now.

Despite the serious challenge posed by the presence and pressure of the Americans in Afghanistan, the ISI has not let up it campaign in Kashmir primarily though the LeT. Or even in the rest of India. If anything, it has only strengthened it. The tactical reduction in terror attacks there to con the Americans does not mean that there has been any let up in the strengthening of the terror network in India or in augmenting its ability to launch even more devastating attacks when ISI's razor sharp top brass gives the green signal. But, as always, the reduction in violence had the effect of lulling the Indians into complacency, till the Valley erupted again last month in a manner that it simply could not have in select pockets by leaderless, unorganised youth, no matter how 'angry'. The ISI, as has been demonstrated yet again, has developed deep enough roots in the Valley to be able turn on the tap of violence when and in the manner that it wants to. What it would be doing in the rest of India, given Pakistan's oft voiced concern about the condition of Muslims in India, is something that only romantics can skim over.

26/11 was the turning point that should have compelled India's leaders to open their eyes. If that attack was not bad enough, the dramatics that have followed since, starting from denying that Kasab was a Pakistani to mocking India's dossiers as literature and now to its aggressive and insulting reactions after Headley's confessions, should have made the Indians realise that they are dealing with an exceptionally clever, ruthless and never-say-die leadership that will use every means at its disposal to put pressure on India to make fatal concessions on Kashmir. It will not let, forget ask, the ISI to take its foot even slightly off the terror pedal in and against India. But, just as the Americans failed to learn the right lessons from what Pakistan was doing to India, the Indians seem to have failed to learn too from it has done to the Americans in Afghanistan.

Headley's startling exposure that the 26/11 attack was controlled and coordinated by the ISI from start to finish, and that the attackers were trained by Pakistan's Navy, was the sort of information that Pakistan would have twisted with a knife in India's gut had India's RAW been the guilty party. But what did Pakistan do? It not only did not concede an inch to India during the recent talks in Islamabad at the Foreign Minister level, it actually demanded that any progress on 26/11 investigations be linked to progress on Siachen, Sir Creek etc. Worse, SM Qureshi publicly humiliated a bumbling SM Krishna. Once again, India was caught flatfooted on the negotiating table and left not only defeated but feeling guilty for it!

It to seems to have escaped notice of the Indians that the de facto ruler of Pakistan, Army Chief Kiyani, was the head of the ISI till October 2008, a month before the Mumbai attack. So, in effect, Headley lays the blame for 26/11, and by deduction other terror attacks too, right on his doorstep. That is so damning that it is a wonder that India still believes that it can smoke the peace pipe with a leadership that sees and promotes acts of war committed covertly as the only way to resolve all disputes, short and long-term, in its favour. As far as Pakistan is concerned, one cannot but infer that the only purpose of talks is to keep progressively legitimising on paper the gains that ISI's well disguised military successes make on ground and in Indian minds.

More damning than Headley's revelation is the realisation that India's own covert operations outfit, rightly named RAW in a rare moment of enlightenment, failed to nail the ISI in such manner, despite being on this very job for decades, with a huge budget to boot. This is further proof that the ISI conducts its dangerous business with clinical professionalism and knows how to keep it under wraps from amateur Indian eyes. Worse is the fact that it exposes another huge and unacceptable chink in India's armour against Pakistan: RAW is a poorly-led-by-police-officers and driven-by-babu-culture set up that lacks the political direction, professionalism, commitment and motivation required to face, tackle and defeat a fanatic force multiplier like the ISI that is directly led and controlled by the rulers of Pakistan.

All this bodes ill for India. Once Pakistan achieves the primacy it is on its way to in Afghanistan, all but drives India out from there, and makes full use of the infrastructure that India's much touted 'soft power' has created in that country, the ISI's energies, spurred by its spectacular success in Afghanistan, will focus almost wholly on India. Some of us comfort ourselves by fantasising that Pakistan will be soon be swallowed by the very jihadi elements its has spawned. What makes us believe that its leaders are so against that happening? If they have completely radicalised Afghanistan and almost achieved the same in the Valley, why would they be wary of gradually Islamising the whole of Pakistan too in the same manner? It is not a few thousand fighters of the Taliban or the LeT, radicalised and controlled by the ISI, who will run over Pakistan's half a million strong Army. Logically, it is the Army itself that will adopt the ideology that already drives the ISI at some point of time.

Is India even thinking of preparing to meet these challenges or do our leaders still fancy that the only way to defend India and protect it is to sit across the table and make one concession after the other? Does India have a plan to prevent and/or defeat the challenges that it is almost certain to face? The way some of our leaders brainlessly dismiss any other option, no matter what Pakistan does, by invoking the fear that Pakistan is a nuclear powered state, tells a story that the Pakistanis have read Indian minds well and know that they can get away with everything short of a declared war and that India will do little more than make some meaningless noises to assuage public opinion.

The ISI is the outstanding product of their near perfect appreciation that has been proved unerringly right for decades. It is an innovative and powerful instrument of war, an invisible and formidable force multiplier, that has already brought US troops to the brink of defeat. At the same time it is relentlessly chipping away at India's weak will, to counter which India has not been able to find an answer till now and is not going to find one in future too. Much as India's ineptitude hurts me as an Indian, I have to admire what Pakistan has achieved through the ISI even in near impossible situations, including the one in Afghanistan. Its successes have been nothing short of spectacular. Wish we could learn a thing or two.
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Related reading:
1. India stoned: the enemy is in our midst
2.Dealing with Pakistan: lessons from history
3. Kashmir deal: solution or surrender?
4. A year after 26/11, calls for a strong Pakistan
5. Don't "beggar-my-buggering-neighbour", make him bigger
6. Musharraf's shockers on terror, Kashmir and Indian Muslims
7. The world is changing; Talibani mindset is not
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ON THE NEGOTIATING TABLE, INDIA CANNOT WIN

If it were not for the fact that thousands of Indians have died due to Pak-sponsored terror, that thousands of young men have laid down their lives fighting terrorists in Kashmir, over which wars, big and small, have been and are being fought, one would have sat back and laughed at what has been happening between India and Pakistan on the negotiating table.

Yesterday was one such event, awaited with baited breath primarily by the media, always in search of an exciting 'story' to fill the day, and experts, always on the look out for opportunities to supplement their incomes. Before the much talked about joint press conference of the two foreign ministers began eight hours behind schedule, there was great expectation that a breakthrough was likely because, for the first time since 26/11, India had devastating information straight from Headley's mouth that the ISI was fully involved, start to finish, in the terror attack on Mumbai. And since this information was given by him on American soil in presence of American officials, some were sure there was no way that Pakistan would be able to dismiss it as it had the many dossiers India had given it earlier as worthless literature. HT correspondent Vinod Sharma, who always has a lot of inside information and who has always been advising India to trust Pakistan and earn its trust, actually let a 'secret' out on CNN IBN that this time Krishna would not return from Islamabad "khali haath", empty handed.

Adding to the unfounded excitement was the deduction drawn from the reaction of the Pakistanis to the attack on the Data shrine in Lahore. Fond as we are of clutching at even the tiniest of straws to support our view that friendship between the two countries is actually possible under the present circumstances, some of us quickly concluded that this attack had opened Pakistan's eyes to the dangers of violent extremism and that it would finally act against them. Even before any action was taken by Pakistan, the public outcry there was, God knows how, extrapolated to conclude that Pakistan would act against terrorists that it was employing against India too. The times were a changing, they said, adding wisely that they had actually detected the change even earlier from the body language of the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan when they had met in Thimphu.

To my uncluttered and relatively simple mind, it was, however, clear as the clichéd crystal that one had to be hopelessly gullible to believe that Headley's exposing of the ISI would make any difference whatsoever to Pakistan, much less compel it to abandon its congenital agenda, yes the one about Kashmir and thousand cuts. At best, it would make its leaders look for a way out to let the adverse wind blow over without conceding a real inch to India. In the event, even that did not happen.

Forget about being even mildly defensive, Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi actually went to the extent of putting Haifz Sayeed's words and deeds in the same basket as the statement of India's Home Secretary about the revelations made by Headley, as a hapless SM Krishna watched stunned. All that India got out of Pakistan was a patently fake promise that it would take "serious & credible steps to brings perpetrators of 26/11 to justice".

Pakistan was evidently surprised and bitten by the Home Secretary's well-timed tough words, used as it had got to mild private protestations of a country that has been for long deluding itself that durable peace can be bought through weakness and compromise, by walking the disastrous "extra mile". But, despite having been caught for committing an act of war as a state, Pakistan was not going to back off, yield even a little. To add insult to injury, Qureshi went to the extent of asking India to be "flexible" about the issue. The message was unmistakable: you have to yield on Kashmir, our position is non-negotiable except for semantics; those you call terrorists are our soldiers, trained and sent into battle to defeat you, don't expect us to punish them for that means we have to punish ourselves; this is the way we are going to settle the matter in our favour, you do what you can, if you have the balls, which we can see you don't.

If Headley's revelations are correct -- and there is no reason to believe that he has gone rogue -- then the implications are more serious than some of us even want to consider. The ISI is the covert arm of Pakistan's Army. Before he became Army Chief and de facto ruler of Pakistan, Gen Kiyani was the Director General of the notorious outfit. Only the naive will believe that the ISI would have been involved only in the 26/11 attack.

A vital fact that seems to have escaped most of us that there is no space for "rogue elements" in any military; they are summarily and severely punished because any challenge to the laid down rules, roles and leaders cannot be accepted under any circumstances. If soldiers start breaking rank, the very foundations of a military organisation and its command and control structure are destroyed, and it ceases to be an effective instrument of war. So, we have to be very clear that wherever the involvement of the ISI is revealed, it has to be of the organisation, not individuals. There is no room for buying Pakistan's argument that some rogue soldiers have acted on their own. It is simply not possible, except in a rare case, nipped with swift punishment. Has anyone ever heard of that happening in Pakistan, ever?

That leads us to straightforward deduction that the involvement of the ISI in 26/11 and other terror attacks flows out of a policy decision taken decades ago at the highest levels not only just in the ISI but the Army GHQ. Which means that the previous heads of the ISI, indeed the entire military top brass, is not only in the know of what is happening but has to be actively engaged in some manner or the other in its execution. And since the military defines and rules the state of Pakistan, no matter that civilian puppets have the titles, there is no getting away from the fact that acts of terror by Pakistan, notwithstanding which the executing element, must be seen as acts of war against India.

These acts of war are not going to stop. Even though Pakistan has been nailed for 26/11, and despite the presence and pressure of the Americans, there has been no visible change in its long standing policy of employing terror as a tool of war. The recent upsurge in violence in some pockets of the Kashmir Valley is clear evidence that the US can at best compel Pakistan to temporarily change tactics till US troops are in Afghanistan: its agenda remains unaltered, its focus clear, and will remain so, no matter what.

As I had written earlier and as a former diplomat also said in a discussion on TV yesterday, for Pakistan these talks mean little. In his view, which appears correct at the moment, Pakistan is close to substantially achieving its goal of becoming the major stake holder in Afghanistan after the Americans leave. When that happens, it will redeploy the Taliban and additional elements of the LeT in Kashmir and, if I may add, elsewhere in India too, in a deliberate and professionally calibrated manner. That is what should be worrying India now, that is what India should be preparing to defeat on the ground, no matter what the cost, how much the blood, which is, in any case, cheap for the leaders of Pakistan who send the jihadis. But, if the discourse visible to the public is an indicator, we are doing the ostrich trick again.

India is never going to defeat Pakistan on the negotiating table. That is primarily because there is a serious imbalance that India has never tried to address. On the Pakistani side those talking are soldiers, -- ignore the civilian façade -- professionals who are in focused pursuit of an well-defined national objective. On the Indian side are ill-informed civilians who have neither a national objective to guide them nor the expertise to dissect and understand the military mind and defeat it. Add to that the lack of will and vision to proactively engage and defeat the products of a military mind reinforced by an extreme and violent ideology, and we get the repeated sorry spectacles of India being made to look like a confused, bewildered, even headless, weakling that is hopping from meeting to meeting on hope.

This is something we should have understood long back, but have obdurately refused to. Are we ever going to learn? Or are we going to keep allowing generalist babus, theoretical think tanks and a romantic media to dictate India's agenda, only to be toyed with by a nation that does not allow itself to be so distracted and misled, even by the US? Battles, as Liddel Hart has written, are won and lost in the minds of generals. Here we have tough generals on one side and soft Nehruvians on the other, rose in hand. Should the outcome surprise anyone? How long can India afford to keep losing these engagements like it has been?
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INDIA STONED: THE ENEMY IS IN OUR MIDST

"I congratulate Pakistani journalist Barza Butt on her humane views on tragedy of Baluchistan and brutalities of Pakistan Army." Can you even conceive of such a tweet being sent by, say, India's Home Minister to the most well-known Pakistani TV journalist and the premier media voice of the Pakistani establishment? Worse, can you even imagine that Pakistan government's de facto PRO will ever dare to show her country and its military in such poor light to its only enemy and rival? And not once but repeatedly for years, applauded by the very government on whose orders young sons of India lay down their lives without questioning why?

Anyone who knows Pakistan will know that such an anti-national journalist will be totally shunned by the establishment -- if not made to 'disappear' -- much less allowed to become a star.

But, India is a different country altogether. Here, leading journalists and others not only routinely subvert minds of Indians but are apparently actually encouraged to do so by a government for whom pursuit of a narrow political agenda that aims at pulling in the last Muslim vote supersedes all other considerations. The vote must come, even if is drenched with the blood of India's unsung sons, even if India has to kneel before its implacably hostile neighbour Pakistan. Some of us may not see what is happening, the plot unfolding, the stage being set to sell India for a few votes more. But, sharp eyes across the border miss nothing. They take in every byte and every image because that helps them fine tune their relentless war against India, to surprise it with monotonous regularity, to remain a few hundred steps ahead of an establishment that can barely react, much less act proactively to defeat its challenge.

An enemy always refrains from publicly acknowledging and appreciating elements in the opposite camps that are working in its interest; they must be kept looking authentic and honest. But, sometimes, the joy over their success is so difficult to contain that one lets one's feeling out before sense returns. And Twitter lets you do that before you can even pause for a breath.

The tweet that you read in the first paragraph is not fictitious. It was sent to Barkha Dutt by the Governor of Punjab, Pakistan. Just replace 'Baluchistan' with 'Kashmir' and 'Pakistan Army' with' Indian Army'. Pakistan's Punjab, for those of you who may not know, is not just another province; it is Pakistan. 90% of Pakistan's military is Punjabi, as is the LeT that is leading Pakistan's jihad in Kashmir.

Unfortunately for India, Dutt is not alone in this defaming, this deforming, this defeating of India. The so-called liberal media and the academia are full of such people that the state seems to have bought through the many means at its command. They have been working over time even after 26/11 to convince India that Pakistan actually needs to be strengthened and that India must make fatal concessions to that country to buy peace. Friendship is what these people talk of all the time, even though Pakistan shows no sign or interest whatsoever in letting up on its proxy war. That, some believe, is primarily because they are convinced that any tough talk, forget action, against a rogue state that needs to be whipped blue, will cost votes of Indian Muslims and thereby the throne of Delhi.

The violence which erupted in the Valley during the last month took everybody by surprise, when it should never have. This is not the first time that India has been so surprised. Worryingly, it will keep getting caught unprepared because those who should keep their senses alert when dealing with Pakistan readily trust --at least pretend to -- the smiles and the blatantly fraudulent explanations that they are given, whether by leading Pakistani journalists -- the rare exceptions can be spotted from miles -- or the establishment, whose voice the former articulate with some sophistication.

More damaging than the stones that youth of a few districts of Kashmir Valley have been throwing at India are the ones that some Indian have thrown at their own country. To cite one more example, Amitabh Mattoo, a Kashmiri Pandit who should know better than most about the roots of the Kashmir problem and the extent of religious extremism that has fuelled the Pakistan controlled proxy war there, has almost mirrored what separatists are saying, and all but given Pakistan a clean chit. He has, surprisingly, not applied his mind even to refute the allegations made by them that no one died during the Bharat Bandhle while scores did in Kashmir; every one knows that nowhere during the bandh was the police targeted directly by organised and hired stone-pelting mobs with the clear aim of forcing it to react and create martyrs. But not Mattoo.

The tragedy of India is that such fellows who have little qualms about betraying their own people made refugees by violent religious extremism -- what to talk of India -- are made members of the National Security Advisory Board and other national institutions. Should that surprise us any more? Can, in Pakistan, people with these kind of views even dream of finding such favour of the ruling establishment?

Let us not be under any illusion that the problem in Kashmir will go away if Manmohan Singh implements the Youth Empowerment Scheme that Matto is selling, even though he knows better, or if India signs the sell-out deal with Pakistan that Musharraf had proposed. Autonomy and azaadi are red herrings that will yield no return whatsoever; they have not in 63 years, will not in a hundred. The proposed deal with Pakistan will only result in handing over the Valley on a platter to it, with the rest of the state also being lost. As I and many others have been saying, there will be no peace in Kashmir till Pakistan swallows it. And -- this is vital -- if it does, there will be no peace in the rest of India.

This time it is stone pelting. Next time it will be something else, sudden, unexpected. After the Americans leave Afghanistan, it will be full-blown terrorism of unprecedented ferocity and violence. As long as Pakistan exists, blood will flow. Pakistan is not in a hurry. To its jihadi mindset, the dead give life; the more the better. There is no room for sentiment. To the emotional and soft Indian, tears are enough to wipe away the sight of what lies behind them. Pakistanis and Kashmiris know it all too well. As do Indians who are shaping national policy and public opinion. Kashmiris only have to pelt a few stones at India's hapless defenders. Mindless, even dishonest Indians are waiting to pick and throw them and some of their own too, at their own country, and earn fulsome praise of its only enemy.

India is fighting the Fourth Battle of Panipat in Kashmir. The next stop is Delhi. So those who are asking India to capitulate there are effectively asking India to surrender as a nation. Let us remember that the Deoband seminary from which the LeT and the Pakistan Taliban draw ideological inspiration and guidance, is in India, not Pakistan. Indian Muslims, more in number than Pakistani Muslims, are loyal Indians no doubt, but only a fool will believe that if Pakistan succeeds in creating the conditions that it is aiming to, the pull of religion will not prove to be irresistible again.

India is being stoned by Indians. The enemy is in our midst. We cannot defeat Pakistan till we defeat him. The sooner we do it, the better.
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Readers may also read:
1.Tavleen Singh: The jihad comes to Kashmir
2. Kanchan Gupta: Let's not defame the armed forces
3. Dealing with Pakistan: Lessons from history
4. Kashmir Deal: Solution or surrender?
5. Don't 'beggar my buggering neighbour; make him bigger'
6. Akbar turns Jinnah, asks for Muslim state
7. Reorganise J&K on a linguistic basis

THE AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN-KASHMIR CONUNDRUM

The Afghanistan-Pakistan-Kashmir conundrum continues to confound. In Afghanistan, the Americans are more confused now than they were ever before, with their military campaign stalled and increasingly looking like getting nowhere; in Kashmir the Indians have been confused and paralysed for decades, and continue to remain so. Both are unable to hit upon the winning formula that will either give them victory or, at the very least, a face-saving solution that is more than a gift-wrapped defeat. At the heart of it, the reason for this sorry state is as clear as acknowledgement of it is dangerous. Because to then act may lead to violence and destruction on a forbidding scale, but to not act will leave both countries without any illusion of workable options, and no place to hide either.

As you may have noticed above, Pakistan is bang in the centre of this problem, and not just physically. It is in the ideological, political and military centre too. Unfortunately, the Americans don't want to see it that way because they think they need Pakistan that needs Kashmir. So, they have conveniently lopped off Kashmir from their maps and are treating it as a discrete problem between India and Pakistan with little or no direct linkage with what they are facing in Afghanistan. On their part, the Indians have done the same with Afghanistan, but for very different reasons: for the last 63 years they have studiously avoided looking, forget intervening, beyond their borders, no matter how intimately the problems that they have faced may have been linked to developments there.

In the former case, the view is due to strategic convenience; in the latter, strategic blindness. In both cases, the beneficiary has been, and remains, the nerve-centre, Pakistan.

Pakistan, one needs to reiterate, is an expansionist state, with ambitions that far exceed its size. To its west, it wants to usurp Afghanistan and to its east Kashmir, to begin with. This is the fundamental cornerstone of its state policy. I do not intend to go again into the history of how and why this has happened, and how it has taken the shape of violent Islamic extremism or jihad, as the Pakistanis like to call it.

The key point that I want to highlight again is that what is happening in both Afghanistan and Kashmir is a continuum that is part of a carefully orchestrated and coordinated campaign that has for long been pursued by the Pakistani military and its clandestine sword arm, the infamous ISI, in relentless pursuit of this strategic objective on both fronts.

The Pakistanis will not allow the US to achieve victory in Afghanistan, come what may, just as they will not allow India to emerge victorious in Kashmir. For them neither time is a constraint nor the number of dead. The cloak of jihad takes care of the latter pretty effectively; there is no pressure of pubic opinion to worry about. The moment we get a clear fix on this, no room for doubt is left that Pakistan has indeed been "playing a double-game of astonishing magnitude", as Matt Waldman puts it, with the Americans from Day One, to ensure its defeat while pretending to be its partner. Some analysts have been pointing this out for long but without sufficient evidence. However, given the fact that the Pakistanis have perfected the art of deniability of the involvement of the state in hostile actions, sufficient evidence is not going to come by easily. That has helped the Americans look the other way, to try and find easy ways around this problem that can bring their war in Afghanistan to successful conclusion. The result is before us.

Even Waldman, in the LSE Development Institute report 'Sun in the sky', has bought Pakistan's line to recommend that the US should address the "fundamental causes of its insecurity, including its latent and enduring conflict with India...resolution of the Kashmir dispute". He conveniently ignores what a Taliban commander told him: "The ISI are helping the Taliban a lot, but they only give for their own gain. There is a reciprocal issue: Kashmir. The root of the problem in Afghanistan is the Pakistan-India competition." This is not a revelation; this is something that has been known for long to many Pakistanis. It is no secret that Taliban terrorists have been deployed in Kashmir by Pakistan earlier. And there is little doubt that if the Americans are made to leave Afghanistan with Pakistan calling the shots in that country, they will be used again by Pakistan in its proxy war against India in Kashmir and elsewhere.

For 63 years, India has been trying to win the hearts and minds of Kashmiri Muslims with the development and autonomy cards, starting with article 370 of the constitution. Huge subsidies, bribes by another name, and economic packages have also been thrown in over the years. But all efforts have come to naught. The Americans are using the same failed strategy, but despite the new roads, schools and other developmental efforts, it too has failed win the Afghans over and wean them from the Taliban.

Why have these strategies tanked in both places? There are two main reasons, one of which India has obdurately refused to acknowledge and address because it strikes at the core of its secular facade and will compel it to look at other, real options that raise difficult questions that no one wants to discuss candidly or face squarely.

The first is that any amount of development or bribing will not unhinge Kashmiri Muslims from Islam. Religion is central to them and is above and more important than anything else, including ethnicity. Now this is nothing new. This is what caused the Partition of India. To this day, the Punjabi Muslim of Pakistan places his religion above his ethnic bond with the Punjabi Hindu and Sikh, is the chief protagonist of the anti-India face of the state of Pakistan and the prime participant in terror outfits like the LeT. In Indian Kashmir, Kashmiri pandits have been driven out of the Valley by their ethnic Muslim brethren.

But the Hindu elite of India refuse to accept this stark reality. That is because it takes a little more than a McDonald's burger -- to put it very crudely -- to make them disown, even disdain, their religious identity and acquire and flaunt an alien one. They continue to believe that Kashmiri Muslims also will react similarly and that even if some want to wear their religious identity on their sleeve, like secular Sikhs do, it is not to be seen as anti-secular or extremist in any manner whatsoever. The net result is that they have been misleading themselves, fellow Indians and the world into believing that the issue in Kashmir is political, not religious.

The second, and the most critical, is the existence and role of the state of Pakistan in its present shape. An artificial, multi-ethnic nation created solely on the basis of religion has, not surprisingly, chosen to paper the lack of logic in it existence by defining it on the basis of Islam alone, even though the religion has failed to be the glue to so politically unite even the Arabs who despite one race, one language and one religion are divided into 22 nations. This identity has been further fine-tuned through Islamic fundamentalism to breed implacable hatred towards India. From that has flown a similar attitude towards the rest of the world, making Pakistan the most natural nursery for the likes of Al Qaida. It is only a question of time before India-specific terror outfits like the LeT acquire global ambitions.

Unfortunately, India's policy makers have done absolutely nothing to dissuade Pakistan from employing terror as a tool to wrest Kashmir from India. And this has been going on for over 20 years. Pakistan's earlier efforts to achieve its objective did not use radical Islam as a force multiplier. That is why they died with military defeat. That is why the ongoing war shows no signs of getting over. And the Indians are getting fatigued fighting the wrong enemy.

The same thing is happening with the Americans in Afghanistan. There too the bribe strategy has failed. There too the war is not getting over. There too Pakistan is conducting the orchestra. There is a canard being lapped up that the proud Afghans have never been defeated and that the Americans, like the Soviets and the British before them will face defeat in their country. My understanding of history tells me that the Pashtuns are actually a conquered, humiliated, defeated, cursed and hopelessly exploited people whose condition is pitiable. Forget the medieval times when their backs were first broken and their civilisation swamped. Have we forgotten the ease with which the ISI and the Pakistani military converted most of their country into an extension of Pakistan after the Soviets left?

If the Americans cut their losses and scoot as the Pakistanis are pushing them to, their problem will not die. They will only get postponed, to resurface from Pakistan in an even more dangerous jihadi avatar, possibly armed with nukes. If they are under any illusion that they will be off the terror radar if they get India to make concessions to Pakistan on Kashmir, it will be their biggest blunder. Such a deal will just be the heady motivator that the Pakistani establishment needs to convince existing and potential jihadis that their cause is divine, that bigger victories await them, that the Great Satan America will fall, as will India.

America's war -- and India's -- is being fought in the wrong place, against the wrong people. They are puppets who will crumble like cookies if Pakistan's ability to motivate, train, arm, finance, use and sustain them is eroded completely. The key is Pakistan. The war has to be won there. As history has shown again and again, there is really no other way to ensure that the problem that Pakistan has created is dealt with decisively so that it cannot not raise its ugly head again in any meaningful manner. How is the question that strategists need to find an answer to.
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Readers may also read:
1. Kashmir Deal: Solution or surrender?
2. Dealing with Pakistan: lessons from history
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