EMBRACE US, EUNUCHS

(Hafiz Saeed's song for India)

Embrace us, do, we will hug you too,
To make you forget what we remember;
Many tiny cuts we will evermore inflict,
To bleed you dry and then dismember.

Every weapon on to bring you down,
Great we won’t let you again become;
A mongoose and a snake's enmity this,
No mercy or respite till you succumb.

At war we are, you pretend it is peace,
You talk to prolong it, we parry to win;
We will not tire, our belly is afire,
Nor will we rest till you kneel, give in.

No cost is too high, no blood too much,
Time doesn’t daunt us, nor a lethal blow;
You fight to not finish but make peace quick,
For us there’s no peace till we slay you low.

Relentless Ghori felled foolish Chauhan,
When he won at last, it was their last battle;
Forgiving is a virtue, forgetting can be fatal,
We remember this truth, you revel in prattle.

A thousand years’ war, eating nothing but grass,
Is not a psycho’s boast, or a coward’s threat;
Each defeat’s ebb builds a tide of revenge,
On one we will hit home, you always forget.

Irrational for you is God’s way for us,
Kafir you won’t get it, such a soft mindset;
This is no game that can end in a draw,
Jihad is never over till victory is met.

Embrace us, eunuchs, we will reciprocate;
Cowardly pleas will help us speed you to your fate.

************************************************

SA'FAI' BEGINS, PURGE NEEDED

The whitewash, sa’fai’, of the damning Faigate revelations that have sinister implications for India, both internally and in its responses to Pakistan, has begun. And, as expected, the usual suspects are at it.

Prannoy Roy and Barkha Dutt’s NDTV, chastened by "guilt-tweets" of Ms. Dutt before and after the Radia tapes rash hit and claimed her, continuing histrionics notwithstanding, has chosen to remain silent lest it is unable to pull its smelly foot out of its mouth subsequently. Their burden has been taken on by two old friends of the channel, the publicly exposed Vir Sanghvi and the yet to be Shekhar Gupta.

Vir Sanghvi, now reduced to writing on the net, the very medium he derided at the peak of his wholly "paid" arrogance, has written another Radia piece “ dressed up” to look as a pat in the back for India, but meant to exonerate his many corrupt liberal friends who have been found to be anti-national as well. If you read the whole piece, you will find that Sanghvi has been unsparing in exposing the well-known game plan of Pakistan – which, let us be clear, means the ISI, which in turn means Pakistan’s Army Chief – for Kashmir which, as he brings out, India has been been warning the world about.

Yet, Mr. Sanghvi wants us to believe that the real issue about Faigate is that Ghulam Nabi Fai's organisation, the Kashmir American Council, was “created by the Pakistani state to con Americans!” You don’t expect men of Vir Sanghvi’s integrity to tell us why the ISI wanted to con the Americans over Kashmir. Because if he does that then he knows he cannot conjure the lame and disgraceful defence that he offers, in just a couple of lines, for Indian liberals and peaceniks, among them Justice Sachar, author of the infamous Sachar Commision report, who were regulars at Fai’s Kashmir conferences that were micro-managed by the sinister ISI. They, he claims, were unaware of Fai’s sources of funding and whitewashes their culpability by saying: “it is sad and unfortunate that they were duped into lending legitimacy to an ISI-sponsored initiative.”

The Editor of Indian Express, Shekhar Gupta, has, for once, beaten Vir Sanghvi and conjured an even more absurd defence of the indefensible, but one that some of those caught will try to employ to escape the accusation of committing plain treason.

Gupta rubbishes Sanghvi's line that those who enjoyed Fai’s hospitality were unaware that he was a Pak/ISI agent. This is what he says of Fai: “But all of it, the injured air of Kashmiri victimhood, and Americanised English would not fool you about who he exactly was, and what precisely he was after. He was a Pakistani lobbyist for “their” Kashmir cause, leading a very cleverly constructed over ground support base for the malevolent movement that was picking strength in the early nineties. You would have to be utterly nuts, delusional or smoking some awful prohibited substance to not figure this out. Would you have known he was funded by the ISI? Again, you had to be from another planet to believe anything else.”

As every donkey and his son knows, Pakistan’s Kashmir policy is driven wholly by the military and its outstanding covert operations outfit, the ISI, that has been fermenting trouble in the Valley and other parts of India for a long, long time. That is the reason why Gupta has abandoned the unaware line. But, he also knows that sleeping with the ISI is an unforgivable act of treason, soaked in blood. So, he bails out the likes of Justice Sachar and many others yet to be exposed by inventing a high moral ground where none can be: “A more honest — and morally totally convincing — answer would have been the straight one. That as an intellectual or, in case of some, as a civil society activist, you were fully within your rights to go and speak at any forum, even if it was funded or organised by the Pakistanis and that just the fact of accepting a free ticket and a tiny per diem would not have compromised your integrity.”

As I understand this bizarre argument, it is perfectly fine for well-known Indians who are representing India to lend respectability and credence to, and bolster the ant-India position of the ISI on Kashmir across the world, knowing fully well that it is one over which three wars have been fought and over which a proxy war is still on. So, by the same logic, Indians should also be at liberty to go to Kashmir and physically fight ISI’s war against India, or do the same in other parts of India by carrying out a terror attacks and killing innocent people.

A war is fought more in the minds than on the battlefield. How can any sane man argue that while Indian foot soldiers of the ISI (a wing of Pakistan's military) are guilty and should be hanged, those who are knowingly furthering its hostile-to-India cause and its war across the globe are not only innocent but have a right to do so?

But Gupta has the the nerve to say that it is entirely irrelevant as to “who accepted Fai’s free tickets and hospitality, knowingly or unknowingly.” Perhaps Gupta no longer needs such petty perks. But, the same gentleman, knowing what he does about the military’s vice-like grip over Pakistan's India policy, was among the first to articulate, and repeatedly, after 26/11 that India should actually strengthen Pakistan and give to it concessions over Kashmir and other issues to “enhance the power and credibility” of Pakistan’s government, one that even prints fake Indian currency in its mints. Then I had imagined that he was writing the nonsense he was because someone in the corridors of power that he lives in had asked him to. Now the picture is getting frightening.

For India, what Faigate means to the Americans is, at one level, peripheral. It is undoubtedly a cog in the big picture, but for us the immediate and extremely worrying concern is that it is the tip of a very large ISI iceberg that is attacking India at all levels in pursuance of the Pakistan military’s single-point objective of bleeding India to death through a thousand cuts.

What the likes of Shekhar Gupta and Vir Sanghvi will not speak of are the scary logical deductions that must come first to the minds of all analysts as a result of Fai exposure as an ISI agent. The simple fact is the Fai was used by the ISI to defeat India internationally in so far as its position on Kashmir is concerned. And it spent millions of dollars over the counter and -- there can be little doubt -- many more below it, to get Indians to help it win this small but integral part of its existential war against India. The real war is being fought and will be fought on ground in India, including Kashmir. Does it take rocket science to understand that ISI must have been spending a thousand times more here, at every possible level, starting from sleeper cells to the media, academia, think tanks, babudom, and India’s political leadership, right up to and including 10 Janpath?

Rahul Gandhi’s assessment, shared with an American, – no electoral politics there – that Hindu terror posed a bigger threat to India than Pak-sponsored terror, is irrefutable proof that – notwithstanding his limited intelligence and grasp – even the future Prime Minister of India (as some believe) is being deliberately misguided by his trusted advisers. This cannot be a coincidence. The ISI has penetrated even his innermost circle.

While one can accept that the daily front paging of Hindu terror is essentially driven by the compulsions of vote-bank politics, it cannot be an accident that the whole mainstream mind-space has become irrationally pro-Pakistan during the last few years.

Sonia Gandhi has appointed the lawyer who defended ISI’s front organisation SIMI, the mother of the Indian Mujahideen who have carried out many terror attacks, as India’s Law Minister. She has also filled the NAC with hate-filled activists of very dubious antecedents and got a former bureaucrat who has given SIMI a de facto clean chit to draft the pernicious Communal Violence Bill that emasculates Hindus and puts the reins of determining culpability of individuals and all state organs, including the military, in the hands of unelected representatives from minority communities, in so far as Hindu-Muslim tensions (let's cut pretences) are concerned.

Seen in isolation, as indeed, liberals and ISI agents want us to, the many steps being taken by Sonia’s government and NAC seem innocuous, even harmless. But when viewed holistically, one cannot miss the fact that there is a method behind it all. Liberals and peaceniks and Hindu-haters are all pushing the “Break-India” agenda of the ISI.

The labyrinth of terror of which Fai was a part runs deep in India and many of these guys who have virtually been dictating India’s policies along all dimensions with regard to Pakistan and, by extension, Indian Muslims, who the ISI has been trying to turn into its assets, are central players in it, many willing, aware. That is why the hushed silence. That is why these fraudulent defences.

“ISI has more freedom of opinion than us.” This tweet unknowingly sums up the picture that India’s traitors have helped paint. They are many, they are powerful, they are dangerous, they have vested interests. And they have already begun the Big Cover Up. They may have much at stake, but India has much more. So, they have to be taken on by the state, by each one of us. The sa’fai’ under way must be exposed, and pressure put on the government to uncover and remove all termites who have gnawed deep into India, right to the doors of Sonia Gandhi who seems to have got caught in a trap of her own making.

The purge has to be ruthless and untouched by any political or personal considerations. This is the real lesson of Faigate.
'

MUMBAI ONCE MORE

Mumbai has been hit once more. Will be hit many times over. Given the trajectory that our leaders and policy makers have put this nation on, it not a question of whether but when another terror strike will take place.

Notwithstanding Rahul Gandhi’s baseless claim that 99% terror attacks have been prevented, it is true that the frequency of attacks has reduced since 26/11. But this is not because of the few half-measures taken by the government to bolster internal security but because a) Pakistan’s hands have got a bit tied after they were completely exposed for the first time ever in that attack b) Sonia Gandhi has gone into a maniacal mode to consolidate her Muslim and minority vote bank guided by her personal predilections and her campaign team consisting of the NAC and dubious NGOs and hate-mongering activists, prompting terrorists and their masters across the Radcliffe Line to pull their foot off the terror-attack pedal till she delivers, so that reaction from the majority community is muted, and c) focus of the intelligence agencies has been diluted and diverted to create a big media tamasha of the clear, present and growing danger of a virtually non-existent Hindu terror which was the creation a handful of people involved in four attacks, the last of which was in 2007, giving them time and space to consolidate and build.

The net result is that the people of India are today more vulnerable than they were earlier to terror; sitting ducks, as a leading daily headlined their plight after the Mumbai serial blasts on July 13, 2011.

What does it take to fight terror? First, a country has to put in place internal measures, including a robust real-time intelligent network, to make it extremely difficult for terrorists to get funding, local support and freedom to move around with little fear of getting caught before they launch an attack. After an attack, not only should getaway be made very difficult but there should be swift and stringent punishment, mainly as a deterrent for those who might be contemplating joining such outfits. Second, the external factors responsible for propagating and exporting terror should be made to feel the cost of their misadventure to the degree that they are compelled to put a stop to their activities. Unless the second part is conclusively addressed, the first will yield only limited results, and lower the morale of the people and the nation as a whole.

But, be it in the corridors of power or in post-attack discussions and columns, despite the sound and fury, despite the very detailed knowledge some analysts have about the mother-terror architecture in Pakistan, in the end, the refrain remains the same: we can do no more than talk to Pakistan, and we must improve police and intelligence set up at home.

The first part, the easy, meaningless one really -- except for analysts and commentators -- continues to be pursued, while the second remains as neglected as it always was.

In fact, given Sonia Gandhi’s seemingly obsessive compulsion to woo the minorities, central agencies are increasingly looking the other way as the Indian Mujahideen consolidates and spreads it wings, and as Pakistan deploys more and more local sleeper cells to be activated at a time of its choosing. Home Minister Chidambaram, who initially promised much, seems to have been effectively been done in by Sonia’s team that is more focused on emasculating the majority and splitting the society communally to deliver an electoral victory to Sonia in 2014, than on allowing the government to fulfill its constitutional obligation of protecting the lives of its citizens and securing the nation from the menace of terror of which it has been a victim for almost a quarter century.

Talking to Pakistan is not going to yield anything for India. Pakistan is getting India to the negotiating table at the point of gun not to give but to extract, to extort. Our leaders and babus have made their mouths and minds the weapons of choice to deflect and defeat the aggressive, never-say-die, hate-filled minds ready to wage – and doing so – a thousand year war. They think little about the helpless and innocent Indians who are getting killed again and again, because they and their kith and kin are safe and secure. They believe that giving some concessions will get the Pakistanis off their back, and they spend their energies solely on trying to give only that much as will not raise a furore in the country.

The Pakistanis, who smelled the coward in them long back, on the other hand, keep shifting the goal posts and outsmarting them at every turn, so as to wear them down till finally they --India -- submit. It does not seem to have struck our guys that the more we give, the more the demands will increase, after suitable pauses. May be they know it; but if that be so, it means that their ignorance of and abhorrence for the employment of force to counter and defeat force overrides their commonsense, live and effective examples of other nations notwithstanding.

The US is a democracy like us, but after just one major attack on mainland US, they went for the perpetrators of the attack even though they were non-state actors in a sovereign country. And, though it took them ten years, they hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden. They knew that unless they struck terror back in the hearts of the terrorists, attacks on the US would not only continue but would increase in intensity and frequency. Though they that also put in place very stringent measures to almost eliminate the chances of further major strikes, they were never under any illusion that mere defense would defeat fanatic warriors who were not fighting a conventional war and who thought nothing about losing foot soldiers fed to fight and die for virgins in paradise.

That is why there have been no attacks on America till now, while here the sense of despair is becoming alarming. Make no mistake: if there are more such attacks, that country will not hesitate at all to introduce even harsher measures, at greater cost to individual freedom temporarily. Liberty comes at a price and can be enjoyed unfettered only in a secure nation not facing a serious threat. Many terror attacks and decades later, we refuse to learn even basic lessons.

Is this the response expected from a huge nation of 1.2 billion to such a grave threat? Every time a terrorist attack takes place, our politicians almost proudly and openly announce that a neighboring country, Pakistan, is behind it. It is almost as if they are telling the nation that they have done their job by blaming Pakistan, which is all they can do, and that the nation has no choice but to meekly continue accepting this evil. Having identified the source two decades back, why has no effective response been formulated yet? Why do we continue to wail like a helpless, defenceless woman who is being repeatedly raped by a small boy 1/6th her size?

Just imagine a scenario in which Pakistan was six times our size rather than the 1/6th it is. What would it have done by now? Do I need to spell out? We probably would have long been splintered and devoured as a nation by that country, and run over by Talibani extremists. And what have we done? For six decades, we have aimlessly and apathetically allowed a tiny Pakistan to fearlessly keep trying to do precisely that, and have not yet formulated a terminal response that can put an end to this cancer that is going larger and that will, inevitably, afflict our own Muslims in the long run, just as is being planned.

We seem to know well only how to rush quickly to the high moral ground of fatal weakness that our first Prime Minister taught us, and camouflage the overriding concern for electoral victory that his Italian grand daughter-in-law is pursuing with deathly determination.

Till this debilitating paradigm remains in place, the ordinary people of Mumbai, indeed the whole of India, will continue to live with the fear that they may not return home in the evening, that their blood soaked bodies will be dumped like garbage at the back of trucks.
'

PAK ARMY, THE TERROR MONSTER

The obfuscations, the denials, the pretensions have gone on for far too long. For far too long the mountain of damning evidence that has been surfacing with telling regularity, steeped with the blood of hapless individuals, both soldiers or civilians, has been simply ignored and filed. For far too long policy makers have stuck mindlessly to the adage “this too shall pass,” ignoring what has been clear even to them and what many informed analysts have been saying ad nauseum for years.

Osama bin Laden has, in his death at the hands of US Navy Seals in a compound bang in the middle of a secure Pakistani military station, delivered a blow so severe to nations and leaders thus far unwilling to face the fundamental truth of the foundation of the terrorism of which he was the most visible face, that it will be a crime if they do not still rouse themselves and do what they have been running away from till now.

As I wrote in my previous piece and in many others before that, the real terrorists who threaten the world are not the ones who carry out terror attacks in India and elsewhere. They are merely foot soldiers assiduously created, cultivated, protected and deployed by the military machine of Pakistan that believes terror is a technique of war that the state is entitled to use in furtherance of its religious and political objectives.

We in India have been facing terror without facing the reality that is carefully concealed behind it and paying a very heavy price, unfelt and un-understood by weak, ignorant and unwise policy makers personally untouched by this two decade old undeclared war. Despite increasing provocations, the last visible one being 26/11, we continue to fool ourselves into believing that we can defeat terror by talking and making concessions to the very guys who are using that weapon with precisely that objective.

After 9/11, the US bullied a very reluctant and duplicitous Musharraf into becoming their ally in their war in Afghanistan. Possibly they were then confident that their ‘shock and awe’ operations in Afghanistan would scare Pakistan’s military leaders into abandoning their relationship with the Al Qaida and Taliban. The LeT and other terror groups operating against India were then of no concern to them. Never did it strike them, on the face of it at least, that they were fingers of the same Pakistani hand. Had their cocky analysis – amnesic of the lessons of the Soviet misadventure -- of the mindset of Musharraf & Co. been right, the US would have achieved a relatively swift victory. It did not.

There lies the real story and the lesson that has been ignored by the US for almost 10 years. And, despite Laden, there are efforts being made still to make sure it remains so.

Like India, the US is worried about waging a war with a nuclearised Pakistan and wants to avoid it all costs, particularly since the threat to its mainland is not even near the kind that India has been, and is, dealing with. In addition, it needs Pakistan as a logistic conduit for the 120,000 US troops in Afghanistan. There is no other practical sea-land route available to maintain such a large fighting force there. The wily Musharraf, his DG ISI Kiyani -- now Army Chief -- and other Pakistani generals grasped the strategic significance of these paralyzing constraints even before America invaded Afghanistan and saw in them an opportunity to not only keep India under attack but also to score a spectacular victory for what we call terror and they Islam, over the second super power to invade Afghanistan. And they went about achieving this objective with single-minded, indeed manic devotion.

There is no getting away from the conclusion that both Musharraf and Kiyani were not only in the know of Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts but would have personally authorized his protection and concealment from the Americans. Deniability of their complicity had to be built into the method used for this – think ‘non-state’ actors in 26/11 and other terror attacks – and that is precisely what is being attempted now to convince the world that they did not know that he was where no one would have suspected him of being, where he would never have chosen to go unless he was sure that the US would not get him, where a confident Musharraf probably agreed to shift him after having successfully hidden him in less incriminating places for many years.

From incompetence to complicity of a few low-level ISI operatives to involvement of India-specific terror outfits like Hizbul Mujahideen, analysts -- free and embedded -- in India, the US and Pakistan are trotting out stories that absolve Pakistan’s top leaders. A few analysts believe that various DGs of ISI were in the know but not the Army Chiefs. Implied in this reasoning is that hand-picked ISI heads and their subordinates were engaged for years in an operation of such a huge magnitude and having such enormous implications in willful defiance of the orders of the most powerful man in Pakistan. This is as absurd as it can get.

Behind the elaborate and almost impenetrable smoke screen placed with great skill by Pakistan’s military, one could always see, with some effort, that terror in Kashmir and Afghanistan were two sides of the same coin minted by it. The logical deduction from that was that the war on terror had to be won in Pakistan and that both India and the US were fighting the wrong guys in the wrong place. But the US, preferring to look only at its end of the terror matrix and focusing on a narrow, short-term objective, thought it could to get clever, determined and driven Pakistani generals to do what it wanted in Afghanistan by nudging India to give them what they wanted, at least partially, in Kashmir.

Laden has, for the first time, laid bare the real face of terror and the terrorist like never before.

This leads to the inevitable question about where the shattered US-Pakistan alliance goes from here. If Kiyani and his men in uniform – literally the state of Pakistan – are the leading soldiers of global jihad, then how does the US defeat this enemy of the world and ensure that it does not raise its ugly head ever again? A 600,000 strong Army with nuclear bombs to throw around is no pushover. Does that mean that the only super power in the world is going to accept defeat garnished with the semblance of victory and let it grow even stronger and more destructive till a bigger catastrophe strikes and results in an extremely violent and costly war?

Or is it time to kill the monster that has inflicted more misery and havoc upon its own people than it has on its many perceived enemies, and free Pakistan from its clutches? The answer is obvious but the path to it is perilous. No one knows it better than the generals who have brought Pakistan to the brink of ruin and who are going to bash on if they get away. They are not going to willingly loosen their vice-like hold over Pakistan and its resources; they have to be forced to and then weakened enough so that they do not rise again, even more murderous, as they did after the 1971 debacle.

It should not take the US more than two days to incapacitate Pakistan Army and secure its nuclear weapons. With a ready and willing India to its East, it just needs to take out Pakistan’s Air Force, making its ground forces sitting ducks from the air. With the US becoming guarantor of its security, like it is of Japan, dismantling of the military-terror apparatus can follow. Without patronage, funds and professional guidance, terrorists outfits will dissolve into the countryside, just as the Nazis did.

Yes, things may go wrong; that is a calculated risk experts in the game have to take. But, if the terrorist-generals get away even now, chances are high that things will go horribly wrong some years down the line.
'

'PAK' INTENTIONS

Before Mumbai was attacked on 26/11, the response of the government every time terrorists struck used to be sickeningly identical and helpless. Home Minister Shivraj Patil would blame Pakistan, his deputy would say that the hand of the ISI was visible, the NSA would either remain silent or would waffle that there was credible evidence of Pakistan's involvement and declare that the LeT needed to be destroyed. Their job, they believed, ended there; in blaming Pakistan they had achieved a victory for India. Not surprisingly, nothing whatsoever was done by them for five long years to strengthen India's intelligence and security apparatus or to deter Pakistan from prosecuting its proxy war.

After 26/11, P Chidambaram woke up a comatose Home Ministry and set in motion badly needed reforms and organisational changes that should have been put in place decades back. But, he seems to be the lone ranger in a paralysed foreign policy and national security establishment that seems to be determined to pursue just the dream course that Pakistan would like India to till its objectives are achieved.

The net result of this continuing inertia and muddle is that Pakistan has come to believe, rightly, that India's leaders are utterly weak and mortally afraid of holding Pakistan to account for any hostile offensive action including an open limited war like the one Musharraf unleashed in Kargil in 1999.

It may be recalled that immediately after 26/11, Pakistan had denied that those involved in the attack were Pakistanis. Later, when confronted with the evidence provided by Kasab and the Americans, and rattled and worried about India's response, in unison they all -- leaders, experts, journalists -- started saying that they were non-state actors, rogue elements of the ISI, and that Pakistan itself was a victim of terror.

Our guys then, noises apart, happily latched onto the 'rogue elements' lie because it saved their face more than Pakistan's; it provided them with just the excuse they were looking for to avoid disturbing the comfortable status quo they had spent a lifetime protecting and promoting. They were keen to get back to kebabs and conversation -- familiar terrain, so what it if meaningless and totally unlikely to yield anything to India's advantage? The net result was disasters, first at Sharm-el-Sheikh where Pakistan turned the tables on them by getting them to talk about Baluchistan, and later at Islamabad where Foreign Minister SM Krishna was publicly humiliated and 26/11 was successfully converted into a non-event.

This is what I had written a few months back: "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?"

The latest revelation that the Interpol has issued a Red Corner Notice for two serving Majors of the Pakistan Army for their involvement in 26/11 confirms this. Let us also remember that this is only the tip of the huge iceberg of deceit that Pakistan has been able to successfully conceal -- or was it allowed to by the Indian establishment that knew about it all along?-- for years about the complete involvement of its military, including the ISI, in terror operations against India in Kashmir and elsewhere. The needle of culpability points right to the top of the military pyramid.

For those in the Indian establishment still willing to give Pakistan the benefit of doubt or, worse, intent on making Indians believe that things are much better than they are, someone with a sharp sense of the weak minds of Indian leaders has removed even the fig leaf. Once again.

Last year, Musharraf had Karan Thapar -- trapped in his own limited and distorted view, script and agenda -- so distracted by his sartorial elegance that even though he made some terribly shocking statements about Kargil, terror and role of the LeT, along with state of Pakistan, in protecting the interests of Indian Muslims -- not Kashmiri Muslims mind you -- that the latter simply was not able to even acknowledge anything offensive Musharraf was saying. To make matters worse, no one in the Indian establishment too made any noise at all, despite the fact it was a former President who had made such provocative policy statements.

Emboldened, Musharraf now says -- overlook lame subsequent denials -- that Pakistan has trained terrorists to fight against India in Kashmir, that he has no regrets for the Kargil intrusion by Pakistan's military. He also says that the LeT, a Pakistani Punjabi terror outfit that launched the 26/11 attack, is rightly fighting for the 'freedom' of Kashmiris. His justification, openly stated, is that since India is not prepared to resolve the Kashmir dispute in a peaceful manner (in the manner that Pakistan wants it to, one must add), Pakistan has a right to promote its own interest.

Now that is a crystal clear statement of intent that Pakistan has and will use all means available, including war, to settle Kashmir in its favour when an opportunity presents itself or can be created by its military establishment. Fear gone, the gloves are off. Musharraf is mocking and daring India's leaders, indeed the whole nation, to stop Pakistan, if they have the balls. And what has been the response of those looking after our foreign policy? The same 'We-always-knew-it' yelp, as if that is a Daisy Cutter that will flatten and deter Pakistan's leaders from doing what they have been for decades.

Musharraf is not wrong when he says that Pakistan won Kargil. Lt Gen Krishna Pal is right when he says that India lost that war. Having driven the Pakistanis out of Indian territory at a speed that no one initially expected, India failed to make Pakistan pay for its misadventure by not moving into, say, Gilgit-Baltistan, so as to get it to the negotiating table on its knees. On the contrary, after Musharraf seized power, Vajpayee legitimised Kargil and gave on a platter to Musharraf the victory his troops had failed to, by agreeing to give concessions that no Indian Prime Minister had ever even thought of. The attacker was rewarded, the attack justified.

If the whole of Kashmir is a dispute, then POK and the strategic Gilgit-Baltistan are as up for grabs for India as the Valley is for Pakistan. If Pakistan says its proxy and hot wars to wrest the Valley are justified, then it automatically gives India a licence to use the same means to reclaim parts of the state under Pakistani occupation. But India has not even whispered this counter, much less think about giving it concrete shape, if only with the limited objective of getting Pakistan off the Valley's back for good.

India's war against Pakistan over Kashmir is not going to be won by India in the Valley; it has to be won elsewhere. The US is not going to win it for us, nor is our tremulous response to Pakistan's continuing aggression. Pakistan, as should be now clear to everyone, cannot, will not, stop doing what it has been to get India on it knees. Emboldened by India's cowardice, it has now stopped even pretending otherwise. It has to be made to stop. Our so-called 'nuanced responses' befitting 'big, serious nations that do not run foreign policy for cheap thrills' -- which practically has meant doing nothing to create even a ripple in the disadvantageous-to-India statu quo -- have not yielded any dividend thus far, will not yield any in future too.

After 9/11 the US did not talk nuance. More recently, despite the fact that supplies for its troops in Afghanistan go through Pakistan, it has made it clear to its leaders that "all bets are off" if there is another terror attack on the US." Our netas, babus and diffident generals need to awaken to the fact that there is only one language that Pakistani generals, as also their civilian leaders who talk and behave like tribal chieftains, speak and understand. They are not hiding their 'Pak' intentions. The communication mismatch is at our end. The onus to remove it is on us. India is under attack, not Pakistan.

AFSPA OR TERROR 2?

In 2008, voters came out in large numbers in the Valley, defying calls given by pro-Pakistan separatists to boycott the elections. Why did they do so? Because they felt they safely could: there was a near total absence of terrorist violence and, unlike during previous elections, no threats were issued by either the LeT or the HM. Many believe that both kept mum because their ability to enforce a ban through use of force had been significantly eroded. And the ordinary Kashmiri knew it well enough to muster courage to go out and cast his vote. No wonder pro-Pakistan hardliner Syed Shah Gilani, stung by the surprise, could do no more than than say that voting figures were artificially inflated by bogus voting and invisible pressure of security forces.

It is a no-brainer that Gilani's Pakistani masters would have been even more deeply disturbed by this unacceptable normalisation of the situation that, more than anything, signaled an important shift in public opinion away from a failing Pakistan. Were Pakistan's generals going to just sit back and let Kashmir slip out of their fingers? Were they expected to simply shrug off their defeat and let the blood that runs in their veins just flow out of their body?

A strident Pakistani response to reclaim Kashmir should have been anticipated by India. Perhaps it was too. But, a clever enemy that is driven by a congenital 'junoon', hit where and when few expected it to. The military mind that was strategising the counter offensive yet again achieved what is central to success in any military operation: complete surprise.

Just before the tornado of stones hit an unsuspecting India in May this year, there was much complacency. Absence of violence and influx of a record number of tourists made many analysts who know Kashmir inside-out claim that the tide had turned, that India had almost won the war against Pakistan, that the people of the Valley had turned their backs on that nation. They were as right then as they are now about the anger of tormented youths who have grown up under the shadow of the gun.

It is presumptuous, if not downright unintelligent, of those who fly into the Valley for what are essentially well-protected and by now well rehearsed conducted tours for a couple of days to claim that they understand the dynamics better than those who serve and live there on a full-time basis for years, and professionals who have intelligence and operational inputs that are not available in the public domain. It is because of this Molotov cocktail of arrogance, ignorance and focus on the moment rather than the continuum that the whole debate about Kashmir has got largely deflected from the essentials.

In the last few months, 70 precious lives have been lost due to firing on stone pelters and arsonists in a few towns in the Valley. Deaths of ordinary citizens pain every one, more so soft, emotional Indians who are easily swayed by suffering. The deaths, not surprisingly, have become central to the argument designed to deflect India's attention away from core issues behind the intifada and pressurise what is widely perceived to be weak, confused and vote-bank driven Indian government into making concessions that, on the face of it, appear somewhat justified.

Consider this: all protesters have been killed in firing by the state police and CRPF. Not one has been killed by the Army. Lt Gen HS Panag, former GOC-in-C of Northern Command, under whose watch the whole state was, tells us that the Army has not opened fire on protestors for the last 20 years and that for the last 10 years the Army has not operated in any city. The police are responsible for maintaining law and order in all cities and they have been given additional powers under that Public Safety Act(PSA) and the Disturbed Areas Act(DAA). This means that none of those teenagers who have been pushed into the streets of a few towns including Srinagar have ever seen the Army firing in and around their localities and killing people.

Yet, other than the calls for 'Azadi' that translated, as they had to, into the hoisting of Pakistan's flag in Lal Chowk on Eid in the presence of the 'moderate' separatist leader Umer Farooq, what is the most strident demand being made by protestors and separatists undoubtedly at the behest of their leaders some of whom are no more than couriers delivering fiats received from their masters and handlers in Pakistan? Remove the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) from all of Kashmir. Some mainstream politicians too have jumped onto this bandwagon, if not anything else, out of fear of getting isolated.

Odd isn't it that no one is asking for removal of the PSA and DAA that enables the police to carry out what Pankaj Mishra, in an op-ed in the New York Times, calls "brutal suppression of non-violent protests"? Even more odd isn’t it that an isolated fake encounter by the Army in remote Machchal is being blown out of all proportions by Kashmiri separatists and some Indian analysts who possibly consider it their moral duty to not only believe what separatists say but also amplify it with eloquence -- rather than filter it with elementary commonsense -- to demand from every possible forum that the 'draconian' AFSPA should be withdrawn?

Let us ask two basic questions. Why has terrorism almost disappeared from the Valley? Has the situation really changed as much as we are being led to believe?

Terrorists are on the retreat in the Valley and the LeT and HM no longer pose the combat threat that they once did. This has happened primarily because the Indian Army has relentlessly fought them for 20 years and has all but defeated and demoralised them. The fight has been bloody, with as many as 5962 soldiers killed by terrorists in J&K between 1988 and July 05, 2010. This success, at a heavy price, would not have been possible without the AFSPA. For those who may not know, the AFSPA entitles soldiers to execute military operations against armed insurgents on its own, including carrying out cordon and search of suspected militant hideouts, and opening fire as per their military judgment, without awaiting a written request from or the presence of a magistrate. It also provides legal protection to soldiers carrying out tasks assigned to them by the government which calls them in only when all other instruments available to the state to deal with a situation have failed.

Of course, there are those who are propagating the myth that terrorism has almost evaporated from the Valley because the international climate has turned against the use of violence. Some believe that Pakistan has temporarily eased off the pressure in Kashmir because of the pressure and presence of the US in its backyard. B Raman, a former RAW officer, is of the view that although Pakistan is continuing to infiltrate terrorists into J&K, it has brought down the "level of their acts of terrorism so that any escalation does not come in the way of the confidence-building process going on between the two countries as a result of initiatives taken" by the governments of India and Pakistan. No one in India, it seems, thinks that the Indian Army has anything substantial to do with it!

There can be no better barometer of a situation than the reaction of the enemy, if one can look through the smoke that he always generates to mask it. In my view, Pakistan's generals have paid rich compliments to the Indian Army for the success that it has achieved in the Valley but, in the din created by the pelting of stones, no one in India has noticed.

In response to the success of the elections in 2008 that jolted them -- don’t buy the latest spin that they were for local governance only -- had Pakistan's generals been in a position to re-crank terror, they would have not hesitated to do so. If they can brazenly play what Matt Waldman calls "a double-game of astonishing duplicity" with the US in Afghanistan by appearing to be fighting on its side while using the Taliban to defeat it, if they can tell the US to lay off saying "Kashmir is ours", can anyone believe that they will willingly exercise restraint against India?

It is because Pakistan could not reactivate Kalashnikov bearing fighters in Kashmir in substantial numbers and was convinced that this time they would be put out even faster, that it was forced to change strategy to send a loud message to Indians, including Kashmiris, that it was not throwing in the towel so easily. Developing and fine-tuning it took some time and, at the perfect moment, the stones surfaced and hit a surprised India. Former Army Chief General Shankar Roychowdhury says that the latest protests in the Valley are "too precise and calibrated to be anything but enemy action." Lt Gen HS Panag, who should know a thing or two more than frequent-flyer analysts, tweets: "Intifada is a carefully calibrated strategy of ISI & separatists & not repeat not pent up frustration of "the tormented generation" and that "we have fallen into the trap."

The real trap is perhaps not the intifada; it is what Pakistan hope to achieve through it. I don't believe that Pakistan's generals have the patience -- or trust Kashmiris enough -- to put all their eggs in the intifada basket. Pakistan is not a weak Palestine. For it, intifada is an inferior and temporary tool of necessity. That is why relentless, emotive pressure is being exerted to get the government to lift the AFSPA from the entire Valley. Sections of the government have, as per media reports, already fallen into this trap. Some just want to get rid of the problem of the moment by partially withdrawing it from some districts, including Srinagar, where the maximum fire is raging, and Ganderbal, in the Valley. The logic is that situation is now normal.

Is the situation really normal? Has infiltration stopped? Has Pakistan given up its claim on Kashmir? Has it stopped using the LeT etc as instruments of the state to achieve its objective of liberating Kashmir by force? Are the security forces in the valley operating "with an expansive mandate that is not commensurate with military necessity" as "General" S Varadarajan has concluded?

The situation looks normal because the Army has brought it under control and is working 24/7 to ensure it remains so, with more than 1000 small teams out at any given point of time, and troops guarding the LoC too. As Lt Gen Raghavan brought out in a TV show, the moment AFSPA is lifted in the whole Valley or even any part of it, within weeks terrorists will regroup and reorganise, like it happened in the North East. Pakistan also knows that once they lift AFSPA, India's leaders will not have the guts to reimpose it till the situation gets out of hand. That is what it wants!

Let us not forget that the normalcy that AFSPA has helped restore has benefited Kashmiris the most. This urban stone-pelting generation does not know what it is to sleep with the sound of bullets flying through the night and live with the smell of danger and death at every turn. How can such a generation ask on its own for the removal of an Act which has never impacted their daily lives?

Pakistan wants AFSPA out. Mere talks, it has learnt from experience, won't get it anywhere. Force, it has realised, is not something that India's leaders can either withstand or repel. It wants, therefore, to take terror to a new level, better integrated and in tandem with indigenous uprising, to get India to give more and more till nothing is left to give. For re-building capacity that takes time, a relatively safe sanctuary is required, the kind Kashmir was before AFSPA was imposed. Remember, there are no walls between districts in the Valley and no demographic differences. So, if AFSPA is lifted in even a couple of districts, it will suffice. And, as the intifada has shown, we will not get a whiff of what is happening till terror strikes again, new, improved, lethal.

India has a choice to make: AFSPA or Terror 2?

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