Showing posts with label Indian Army. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Indian Army. Show all posts

Friday, August 07, 2015

Making Peace With Pakistan

How To Make Peace With Pakistan


  • Get engaged, stay engaged.
  • Keep expectations low, especially short term expectations. 
  • Expect setbacks. Use setbacks to better understand how the Pakistan Army, the ISI and non state actors try to undermine the Pakistani Prime Minister
  • Engage at multiple levels, not just with the Prime Minister. 
  • Appreciate their need to posture. They need that drama for their domestic audience. 
  • Talk to the Prime Minister, but also talk to the Pakistan Army directly. They are not a subservient but a parallel power center. 
  • Seek a trilateral intelligence sharing arrangement vis-a-vis the United States, especially on terrorism. Pakistan itself is a target. 
  • Help strengthen democracy inside Pakistan. Ultimately only a fully democratic Pakistan is capable of true and permanent peace with India. Until that day arrives, keep expectations in check. Expect slow progress and setbacks. 
  • Greater people to people contact would help. More trade will help. 
  • And if that happens between China and Pakistan, so be it. Think of that as dress rehearsal. Pakistan opening up is good news. It is a closed society. Russia is also a good one.
  • Muslim-Hindu per capita income parity is a domestic goal for India. Steps towards that goal would help. 
  • Peace is possible. Ultimately perhaps even a free trade area
  • Attempts of terrorist attacks will continue. There are plenty of non state actors inside Pakistan, but mostly globally, who would like to hurt India. It is a democracy thing. And there counter-terrorist acts is an area for the military experts. This is not traditional warfare. You have to speak the language they speak. You have to be able to counter their moves. Mostly you win if you are really good at intelligence. Intelligence sharing with governments goes a long way. 





































Friday, July 10, 2015

Peace In Kashmir

The Disputed Territory : Shown in green is Kas...
The Disputed Territory : Shown in green is Kashmiri region under Pakistani control. The orange-brown region represents Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir while the Aksai Chin is under Chinese occupation. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I like this. A lot.
From unsigned notes revealed in 2009, it is known the two governments were contemplating a four point deal: the transformation of the Line of Control into a border; free movement across the LoC; greater federal autonomy for both sides of Jammu and Kashmir; and gradually-phased cutbacks of troops as jihadist violence declined.
Peace in Kashmir is crucial. The Kashmir border should some day become like the Nepal-India border, because it is the same people living on the two sides. A lot of trade and people to people. contact will go a long way.

Pakistan is not a monolith. It has terrorists, but they also target the Pakistani establishment and its people. Its army is not exactly subservient to popularly elected leaders. The ISI is a hydra, half in dark, the other half also in dark. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

Engaging Pakistan is a complex picture. When you engage the moderates, and make progress on trade and peace, you threaten the extremists in the army and the ISI: the hardliners do their best to scuttle peace efforts. Because if there is peace between India and Pakistan, they become irrelevant inside Pakistan. So when they disturb, don't blame it all on the moderates you are engaging with.

Normalized relations with Pakistan will add 1% to India's growth rate.
General Kayani himself, in speech delivered in 2010, endorsed the jihadi project, saying “There is no greater honour than martyrdom nor any aspiration greater than it”. “The army is the nation”, he concluded, “and the nation is the army”.