Until recently, the relationship between Islamabad and New Delhi seemed to be going relatively well. Tempers had calmed in the wake of the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, substantive discussions at the bureaucratic level were well under way, and the highest levels of government had given their blessing to joint diplomatic talks held on July 16. But things have turned sour -- as they often do on the subcontinent -- with a remarkable quickness.
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Two seemingly unrelated events of the past two weeks have illustrated a fundamental problem with the nature of the Indo-Pakistani relationship. The first was the breakdown of the talks in Islamabad. At their press conference following the closed-door meeting, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi excoriated the Indian home secretary for publicly announcing that David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American charged with involvement in the Mumbai attacks, had worked closely with Pakistani intelligence. The outburst brought an acrimonious end to the carefully planned talks.
The second was the decision of three news organizations to simultaneously publish significant excerpts from a trove of classified documents made available by WikiLeaks, the self-described global whistleblower website. The documents alleged that over the past several years, despite public professions of close cooperation with the United States on the antiterrorism front, Pakistan's powerful Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate had actually abetted and aided the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Afghan insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Beyond these startling revelations, the documents also charged that the ISI had provided information to insurgents about U.S. troop movements, their likely operations, and military capabilities.
Both developments highlight the disturbing dominance of Pakistan's permanent military establishment and their ongoing ties to jihadi groups. Even though a civilian regime assumed office in Pakistan in September 2008, the country's military has experienced little or no change. Gen. Pervez Musharraf's hand-picked successor, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, though nominally subservient to the civilian regime, remains primus inter pares. And the security establishment that he presides over has not lost sight of its two cardinal and related principles: unremitting hostility toward India and the need for a pliable regime in Afghanistan.
Pakistan's military has long cultivated ties with a host of religious militants, but the notion that it might be convinced to abandon its use of asymmetric war strategies in Afghanistan and Indian-controlled Kashmir seems increasingly unlikely. Contrary to popular belief, the security establishment's links with these groups is not of recent vintage. Pakistan has used jihadi proxies to varying effect against India since the first war following partition in 1947. They were also the basis for another assault against India in 1965.
Of course, the use of jihadis reached its peak under the leadership of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After the Soviets departed, the ISI played a decisive role in the Afghan civil war that brought the Taliban to power. By installing that regime in Kabul, Pakistan's security establishment realized its long-sought goal of "strategic depth" against India.
Meanwhile, thanks to India's ineptitude in the handling of political demands in its Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, an insurgency there erupted in 1989. Almost immediately, the Pakistani security establishment sent in its militant surrogates, transforming a domestic rebellion into a well-funded, externally supported, and religiously oriented extortion racket.
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, General Musharraf was coerced by the United States to cut his ties to the Taliban and a plethora of other jihadi organizations. Musharraf, however, didn't want to lose Pakistan's strategic assets in Afghanistan and Kashmir. So even as he delivered a handful of key al Qaeda leaders including Abu Farraj al-Libi, reputedly the group's third in command, he did little or nothing to curb the activities of other jihadi organizations, most notably Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, two of the largest and most active Islamist terrorist organizations in South Asia. Instead, they were allowed to operate with considerable impunity from a number of encampments within Pakistan.
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