Responding to India’s terrorism

What will it take for the world to respond to India’s terrorist campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan? This past weekend’s press conference by Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Director General of the Inter Services Public Relations (DG ISPR) Major General Iftikhar Babar has renewed the question of why India continues to be afforded such impunity for its fomenting of terrorist operations aimed at destabilizing and destroying Pakistan.

The question merits a response for a wide variety of reasons, chief among them the perception among many Pakistanis that, no matter how much good Pakistan does, it will be punished by the West – and no matter how much bad India does, it will be rewarded. Addressing this perception is in the vital interest of Pakistan’s ruling elite, even if Western capitals ignore it, because the story of Pakistan’s national security and economic growth cannot be written without the ability of the Pakistani elite to engage in and deepen relations with the West.

In short, Pakistanis that want the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan to go home, instead of protesting on the streets, need to understand that the protesters believe that countries like France are the enemy of the people of Pakistan. That President Emmanuel Macron sought to cheapen the idea of French secularism by insisting that it demands support for blasphemy is a mere trigger. Beneath the surface of the injury of blasphemy is a much more profound divide between the ordinary Pakistani and the wider Western world. The principal casualty in this divide will be the ordinary Pakistani – but her victimhood is little understood and even less likely to be mitigated. To understand and address the Pakistani victim requires an honest appraisal of why the chickens always come to roost in Pakistan, even those whose home is in another country.

As the press conference by FM Qureshi and Major General Babar proffered the gruesome details of the various machinations of India’s terror enterprise, two dates should have been occupying the mind of Pakistan’s leaders: July 4, 1995 and October 15, 1999.

In the summer of 1995, after dealing with the renewed Kashmiri freedom movement for the entire first half of the decade, India went back to a playbook it perfected between 1947 and 1971: how to achieve strategic goals through terrorism, proxy war and the manipulation of the legitimate grievances of people outside its territory. As Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark detail in their book, ‘The Meadow’, India’s spy chiefs and military leaders essentially adopted a militant group known as Al Faran. On July 4, 1995, Al Faran kidnapped two Americans and two British nationals. After one of the Americans escaped, Al Faran kidnapped another German and a Norwegian. The group beheaded the Norwegian gentleman, and the remaining four were never found. Whilst the young men working for Al Faran were duped into believing they were serving the ends of liberation for Kashmir, the Indian officials that were managing the kidnapping and beheading were aiming for a tactical goal: to ensure that the Kashmir issue becomes tainted with the word “terror”.

The wider strategic game of one-upping Pakistan was, as always, at the heart of India’s patronage of Al Faran. Many threads emerged from the Al Faran kidnapping episode, but the one that endured most was the saga of Masood Azhar as a key figure in the Pakistan-India relationship, and the landing of a hijacked Indian plane in Afghanistan, under the rule of the Taliban in 1999.

The 1990s’ Taliban were of course the hosts and principal patrons of Osama bin Laden. When Al Qaeda attacked the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998, it sealed the fate of Bin Laden. The US initiated a relentless diplomatic campaign to pursue Al Qaeda, and one of its most significant efforts finally bore fruit on October 15, 1999 when it managed to push through a resolution at the UN Security Council that established financial, weapons and travel restrictions on not only the Taliban, but anything that came within a mile of them. This resolution is called UNSC Resolution 1267.

India’s successful enactment of the same magic trick over several decades should not surprise Pakistani realists. But it should beg questions about the strategic, tactical and operational decision-making in Pakistan. How were the lessons of counterintelligence from the 1971 catastrophe forgotten so easily that Pakistan was a sitting duck for Indian information operations that tagged Kashmir as an epicentre for terrorism?

The passage of UNSC 1267 – which is the principal tool used by India in its diplomatic efforts to exact economic and diplomatic ruin upon Pakistan through tools such as the FATF – should also not have come as a surprise to anyone in Pakistan. At the passage of the resolution, Afghanistan’s Ambassador to the UN Ravan Farhaadi (who represented not the Taliban, but their opponents in Afghanistan) said that the text of the resolution, “signalled to the Taliban and their Pakistani mentors that the international community was concerned with the policy of Pakistan and the Taliban, which posed an immediate threat to international peace and security”. If that language sounds familiar, it is because it is. Farhaadi at the UN in 1999 was saying what many Afghans say in Kabul, and Doha today, over two decades later: that Pakistan is the sponsor and owner of the Afghan Taliban.

Should Pakistan support the Kashmiri struggle? Does Pakistan have legitimate interests in peace and stability in Afghanistan? Both questions merit answers that are unequivocally in the affirmative. But the caveats should be obvious: how Pakistan conducts itself matters. The intentions of India, as a nation-state and the Indians as a strategic community – no matter whether they are secular or Hindu extremist – are not hidden: India seeks the destruction of Pakistan.

One of the principal questions Pakistanis must ask is whether the degree of Pakistani preparation for India’s games, including its support for terrorism, is satisfactory.

Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs established a national committee to oversee the implementation of sanctions against individuals and entities designated by the UN Security Council 1267 in August 2018. UNSC Resolution 1267 was updated immediately after 9/11 in 2001, then again in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2011, 2015 and in 2017. Each time, the precision and reach of the impact of 1267 was improved (including the addition of Al Qaeda and eventually Daesh, to the original targeting of the Taliban). Yet it took Pakistan nineteen years to establish a formal mechanism recognizing the threats posed to the Pakistani people.

The announcement of unprecedented details about India’s support for terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a welcome change from a tradition of a lack of detail and a lack of preparation. But Pakistanis must remember when the seeds of India’s success in painting itself as a victim and painting Pakistan as the aggressor were sown. In the valley of Kashmir in 1995, and in the hallowed halls of the UN Security Council in 1999.

As the TLP’s protest demanding the expulsion of France’s ambassador continues to paralyze parts of the nation’s capital, the question is: what seeds can Pakistan plant today, during the twilight of 2020, that will lead to Western nations holding India to account for its litany of misdeeds and terror? How long will it take for the seeds to sprout and grow? And who will help Pakistan harvest that fruit?

If FM Qureshi and Maj Gen Iftikhar’s press conference are to have any impact at all, it is these questions that must be answered.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.