‘Dead Horse’ Business

Going by the transcripts of telephone conversations between terrorists holed up in a hotel near Lal Chowk in Srinagar and their Pakistan-based handlers last week, it is clear that the siege was intended to bring Kashmir back into focus. As published in a newspaper, when the encounter with security forces was in full swing, Junaid, a Pakistani handler of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, told one of the terrorists that ‘‘aapne ek murde ghode mein dobara jaan daali hai (you have again breathed life into a dead horse)’’. The ‘‘dead horse’’ is Kashmir that Pakistan-based terrorists, backed by the Pakistan Army’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), would enliven by hook or by crook so as to prompt Pakistan to shift its focus from its tribal areas and Afghanistan to the Kashmir valley. The equation is simple: start fresh trouble in Kashmir so that India mobilizes troops in the valley and along the border with Pakistan that will naturally compel Pakistan to move its troops to the border, thus freeing itself from the US-declared war on the Taliban-Al Qaeda combine. No longer does the Pakistan Army want to play any role in that inconvenient war. The proxy war being attempted in Kashmir is a sly ISI project for Pakistan to disentangle itself from the so-called war on terror and for the Pakistan Army to be in the good book of the greater jihad society. Therefore, it will now not do for the Barack Obama administration to merely create a hype about its ‘‘Afpak’’ policy without assessing the ground reality — that is, without acknowledging the fact that Pakistan’s intentions are sinister and its participation in the offensive against the Taliban and Al Qaeda is only a compulsion. It will now not do for the US to pretend that all is well with Pakistan.

The Pakistan Army’s (which includes the ISI) ‘‘dead horse’’ business should also be interpreted as an attempt to deter India’s march towards becoming a power to be reckoned with in the comity of nations; to create hurdles on its marvellous growth trajectory; to anyhow stop India from being what it is poised to be — far more powerful in all ways than Pakistan despite they being born at the same time. It is difficult for Pakistan to come to terms with the Indian reality because it is a complete failure as compared to India. Vast swathes of Pakistani territory are absolutely anarchic with the Taliban-Al Qaeda terrorists ruling the roost while it is such a huge drain on the already unstable economy of that country to take part in a war that is not its own, despite US aid. And when it comes to US aid, the Pakistan Army would rather use it to concretize the anti-India infrastructure, including that of jihadi terrorism to be exported to India. The US is not unaware of the clandestine diversion of its aid by Pakistan for military and jihadi build-up against India. The US knows everything. But it can do little except for the conditionality that Pakistan is supposed to respect but which can be easily violated. The US also cannot do much about the ISI’s shenanigans because it is the same ISI whose services the superpower had used during the Cold War era against the erstwhile Soviet Union in Afghanistan to train and arm the same category of mujahideen who have now evolved into monsters out to gobble their very master. The bottom line, therefore, is that India itself will have to destroy the ‘dead horse’ enterprise. And it does not need sermons from anyone — it is fighting criminal terrorism. THE SENTINEL