A joint campaign to root out terror, then summit talks

International Herald Tribune
July 5, 2002

When Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, dismissed his Kashmir department head at the notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency last week, he intended to send a signal to nuclear neighbor India that he was heeding Washington's call to button up mercenary infiltration along the disputed Line of Control. Instead, he unleashed a new wave of rage inside Pakistan's increasingly raucous jihadi network and scuttled a carefully orchestrated effort by a rational cadre of fundamentalists to offer New Delhi a comprehensive 60-day cease-fire in the Kashmir Valley.

A pragmatic blueprint is urgently needed for dealing with Kashmir - where a million heavily armed troops still stand eyeball-to-eyeball - in order to keep attention focused on stamping out the terrorist militias that are spreading around the globe from South Asia.

Given India's aversion to third-party mediation over Kashmir and Pakistan's almost suicidal method of drawing the international community's attention to the dispute, a bilateral framework is needed.

Working together under a common definition of who the bad guys are and using American ground-monitoring technology, both sides should launch an all-out assault on the most hardened "Arabized" foot soldiers who escaped U.S. bombing raids in Afghanistan's mountains. Most of these men are already in Indian-held Kashmir. Pakistan's co-operation in identifying them and their Pakistani and Kashmiri converts is vital.

The success of joint operations to root out terrorists could lay important groundwork for a new India-Pakistan summit meeting in the late summer, even if large troop deployments remained at the Line of Control to sate hawkish domestic lobbies. The meeting, convened in Islamabad, this time at Musharraf's invitation, could pick up where the Agra summit meeting left off. India's newly appointed deputy prime minister, Lal Krishna Advani, a strident critic of Musharraf, should be chief among the invited guests.

To facilitate New Delhi's acceptance of the summit proposal, Musharraf must sacrifice even larger legions of his militants, and perhaps some more army hard-liners as well.

Pakistan's religious parties will continue to protest; let them. If civil war and Musharraf's removal is what they intend for Pakistan, a last effort at peace in Kashmir will not deter them anyway. Rather than responding to Indian demands to hand over terrorists on New Delhi's list - something no sovereign leader could do - Musharraf should prepare his own inventory of men infiltrated into Indian-held Kashmir by Inter-Services Intelligence and offer it to India as a good-faith gesture. Such a list is readily available. Inter-Services Intelligence records the identity of every man who crosses over into the valley in order to compensate families should a jihadi be martyred.

Similarly, India's prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, could prepare a list of Hindu agitators who have for years fueled sectarian violence on the streets of Karachi and Lahore and hand it over to Musharraf.

There is a precedent. In 1989, Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistani prime minister at the time, sacrificed Sikh extremists agitating in Indian Punjab when she invited Rajiv Ghandi to Islamabad and handed over a list of 400 Sikh extremists known to have crossed the border from Pakistan into India. Within six months, the Sikh uprising in Indian Punjab was over.

The current leaders of Pakistan and India should then define a final framework for resolving Kashmir's future. In order for the structural outline to work, India must recognize that Pakistan simply has too much blood invested in Kashmir to ever walk away quietly.

Allowing Pakistan to emphasize how its army's "principled support" of the Kashmiri people empowered them to earn their rights from India, whatever they ultimately are, is a small price for New Delhi to pay if a structural solution can be found. Only Pakistan's army can make peace in Kashmir, and make it stick.

Equally, Pakistan must understand the ramifications for India as a confederation if it were to allow one Muslim-majority state to break off and accede to its neighbor. Disintegration of an already fragile union would not be far behind.

The final phase of the framework must revolve around the political needs of the Kashmiri people. India bears unique responsibility in this regard. Rather than systematically dismantling the Kashmiri opposition in the valley, India needs to hold transparently free and fair elections there in October. International monitors must be invited in to observe.

In empowering a revitalized Kashmiri people as the central partners for peace, a logical formula for their existence within autonomous zones on both sides of the disputed border will eventually become self-evident.

The existing Line of Control could serve as a starting point for the international border separating India and Pakistan, and could then be modified through electoral means over a five- or 10-year period in such a way that Pakistan fulfills its yearning for some of the people of the valley, while India maintains its long-standing objective of territorial integrity and identity as a secular state.

India and Pakistan have a moral responsibility to their people, and to the world, which these nuclear powers seem wont to periodically blackmail with their weapons of mass destruction, to set down a framework for finally - and bilaterally - resolving the Kashmir dispute.

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