The dark horse has bolted out of the stable and is bucking and rearing but none of the cowboys around are trying to lasso it, forget saddling it. Pakistan Army Chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani’s allergy to India is now well out in the open, thanks to WikiLeaks. Mr Chris Alexander, Canada’s ambassador in Kabul from 2003 to 2005 and later deputy of the UN mission until 2009, said Gen. Kayani is calling the shots on Afghanistan and was prepared to support suicide attacks in Afghanistan’s cities. The Pakistan Army chief has even told President Hamid Karzai that he can broker a peace deal with the Taliban — only if Indian consulates in Afghanistan are closed. Mr Alexander is reported to have said that the Pakistan Army under Gen. Kayani has been sponsoring a large-scale, covert guerrilla war through Afghan proxies. “Their mission in Afghanistan is to keep Pashtun nationalism down, India out and Mr Karzai weak. The principal drivers of violence are no longer, if they ever were, inside Afghanistan... The ISI is the main driver of the conflict... Gen. Kayani and others will deny complicity. But as the WikiLeaks material demonstrates, their heavy-handed involvement is now obvious at all levels,” the Canadian diplomat told an American daily. Because of this policy, he said, “Reconciliation has failed to get off the ground: the Pakistan-based Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan — the official name for the Taliban and its allies — clearly prefer to fight.” Without Pakistani military support, he said, the Islamic Emirate’s combat units would collapse like a house of cards. “Peace and reconciliation would prosper,’’ he said.
Giving many examples of how Gen. Kayani controls the principle drivers of the Afghan violence, Mr Alexander said, “First, in February, Pakistan’s security forces began arresting a dozen or so Taliban leaders — whose presence on their soil they had always noisily denied — presumably because these insurgent commanders had shown genuine, independent interest in reconciliation. Second, Gen. Kayani, this year once again successfully resisted US pressure to launch military operations in Balochistan and North Waziristan, where the Islamic Emirate is based. Third, Gen. Kayani told Mr Karzai this spring that the condition for peace in Afghanistan would be the closing of several Indian consulates, while offering to broker deals with Islamic Emirate leaders, whom he considers a strategic asset. He said the Pakistan Army’s interference in Afghanistan violates the UN Charter and poses a threat to world peace. It deserves serious discussion in multilateral forums, including the UN.”
One of the greatest ironies in post-9/11 Afghanistan is that while India’s presence there is highly constructive, Pakistan’s is more than its exact opposite. India, which has cherished its historic civilisational links with Afghanistan and its people, was the first to resume diplomatic presence there to coordinate a very major and extensive reconstruction, food aid, new construction and multi-aspect assistance programme, which it has continued despite many bloody terrorist attacks, including on its embassy. Whereas India is creating valuable assets like the high-quality Zaranj-Delaram road constructed by the Border Roads Organisation and many other buildings, including the Afghan Parliament, the Pakistan Army, deployed as America’s “frontline ally in the war against terror” in Afghanistan has been busy 24x7 supporting and sustaining terror, with an ultimate aim of regaining control for its “strategic depth”. Its aim is also to destroy Afghan culture and peace and set up its own rule through the Taliban that it created and which specialises in twisting a good religion out of shape and the practice of medieval torture, particularly against women. The latest year-old example of mindless cruelty against women is a Taliban “court” sentencing young Aisha for leaving her home to escape torture by her husband and in-laws by having her husband to cut off her ears and nose. That she survived is a wonder and the latest issue of a US weekly features her on the cover.
While in Afghanistan, Pakistan’ infamous Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), earlier headed by Gen. Kayani, is indirectly responsible for the plights of many women like Aisha, in India’s Kashmir, Kayani’s other high-priority target area, the Pakistan Army and the ISI began working in tandem to destabilise the Valley, which enjoyed a spell of peace from 2004 till 2008. What has emerged after the recent ministerial talks fiasco is that the upping of the ante in the Valley in the past five to six weeks was done to ensure that a lot of pre-talks effort of trying to resolve some issues comes to naught.
Two photographs published in this daily recently amply convey the seriousness of the situation caused by the large-scale instigation in the Kashmir Valley. One is of a policeman stripped to his underwear escaping a worse plight, like being stoned continuously after falling almost to death. The other photograph of a lady and a young boy placing large boulders on a road to block it, defying curfew, is indeed more disturbing as it corroborates reports about the instigators network going about its ISI directed task of a well-organised and financed campaign of provocation by attacking the Central police posts and vehicles as well as stone-pelting and forcing the police to open fire, causing deaths. And while the separatists are playing by the script written for them by their Pakistani mentors, what is more irksome is the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) playing into Pakistan’s nefarious designs. Doctors and medics being targeted or a Sikh’s hair being chopped of are new tactics added to the instigators’ list. While the hair-chopping incident resulted in a protest shutdown being observed in Kathua, far down south in the plains, SOS messages on social networking websites, asking for food and blood are indicators of the damage and loss caused by shutdowns ordered by the separatists under their directors inside the Valley and across the Line of Control.
Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Pakistan’s conduit for funding terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir, while urging the state not to impose curfew reportedly said: “The next protest programme will be announced at the Idgah and a resolution will be passed to press India to resolve the Kashmir issue as per the UN resolutions… If people are able to display discipline at Idgah, half of our struggle is won.” The Idgah, a ground in downtown Srinagar, is where special prayers like Id are offered, has been the separatists’ platform for inciting public against India, since the 1990s.
Why have the instigators etcetera not been identified and appropriately punished and how come just about 70 stone-pelters have been apprehended? New Delhi should be very clear about the clock in the Valley being turned back over the past two years following substantial troop reduction, to the late 1980s.
If talking — even to Geelani and co. — does not help and if Indian Kashmir is to be saved, then a very serious review of Article 370, which anyway ridicules India’s stand of Jammu and Kashmir being an inseparable part of it, must not be ruled out.
Anil Bhat, a retired Army officer, is a defence and security analyst based in New Delhi