AsiaScoop   

Kashmir Ambush

Diplomats, Charles de Gaulle once said, are useful only in fair weather — “as soon as it rains, they drown in every drop.”

Although the monsoons in the Indian subcontinent are still a good six months away, Richard Holbrooke, the new U.S. special envoy to South Asia, is likely to get soaking wet if he tries to broker a settlement between India and Pakistan over their longstanding dispute over Kashmir.

Holbrooke should learn a lesson from British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who suffered exactly that fate during a recent visit to India. In a January 15 speech at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel, one of the targets of last November’s deadly attacks that claimed 195 lives, Miliband suggested that the tragedy in India’s most cosmopolitan city was the result of New Delhi’s failure to resolve its conflict with Pakistan over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.

Miliband went on to denounce the post-9/11 “war on terror,” arguing that such nomenclature had done “more harm than good.” It was an odd admission for a dignitary whose government consistently supported the “war on terror,” particularly in Iraq, until as lately as a few months ago, and it raised suspicions that Miliband found it expedient to disown the war, now that a new administration in the U.S. favors a more nuanced approach to fighting terrorism.

Miliband’s remarks ignited a diplomatic row in India, not least because he also came off as disrespectful and patronizing in his closed-door meetings with Indian officials. The prominent Economist newsweekly observed that the fiasco “proved Britain’s continuing ability to cause offense,” and Indian commentators labeled Miliband’s visit the worst by a British foreign secretary since India’s independence in 1947 created Muslim-majority Pakistan, and with it, the festering Kashmir crisis.

In sharp contrast, Miliband’s February 3 trip to Washington, where he earned the distinction of being the first foreign minister to hold face-to-face talks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was by all accounts a success. Predictably, Kashmir did not figure in Miliband’s talks with Clinton, although Pakistan and Afghanistan did. However, Clinton, and especially Holbrooke, are likely to hear much about Kashmir when they visit Pakistan. Both would do well to note that the Kashmir dispute has historically been graveyard for conflict mediators.

Part of the reason lies in the potent ideological mix underpinning the conflict: Pakistan claims Muslim-majority Kashmir under the so-called “two-nation theory” that has always been Pakistan’s raison d’être — the idea that Muslims cannot coexist with India’s overwhelmingly dominant Hindu population. India counters that not only does Kashmir have a substantial non-Muslim population of Hindus and Buddhists but that the state is a crucial test of India’s secularism, which has allowed some 150 million Muslims to live in what is one of the world’s most pluralistic nations.

“Although I understand the current difficulties, resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms, and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the (Taliban) threat on their western borders,” Miliband said.

There are two key reasons why a resolution to the Kashmir conflict will not help contain terrorism. First, extremist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Tayiba, which is responsible for the Mumbai attacks and is trained and funded by Pakistan’s military intelligence wing, use Kashmir only to justify their violence. In reality, these groups are part of a global jihadi network and are less concerned about Kashmir’s welfare than, say, the average Texan is about misery in North Korea. (Besides, the genuine grievances of Kashmiris, of which there are many, are being addressed bilaterally by India and Pakistan over such issues as increased trade and contact among Kashmiris on both sides of the India-Pakistan border.)

Second, these groups aren’t Kashmiri at their core. The Lashkar-e-Tayiba, for example, comprises of Punjabis from Pakistan — and it strains the imagination to believe they would close their training camps and go back to work (that was never there in the first place) once the Kashmir dispute is settled. If anything, they are likely to unleash their violence elsewhere.

Although U.S. officials have clarified that Kashmir won’t be on Holbrooke’s South Asian agenda and that he will only try to encourage a dialogue between India and Pakistan over the Himalayan region, “the bulldozer,” as Holbrooke is nicknamed, may find it hard to stick to his brief.

Here’s why: When he pressures the Pakistan army to do more than it has been doing to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda at home, Pakistan’s generals are likely to make any such efforts conditional on Indian action over Kashmir. Of course, they will do this knowing full well that India won’t make any concessions — and then Pakistan will have an ostensibly justifiable excuse for not fighting terrorism as aggressively as it should be.

About the Author

Ajay Singh is a writer, former tea planter and chicken farmer who began his career in journalism at the New Delhi bureau of the Asian Wall Street Journal in 1988. Since then, he has worked as a reporter for the Associated Press, Time Inc.’s Hong Kong-based newsweekly Asiaweek, and India’s leading newsweekly India Today. Singh is also the author of “Give ’Em Hell, Hari,” a postcolonial East-West comedy that was Waterstone Book of the Month in Britain in March 1996 and on the bestseller lists in Hong Kong, Ireland and Scotland.