Religious zeal injected easily in Pak bloodstream will be hard to extract

Suggestions to take action on Pakistani soil by Indians need to be treated with the contempt that responsible people reserve for ignorant and extremist ideologues. It was a bad idea after 26/11 and it is a bad idea now.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | Int'l Desk
Source/Credit: The Times of India | Delhi
By Mosharraf Zaidi | May 4, 2011

Now that Osama bin Laden is in the bag, the big question is how much the Pakistani authorities knew? About bin Laden’s whereabouts, about the intelligence operation that had identified his couriers, about the surveillance that began in earnest in August of last year, and about the actual ope r at i o n that took place on May 1 in the dead of the Abbottabad night.

From the Pakistani and US authorities, there seems to be a well-coordinated effort to create the impression that Pakistan was kept in the dark about the operation. This suits the narrative of an unreliable Pakistani intelligence community that may have tipped off the al-Qaida chief.
It also creates plausible deniability for Pakistani authorities, who have, no doubt, learnt the lesson from the real-life Shootout at Lokhandwala scenes enacted at the Red Mosque in Islamabad in 2007. The fallout from Red Mosque continues to haunt Pakistani tombs, shrines, mosques, universities, markets and street corners. Just because the ‘exclusion of Pakistan’ fable suits both countries however, doesn’t make it necessarily true. The symbiosis of the dysfunctional US-Pakistan relationship is one of the qualities that sustains it. That bin Laden was alive and well till May 1 because the Pakistanis were helping him, and that he is dead and buried, because the Pakistanis helped kill him —both can be simultaneously true. And they probably are.

Duality is something that the Pakistani state must now contend with for the better part of a generation. Much time, effort and resources were invested in building the edifice of a second-line defence — or infrastructure of terror, if you will — to contend with the bigger, richer, and almost routinely smarter India. It will take some doing to dismantle it. Religious zeal was easy to inject into the Pakistani bloodstream, it will be difficult to extract. The process cannot and must not be rushed. A superpower with some experience in how the world works, would understand this. It appears it’s the case with the US, whose topsy turvy relationship with Pakistan is not going to disintegrate suddenly.

On the other hand, it appears that India’s ambitions for a regular role in world affairs beyond the showing off of IT services behemoths at the World Economic Forum require some time before coming to fruition. India is, by size, by cultural richness and depth, and by history and anthropology, fully due a global leadership role. But global leaders are innovators and jump starters. They help ignite prosperity and security in their own neighborhoods --- think US with Mexico and Canada. The glee and hubris that is so palpable, at least among the Delhi policy elite unfortunately, suggests that there is plenty of partition baggage left, both from 1947 and 1971.

Pakistan is not in a position to teach India how to conduct itself. India is a more successful economy. But India has a substantial number of challenges that it needs to address. While it has had tremendous success in dealing with insurgencies in cases like Punjab, it has failed miserably in others, like Kashmir.

Pakistan's current dilemma is that even if all the wisdom in India, or the world, were to somehow be injected into the Pakistani elite, there is little it could do functionally that would reflect immediately on the ground.Short term steps that have visible outputs, tend to produce long term outcomes that are dangerous and often difficult to predict.

So yes, some elements of Pakistan may have harbored bin Laden, and may be harboring others like him that India is interested in prosecuting. But India is not the US. It has neither the leverage over Pakistan that Uncle Sam enjoys, nor an understanding of Pakistan that would enable it to conduct a reasonable calculus of the pros and cons of a direct military action in Pakistani territory. Suggestions to take action on Pakistani soil by Indians need to be treated with the contempt that responsible people reserve for ignorant and extremist ideologues. It was a bad idea after 26/11 and it is a bad idea now.

The path of slow, gradual and constructive engagement, which is the one that PM Manmohan Singh has chosen is the only option India has to gain influence and leverage in Pakistan. Luckily, it also happens to be the right choice.

    Mosharraf Zaidi is a political analyst based in Islamabad

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