Trump And The Rocky Road Ahead From Pahalgam

New Delhi will have to work through a set of unexpected challenges that have emerged consequent to the punitive expedition that was undertaken after the Pahalgam terror attack, which had Pakistan’s fingerprints all over it.

The Prime Minister promised that he would go to the ends of the earth to find and punish the perpetrators of that dastardly attack. The fact is, after the ceasefire, we have no additional information as to what happened to these perpetrators or their handlers. Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri alluded to intelligence in that area, but he wasn’t very explicit about whether we had been able to pin down all the particulars for further action. In the absence of information regarding the fate of the attackers, questions that cry out for a satisfactory answer are bound to swirl. Where are those perpetrators now, and have they been neutralised, and if not, where are we on that process?

It has been carefully put out that the ceasefire between New Delhi and Islamabad is solely the result of parleys between the two Director Generals of Military Operations, and that the call materialised from the Pakistan side. The suggestion is the Pakistanis sued for peace. Yet, it is spinning out as though they cried Uncle Sam, which is not nearly the same thing. In terms of sequence though, President Donald Trump went public with it, claiming credit for the American role in the matter even before Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar or Vikram Misri had a chance to break the development to the audiences here. Whether we describe the American announcement as mediation or interlocution is only going to be viewed as a matter of semantics. It is pertinent to point out that Islamabad was from the start playing to get the Americans in as the middlemen, as was the situation many years ago, and we were just beginning to get used to the idea that there were no middlemen, but now we seem about to have it exactly that way, where the sudden denouement that we saw on Saturday at our western border and Line of Control was actually the result of a flurry of phone calls from the Trump administration to this part of the world. The most important one was perhaps the American call to the Pakistani army chief, General Asif Munir. He proved most amenable because the Americans had taken the bait, hook, line and sinker, and landed right in the muddle.

Now that Trump has been able to willy-nilly inveigle himself in the middle of India and Pakistan, the question, therefore, arises: Has New Delhi been able to extract a promise that Pakistan will not engender or facilitate or create conditions to perpetrate another Pahalgam? New Delhi has an opportunity home of pushing this point when, if and as the Americans have claimed, the ground has been set up for a meeting between India and Pakistan on a “neutral” ground. The word “neutral” could well be more loaded than it seems. Yet, there is an opportunity here, which was not there before, to pin Islamabad down, to hold it accountable.

The downside is we have been there before when President Pervez Musharraf promised prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee that Pakistan would not allow its soil for activities of terror against India. We have had this so-called TRF commit the Pahalgam atrocity. It works for a while, then it stops working, a bit like straightening a dog’s tail. While New Delhi’s attacks on the nine terror targets were exemplary, were they sufficient to discourage Pakistan from continuing to breed terrorists in every nook and cranny, like cockroaches? Were New Delhi’s actions enough to force change in Pakistan’s behaviour?

Evidence could well be very slight in that department, unfortunately. The latest IMF tranche to Pakistan suggests that not even the interlocutors seem to have brought the argument that the funds could be diverted to terror activities. Unless of course, there is a new level of scrutiny of the way the funds are going to be spent that prevents such an outcome.

It is a piquant situation that confronts us. Trump is in the middle of it now. He is promising to have enlarged trade relations with Pakistan as well, and it is a unilateral offer. The Pakistanis didn’t even have to ask for it. Imagine. As Trump puts it, “While not even discussed, I am going to increase trade, substantially, with both of these great nations. Additionally, I will work with you both to see if, after a “thousand years”, a solution can be arrived at concerning Kashmir.” We know that Trump is no student of history, but here is the thin edge of the wedge. We also know that Pakistan is a past master at manipulating America, and here America is once again being seen as bailing out a country that harboured Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad even while it was helping America fight Osama’s legions. We could well be looking at the re-introduction of another hyphenated era, something that our strategic community was saying had become a thing of the past.

A considerable amount of diplomatic energy will no doubt have to be squandered on this. Has it put Kashmir back in the front and centre? Pakistan will certainly do its damnedest now that it has Trump’s attention, and he has begun signalling it as well. New Delhi can only hope that Trump doesn’t start muttering ‘Kashmir’ along with ‘Ukraine’ and ‘Gaza’ in his sleep. It is not clear how the hostilities, which have played out for the younger generation in Pakistan, will affect their perception and consolidate the peace constituency. But the opening inadvertently created by our response to Pahalgam certainly provides the opportunity for drawing up a new and very limited framework of engagement with Pakistan, a framework that perhaps works to New Delhi’s advantage.