When it comes to peace overtures from Pakistan, it is difficult—and perhaps foolish—not to be cynical. Hence the recent offer to open the Kartarpur corridor for pilgrims wanting to visit the final resting place of Guru Nanak, a long-standing Indian demand, should be viewed in the context of Pakistan’s attempts to revive the secessionist Khalistani movement in Punjab, as well as the vain hope it would change New Delhi’s position that formal talks and terror cannot go together.
India’s polite but blunt refusal to accept the subsequent ‘invitation’ to attend the summit of SAARC, a regional grouping dead in the water since 2014, in Islamabad later this year shows it is unwilling to change its stand. Then, in what appears to be a significant U-turn in its long-held policy, Pakistan’s foreign minister this week admitted that India had a role in the peace process in Afghanistan. Ever since Partition, Islamabad has bristled at any Indian presence in Afghanistan, no matter how benign, seeing it as an attempt to ‘encircle’ its western flank.
Indian missions and interests in Afghanistan have been targets of terrorists backed by the Pakistani deep state. Even Pakistan’s ‘support’ to the US-led war on terror in Afghanistan was partly conditional on there being no Indian role in the country.
And recently, it also forged a China-Pakistan-Russia Trilateral on peace in Afghanistan, which ironically enough, excluded Afghanistan till recently. Unfortunately for Islamabad, Kabul believes, with good reason, that Pakistan is the problem, and not a solution to its issue with terror and the Taliban, the bunch of bigoted zealots who ruled Afghanistan for nearly a decade until they were kicked out by the US in less than two weeks of bombing in 2001.
If Pakistan genuinely wants to pursue peace in Afghanistan, and believes India is a part of the solution, then the first thing it needs to do is allow a land-transit corridor to facilitate the movement of goods between India and landlocked Afghanistan. Anything else would be nothing but strategic garbage.