Does terror have a new address? Was Delhi caught napping as Pakistan’s terror machine came alive after a five-year hiatus with four back-to-back attacks—not in the Kashmir Valley as earlier—but in its new hunting ground of Jammu?
Pakistan’s Army is returning to its old playbook, putting Kashmir front and centre of the long-running India-Pakistan confrontation, after a ceasefire agreement in 2021 between former Pakistan Army chief Gen Qamar Jawed Bajwa and India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval was tested repeatedly, in word and spirit, and finally frayed.
What prompted this terror pivot to Jammu? And how will India respond?
The plan is being touted as the brainchild of Pakistan Army chief Gen Syed Asim Munir. His primary aim is to whip up popular sentiment for the Kashmir cause, win back the people’s respect. The blame for popular former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s electoral defeat and incarceration has been parked at the unpopular and deeply-divided army’s door. For the first time, security forces and the army-backed government in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir faced street protests. On the surface, they were over a hike in power tariffs. In reality, it was barely-disguised anger against the armed forces.
But the real mover behind Pakistan’s reactivation of terror attacks could well be Beijing, which made its displeasure clear during a tense China visit by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on June 7 over India being able to move some 50,000 troops from the once-hot Line of Control to the border with China.
The Iran-India link added to China’s ire. “If you do a Chabahar with Iran, can you expect anything less than a Jammu?” a senior Pakistan analyst asked, referring to India’s recently-concluded 10-year deal on running Iran’s deepwater port. Chabahar could reduce the China-run Gwadar port and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which runs through insurgency-ridden Balochistan, to irrelevance.
Given the country’s fragile economy and depleting resources, the Pakistan Army, deprived of billions of dollars in US aid, has been unable to fund, train and arm a jihadist army on the same scale as earlier. China, set on using Pakistan to keep India engaged on its western and eastern borders, is the new backseat driver. Pakistan’s other mentors, Saudi Arabia—where Munir served as a brigadier—and the UAE must think twice before investing in the economic resurgence of a Pakistan falling back on its old ways. It’s not that the US has not backed Pakistan—quietly securing World Bank funding, helping move Pakistan off the Financial Action Task Force grey list, and after Munir’s confabulations with Washington after taking office, rewarding Pakistan for its role as a conduit for arms to Ukraine. Whether Munir can continue playing the US off against China is the big question.
For the Modi government, which secured Kashmir Valley from terror attacks, throwing a similar security ring around Jammu is immediate imperative. It must begin by ensuring the safety of Amarnath pilgrims. The first attack on a bus carrying pilgrims to Vaishno Devi, which killed nine people and injured 33 in Reasi, should have set alarm bells ringing. Instead, it took three more terror strikes before the message hit home that Pakistan had changed the rules of engagement overnight.
Timed to coincide with Modi’s return to a third term, after he pulled off an incident-free parliamentary poll in J&K that had been integrated into the Indian Union as a Union Territory, Pakistan took the jihadist route to signal it would no longer look the other way on the abrogation of Article 370. The restoration of statehood was the concession Gen. Bajwa repeatedly sought during back-channel talks with Doval, to which the NSA, now reappointed to a third term, made no firm commitment.
With Reasi coming within hours of Nawaz Sharif’s effusive congratulatory message to "Modiji," the military was also saying it was not on the same page as Nawaz. His message to “replace hate with hope” and to “seize the opportunity to shape the destiny of the two billion people of South Asia” was, after all, nothing but a thinly-veiled call to resume dialogue. He was markedly different in tone from Shehbaz, who echoed the military-establishment’s frost over Pakistan-baiting during polling.
Nawaz, who has reached out to virtually every Indian prime minister, from Inder Kumar Gujral and Atal Bihari Vajpayee to Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi, had only last week blamed former Army chief Gen Pervez Musharraf—a man he’d hand-picked for the job, but who subsequently overthrew him—for derailing the 1999 Lahore peace agreement. He was probably preparing the ground for a reach-out to Modi. Except, much as the Indian leader’s truncated majority limits his room to manoeuvre, Nawaz’s own position could be equally restricted with Munir growing in stature.
It’s unclear if the army kept Shehbaz fully in the loop on Jammu, but the Pakistani premier’s recent meet with the US-based Kashmir Federation Ghulam Nabi Fai, who fronted a US-initiated back channel with the separatist Hurriyat Conference in the 1990s, was reportedly sparked after Delhi’s alleged string of hits on jihadists within Pakistan.
Jammu has also set off speculation that while Munir may have no one but the Sharifs—who hand-picked him and remain committed to extending his tenure—to front the ‘hybrid’ government and counter Imran, the army, unnerved by the government’s unpopularity over rising prices and anger over the army co-opting a major share of the budget, may induct a new face—a hard-nosed economist backed by Washington—to front the government.
Pakistan is torn—facing pressure from China to up the ante against India and from the US to shut down its terror cells. Falling back on reactivating the battle-hardened veterans of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed—who were shifting to an Islamic State (Khorasan) flush with funds and state-of-the art weaponry—only raises the spectre of war between the two nuclear-armed nations. Recent Track 2 dialogues show India will not hesitate to retaliate if Pakistan repeats a Pulwama or its 2015 entry into an Indian airbase.
It is Nawaz’s long-held plan for restoring trade with India that Pakistan should push for and not allow itself to be coerced by China into heating up the border. That would be a huge misread.
(Views are personal)
(neenagopal@gmail.com)
Neena Gopal | Foreign policy analyst