In 2023, if wedding bells ring for any Pakistani leader, especially 33-year-old Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, don’t expect Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make a flying visit as he did when he landed in Lahore in 2015 for former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s granddaughter’s nuptials.
Not after the foreign minister unleashed an impolitic diatribe against Modi, putting paid to whatever little hope there was of any revival of ties.
Admittedly, a summit a la Lahore was never on the cards despite back-channel talks initiated by former Pakistan army chief Gen (retd) Qamar Javed Bajwa, which brought Pakistan-sponsored infiltration down across the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir through 2020-22.
But that, too, is at an end. While Pakistan remains a convenient whipping boy for the Modi government and a Free Trade Agreement, opening borders for a free flow of goods more difficult than before, it is the recent uptick in violence in J&K that has all but derailed the Bajwa-Modi plan for an unheralded peace in Kashmir in 2023.
The internal upheaval within Pakistan has left a weakened political leadership. Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, as much as the Pakistan Army, which pulls the levers of power, is consumed with ensuring former prime minister Imran Khan does not return. India is not a priority.
Khan, who lost the army’s confidence, was removed from office in April and now faces moves to disqualify him from office as a prelude to the induction of an interim government run by economic experts in the coming months than the elections that he wants.
Through it all, it must be said Bajwa did come close to pulling off a backroom deal with India on the one issue that has bedevilled relations. Bajwa’s inner circle had consistently claimed that a trusted Delhi interlocutor promised that the abrogation of Article 370 and Article 35A in August 2019 - which scrapped J&K’s statehood and drew international opprobrium - would, at best, be temporary; and that when the situation in J&K improved, it would be revoked, Article 371 imposed, giving it the face-saver of being on par with the North-East states. This would be followed by elections.
While none of this has been openly acknowledged by Delhi, the recent spike in targeted killings of police and government officials, mostly Kashmiri Pandits and officials from outside the state, has put paid to any such plans as the situation on the ground worsens.
The big question is whether terror cells, dormant through the Bajwa years, have been reactivated by the Pakistan army under its new chief Gen Asim Munir, in prod to Delhi to get moving, despite the prevailing view that Munir – and the Inter-Services Intelligence - would keep to Bajwa’s line. Could it be an organic reaction by terror groups to derail the process of normalisation? Or, as Afghan analysts believe – is it the handiwork of the Taliban and its proxies that see Kashmir as ripe for the picking?
The Doha Shura, bankrolled by Qatar, its fighters armed with weapons, drones and ammunition the US left behind when exiting the Afghan theatre, is seeking to carve its path, independent of Pakistan, which has lost control of its key protégé, the Haqqani network that until recently wielded greater influence over the Doha and Kandahar factions.
But, as a close aide to the National Resistance Front leader Ahmed Massood, son of the legendary Tajik leader Ahmad Shah Massood, who kept the Taliban at bay through the ’90s, warned: “The time for a jihad within Afghanistan is over. The Islamic Emirate is a reality. The focus of the 20-odd terror groups operating within the country and along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is to expand its jihad to Central Asia, Pakistan and India.”
J&K has long been in the cross-hairs of terror groups such as ISIS-Khorasan, which works in tandem with Al Qaeda, which has some 5,000 odd Arab fighters under its command. Groups active in Northern Afghanistan, Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and its provincial capital Peshawar, and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan (FATA) include the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL). Giving Taliban heft is the 10,000-strong Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which seeks to carve FATA out of Pakistan and has, under the benign eye of the Taliban, sanctuaries and safe havens on both sides of the border. Both violently object to FATA’s recent merger into KP province and Pakistan’s strong-arm tactics to make them accept the Durand Line as the International Border.
That has manifested itself in repeated attacks on Pakistan government and army training facilities, border posts and the actual fence, with the most recent being a suicide bomb attack by two bombers on a border check-post in North Waziristan on December 29.
Newly powerful, no longer dependent on Pakistan for funding or arms, the Taliban’ worm’ has turned. Its return to power was almost a given after it was allowed to open an office in the Qatari capital of Doha in 2013 in the last year of the Hamid Karzai presidency under the aegis of Washington’s special envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad. Khalilzad negotiated a safe withdrawal of US troops from that country, keeping the elected Ashraf Ghani government out of the loop on the actual quid pro quo, and in return, handed Afghanistan back to the regressive group that Pakistan had nurtured for over 20 years, on August 15, 2021.
It was seen as a huge win for Pakistan and a setback to India, which had hobbled Pakistan’s ‘strategic depth’ strategy and its virtual colonisation of Afghanistan with some success. Except that the Talibs in power have made a tactical shift. Stoking the debate on women’s rights - on which insiders say, they will make a predictable concession to win brownie points in 2023 – Kabul is shifting attention away from the detention and torture of hundreds of young Afghans and deploying Karzai and others to divest themselves of the terror tag and gain international legitimacy.
The Taliban’s use of the Haq Do Tehreek and TTP, to blockade Gwadar port and Makran in Pakistan’s Balochistan, prompting an exodus of Chinese workers and jeopardising investment, critical to Pakistan’s economy, which is in danger of defaulting on its external debt, consumes the Sharif government’s attention, even as it ties the army down to fire-fighting the newfound threat.
The Taliban blowback, the unexpected enemy in the house, could derail not just Pakistan. But singe India as well.
Neena Gopal
Foreign policy analyst and author