Amid an exaggerated obsession with a return to hyphenation between New Delhi and Islamabad by the international community, India is dangerously unconcerned about the resurgence of an existential threat to its national security.
The so-called 12-day war between Israel and Iran—as indeed other global events following the return of Donald Trump to the White House—has revived the idea of ‘good terrorists vs bad terrorists’ in international strategies and diplomacy. It is a menacing idea that the US promoted in South Asia and the Arab world for more than three decades until Trump first became US president in 2017. India paid a big price for it as the country that suffered most from terrorism in those decades. Now the spectre is back. But New Delhi’s response so far has been to ignore it, hoping it will go away by pretending that the threat does not exist.
The Trump administration knows very well that Pakistan is a state sponsor of terrorism. But in choosing to ignore it and inviting the patron saint of such terrorism today, Field Marshal Asim Munir, to the White House, the US is glorifying him as a good terrorist.
Similarly, Trump has lifted sanctions against Syria although the country’s new regime is headed by a man who is a terrorist now in a pacifist avatar. The new Syrian regime has been engaged in genocide of Christians and the Alawaite minority. They have kidnapped scores of women from Damascus. But, for the US and the European Union, President Ahmed al Sharaa is now a good terrorist.
I first heard the term ‘good terrorists vs bad terrorists’ from Frank Wisner II, who was US ambassador to India and later a lobbyist for the Indian embassy in Washington. I was present during a conversation between Wisner and J N Dixit a few months after the latter had retired as foreign secretary, where the ambassador told Dixit in so many words that Pakistanis were “good terrorists” because they had consistently supported US interests in South and Central Asia. Dixit, a veteran of Pakistan and Afghanistan affairs, challenged Wisner and told him that he was promoting a treacherous idea, a sort of double-edged sword. The ambassador said this had been American policy and would remain so.
In a haunting twist of irony, Iran’s ambassador to India when Dixit was foreign secretary had lobbied for a similar approach to terrorism. In an enlightening sub-section on Iran in Hamid Ansari’s autobiography, By Many a Happy Accident: Recollections of a Life, the former vice president recalls the deep suspicions which India and Iran harboured against one another when he arrived in Tehran as ambassador in 1990. Such was the trust deficit that even functionaries in the supreme leader’s office in Qom were refused visas to visit India.
The conversation between Dixit and Iran’s then ambassador in New Delhi, Alireza Sheikhattar, took place after Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao had successfully pushed through his pet policy of disentangling Iran from Pakistan’s vice-like grip. Dixit’s visit to Tehran in 1992 was a turning point in bilateral relations and made Iran a trustworthy friend of India until Rao’s successors, Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi, pushed Iran back into Pakistan’s embrace. Words and actions by Iran and Pakistan during and after the Israel-US attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities make it clear that Tehran is back in Islamabad’s embrace. The clock has been turned back to pre-1992 years.
Sheikhattar told Dixit that given enough latitude within India, his country, as the fountainhead of Shia faith, could wean away Shias in Kashmir from taking the path of secession and violence against New Delhi’s interests. Iran could also be a benign influence on Shias elsewhere in India, such as Uttar Pradesh. In other words, followers of this branch of Islam could be groomed as good terrorists to take on pro-Pakistan separatists, who are mostly Sunni Muslims. Shias constitute a quarter of Kashmir’s population. Shia voters in Lucknow ensured thumping victories for Atal Bihari Vajpayee in five Lok Sabha elections. Sheikhattar assured Dixit that he had triumphantly practised shades of such policy when he was governor of Iran’s restive West Azerbaijan and Kurdistan provinces for five years shortly after the Islamic revolution.
The conversation was relayed to me then by a primary source who was present in an official capacity. Accounts of this conversation would be in the archives of the ministry of external affairs.
After India became an elected member of the United Nations Security Council in 2011 after a gap of 20 years, Hardeep Singh Puri, the permanent representative to the UN, became chair of the UN’s Counter Terrorism Committee at one point. He pushed very hard to eliminate the distinction between good and bad terrorists. He had an ally in Susan Rice, his American counterpart at the UN. It has been India’s conviction that there are no good terrorists, but the policy has not made much headway because of expediency in geopolitics.
In Trump’s first presidential tenure, he tried to follow the Indian line—out of his own convictions. But he was inexperienced and the deep state that surrounded him did not let Trump change policy. Having been elected as an anti-war president last year, Trump once again wished in the initial months of his current presidency to eliminate terrorism—whatever the variety. The 12-day bombings in the Gulf, in which Trump participated, have now made him a war-time president no different from his numerous predecessors. And recent events have made it clear that Trump is resurrecting the policy of patronising, training and arming the so-called good terrorists. He is being overwhelmed by the deep state once more.
For India, this is not a pretty picture. At some stage in the Trump presidency, Munir will ask for his proverbial pound of flesh for whatever Pakistan does covertly and overtly for the Pentagon and other White House agencies. In his June 10 testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Michael Kurilla, commander of the United States Central Command, more than hinted at this while praising Pakistan. Munir’s pound of flesh will inevitably have to do with India. One possibility is that Trump and Munir will together force the Modi government to resume the IndiaPakistan dialogue. There are straws in the wind that India is already sounding out rationalisations and excuses for resuming talks with Pakistan.
K P Nayar | Strategic analyst
(Views are personal)