COVER STORY

Missions and concerns

Diplomatic efforts to find a solution to the Kargil crisis enter a sensitive phase.

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN

GIBSON LANPHER had his day of fame on June 27 when he spent a few hours in Delhi meeting senior officials in the Ministry of External Affairs. The Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Department of State then called on Brajesh Mishra, Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister and the chair of the National Security Council.

Indian officials remained cryptic about the outcome of the talks. The official spokesman stuck to the position that Lanpher's mission in Delhi was merely to brief the Indian Government on what had transpired in Islamabad between an American delegation and the Pakistan Government. And the main result apparently was that India found unequivocal endorsement of its demand from the "international community" that Pakistan should "take immediate steps to withdraw the armed intruders from the Indian side of the Line of Control (LoC) and ensure that such violations do not recur in the future." There was an inducement held out in the promise that once this process was completed, the dialogue on all contentious issues between the two countries could be resumed. But in the prevalent circumstances, the promise of talks could not have had more than a marginal appeal.

Lanpher's visit to Delhi was followed within hours by a planned leak from within the Pakistan Government, that a special envoy would soon be visiting India on a secret mission. The choice of envoy - former Foreign Secretary Niaz A. Naik - seemed to suggest that a mood of conciliation had perhaps dawned, though no definitive inference can be drawn about the negotiating brief he will carry. The issue of troop withdrawal from the Kargil sector has become entangled in the multiple infirmities of the political process in Pakistan. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif clearly lacks the power to entrust his special envoy with this mandate.

To a great degree, the new movements were stirred up by the visit to Islamabad of U.S. Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Central Command. Zinni is no stranger to the Pakistani civilian and military leadership. His last visit to Islamabad was on August 20 last year, when U.S. cruise missiles were launched over Pakistani territory en route to targets in Afghanistan. The rather muted response then to the violation of Pakistan's sovereign airspace bears testimony to the influence that the U.S. Central Command chief exercises. But Nawaz Sharif chose the occasion of Zinni's visit to put up a pointed display of defiance, flying off to the Pakistan side of the LoC to mingle with troops engaged in operations against India.

Gibson Lanpher, Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. State Department, with the U.S. Ambassador in India, Richard F. Celeste (right), in New Delhi on June 27.

Zinni was initially closeted in talks with General Pervez Musharraf, Chief of Staff of the Pakistan Army and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. The following day he held a two-hour-long discussion with Nawaz Sharif. There were no official disclosures of what transpired since these would have been superfluous. The agenda was transparent and announced well before the meetings took place. As the spokesman of the U.S. State Department announced the day Zinni was tasked with the mission to go to Islamabad, his brief was very simple: to persuade Pakistan to withdraw the "armed infiltrators" it had sent into Kargil. The same day, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan William Milam said, without naming any country, that "those who had sent the fighters to Drass and Kargil would have to call them back."

As a last resort, the Pakistan Government sought to fall back upon the pretence that Zinni's mission would focus symmetrically upon both sides of the border. This effort was scuttled by a fairly explicit clarification from the U.S. State Department that Zinni's visit was "Pakistan-specific". According to some reports from Washington, State Department officials also revealed that Zinni was asked to convey a warning to Pakistan that India would launch full-scale hostilities if the intrusion in the Kargil sector was not vacated. That the threat was indeed made from the Indian side seems now to be fairly authoritatively confirmed. It had been learnt from official sources in India that Brajesh Mishra met U.S. National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger on June 17 to hand over a letter from Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee to U.S. President Bill Clinton. Little was revealed about the contents of the letter, though it was assumed then that it would have dealt with India's restraint in the face of grave provocations and the imperative need to remove Pakistan-backed intruders from Indian territory. It is now believed, on the basis of reports in The Washington Post, evidently supported by high-level leaks from the U.S. Government - that Vajpayee's message bore the clear assertion that India would feel compelled to attack deep into Pakistani territory if a unilateral withdrawal could not be secured by other means.

The prospect of hostilities across a broad range could not have been particularly reassuring for the U.S. administration. Overstretched in the Balkans and confronting fresh eruptions in East Asia and Africa, the U.S. clearly is incapable of coping with the consequences of a burgeoning military conflict between nuclear-capable adversaries. Vajpayee's message, received by the U.S. President as he travelled through Europe in the afterglow of his supposed triumph in the Balkans, was just the signal needed for the U.S. administration to step up pressure on Pakistan.

However, in the immediate aftermath of the Zinni visit, the Pakistan military kept up its tone of defiance. General Musharraf ruled out any possibility of a "unilateral withdrawal" from Kargil, thus effectively overturning the carefully cultivated pretence that the events in that sector were the logical outgrowth of the Kashmiri militancy. This affirmation came as the conclusion to a sequence of locutions in which Musharraf first declined to comment on the prospect of a withdrawal and then declared that the decision was firmly within the province of the Prime Minister. Curiously, in another assertion that seemed to raise questions about who is in charge in Pakistan, he informed a public gathering in Karachi that efforts were under way to arrange a meeting between Clinton and Nawaz Sharif. Since the Kargil intrusions began, Pakistan has suffered a series of diplomatic setbacks. U.S. displeasure was evident in its decision to share sensitive intelligence data with India and even acquiesce in India's decision to make this information public.

The public airing of a private conversation between General Musharraf and his Chief of General Staff, Lieutenant-General Mohammad Aziz, was a serious embarrassment to the Pakistan Government. After the Group of Eight nations - comprising seven of the advanced industrialised countries and Russia - called for an end to the Kargil hostilities at its Cologne summit in mid-June, the Pakistan Government made another valiant effort to turn adversity into advantage. The mere fact that it had not been named as the culpable party seemed an indication that the West was inclined to place the onus for conciliation on India. It did not take long for this pretence too to be shattered.

Today, amid growing international apprehensions about who is in charge and fears of a backlash from the military and the clergy, Pakistan seems to be lurching towards financial insolvency. An infusion of $100 million is due from the International Monetary Fund in July to assist the country in meeting some of its international financial obligations. Even a decision to defer consideration of this loan could be a powerful diplomatic tool in the current context.

India has over the last month successfully managed to exert leverage where it has mattered, in order to ensure a dramatic swing in global public opinion in its favour. But a dissonant note was sounded late in June by China, which advised India and Pakistan to suspend hostilities at once, since the alternative would be a growing role for big power mediators in neighbourhood disputes. India's stand is that a ceasefire can only be declared if all the territory held by Pakistani infiltrators is vacated. This is an eminently reasonable stand which has so far managed to keep the international community firmly in India's corner. But if military operations are indefinitely prolonged, casualties will inevitably mount and pressure would grow for the utilisation of force along points at which India is less vulnerable. That process could well call in the global umpires, who have not shown themselves to be either reasonable or fair in recent conflict situations.

Kargil has been an exception only because Pakistan has forfeited much of its claim to global sympathies by its conduct in the neighbourhood over the last decade. War situations have been known to induce mood changes of a fairly bizarre kind. Even the cosmopolitan intelligentsia in Pakistan seems today to have embraced, with more than a suggestion of artifice, the cause of the "Mujahideen" in the Kargil heights. Sections of Pakistan that had acclaimed the growing strength of the impulse towards peace just three months back have today turned champions of the "jehad", cheerleaders of the holy warriors seeking to vanquish the might of the Indian Army.

Diplomatic isolation is in this narration the regrettable outcome of the disproportionate economic rewards that India has to offer the global community in comparison to Pakistan. Global reaction, however, is divorced from any sense of morality and is simply a burden that must be borne in the cause of justice for Kashmir and the sustenance of the Pakistani identity.

Few Pakistani commentators have chosen to place the global isolation of their country in the context of its international profile over the last decade. Despite the facade of a democratic transition that has weathered several crises and now seems fairly secure, it is not a profile that inspires much faith. And the fundamental cause of this erosion of credibility has been Pakistan's cynical and bloody-minded role in the demise of Afghanistan as a state.

First an instrument of American geopolitical interests and then a sponsor of the peace. Shortly afterwards, an active patron of efforts to destroy the truce it had brokered. Finally, the promoter of a unique political transition - an entire society besieged by warfare is urged to seek salvation in medievalism. Pakistan's role in Afghanistan has gone through successive mutations in the last many years, none of them inspiring confidence in its ability or inclination to live in peace with its neighbours. When the Kargil conflict began, India was able to call upon the Taliban analogy to bolster its case for the global ostracism of Pakistan. "We don't want the Talibanisation of Kashmir," said Naresh Chandra, Indian Ambassador to the U.S. "But if you use these guys as guest terrorists of the Pakistani Army, what would be the consequences?"

The "jehadist" cabal in the Pakistan Army is clearly in global disfavour, its role in the service of U.S. geopolitical designs now exhausted. A U.S. State Department official was recently quoted as saying, in great exasperation, that General Musharraf and his Chief of General Staff, Lt.-Gen. Mohammad Aziz, "have spent their careers supporting one Mujahideen movement after another." In this regard, their appointments to senior positions in the military establishment raised "serious questions" about where Pakistan was headed as a state.

A similarly gloomy prognosis was made in the early days of the conflict by Michael Krepon, head of the Henry L. Stimson Centre in Washington D.C., which has been supporting an ongoing project on confidence-building measures in South Asia. "By associating itself with military operations across the LoC," said Krepon, "Pakistan can only lose, externally and internally. The more Pakistan supports lawless elements across the LoC, the more lawlessness will grow within Pakistan itself."

Krepon's assessment resonates strongly with one made early last year by eminent Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in the context of the growth of the Taliban in Afghanistan: "With Pakistan's civil-state machinery eaten away by corruption and ineffectiveness and growing public disillusionment with the political system, the law and order agencies would be unable to cope with an Islamic movement which would be violent and self-sacrificing... In any future prolonged confrontation with Koran-waving Islamic youths, the Army's more secular high command would be hard-pressed to order their troops to open fire. The threat of an Islamic revolution in Pakistan has never been greater."

Kargil seems to indicate that the "secular high command" in the Pakistan Army has been rather decisively pushed to the margins. It is the "jehadist" cabal that dominates, drawing its authority from the Islamic clergy and the diverse militant groupings it controls, often bending the civilian establishment to its will. There is also the uneasy awareness that Kargil is in a sense the final gamble of an embattled country that has made little headway in Kashmir despite a decade of effort. If the Kargil adventure fails, then Pakistan's right to be recognised as an interested party in Kashmir fades. But the tone of urgency adopted by global diplomacy clearly indicates what is at stake in Kargil. Unless the matter is resolved quickly and decisively, the outcome could be a violent implosion in Pakistan, with incalculable consequences for the entire region.