COVER STORY

Mediation by any other name

The defusing of the Kargil crisis is likely to see intensification of external, especially U.S., pressure on India to resolve the Kashmir issue. We may not call it mediation, but we are quite in the middle of it.

AIJAZ AHMAD

THE President of the United States went to work on the Fourth of July. Mindful of the sensitivities of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in New Delhi, the White House claimed that a meeting had been hastily arranged in response to Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's urgent request. The facts would seem to be otherwise.

The weekend of June 26-27 appears to have been decisive. It was then, at the end of the week, that Pakistan's Chief of the Army Staff, General Pervez Musharraf, casually told presspersons in Karachi that Sharif would soon be meeting Clinton. Musharraf had just concluded intense negotiations with Gen. Anthony Zinni, Commander-in-Chief, U.S. General Command, and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Gibson Lanpher, who had been in Islamabad since June 23, and therefore had reason to know. On that same day, June 27, The Sunday Telegraph reported in London that the mechanics of a negotiated withdrawal by Pakistan-inspired forces occupying the heights of Tiger Hill, Marpo La and Batalik was a topic of conversation between Zinni and Musharraf. In Karachi, where Musharraf himself was to make that statement, Dawn, the oldest of English dailies in Pakistan, went further and wrote: "Pakistan had insisted on reciprocity. For example, a promise by the Indians for time-bound discussions on Kashmir in return for assisting the mujahideen to home bases. Pakistan, on its part, would be prepared to consider as part of the permanent solution the inclusion of the entire Valley and the Muslim parts of Jammu in the Azad Kashmir territory - a settlement on the line of the Owen Dixon plan."

That "the Owen Dixon plan" is very much in the air these days has been reported in Frontline ("Broadening the base", June 18, 1999; "The Many Roads to Kargil", July 16, 1999), and we shall return to the matter presently. That "the Valley and the Muslim parts of Jammu" should be included "in the Azad Kashmir territory" is of course Pakistan's maximum demand which India is most unlikely to concede. But that some variant of this solution, interim and much softer, is being prepared seems beyond doubt, as we can surmise from the contours of the plan for the reorganisation of Jammu and Kashmir that Farooq Abdullah's Regional Autonomy Committee had released already, on April 13, as well as the carefully prepared proposal that Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan, published on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on June 8 under the significant title "Camp David for Kashmir"(reproduced in Frontline, July 2).

We shall return to this key document later. Two things may be noted immediately, however. One is that what happened in Washington on the Fourth of July was itself a miniaturised Camp David, with Pakistani and American specialist groups sitting across the table, yet again, to hammer out the final wording of the joint statement; U.S. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger clearing the wording with his Indian counterpart Brajesh Mishra on the telephone; and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee available and waiting at the other end of another telephone line while Sharif and Clinton met in person. The latter is known to have called Vajpayee in the middle of that meeting. Clinton's "personal interest in encouraging an expeditious resumption and intensification" of bilateral efforts that the joint statement promises seems to hold at least a faint promise of a more comprehensive and prolonged 'Camp David' through other means. In any case, the phrasing does come very close to what Dawn had indicated on June 27 as Pakistan's basic negotiating position: withdrawal of the 'mujahideed' in return for a promise for a time-bound discussion on Kashmir. K. Natwar Singh, the seasoned diplomat that he is, was actually being circumspect when he merely said that the phrase "personal interest" amounted to third party intervention.

The other curiosity is that the ink on the joint statement was barely dry when Benazir Bhutto started indicating an imminent return to Pakistan. As if on cue, her party has promised a massive welcome rally, on the model of 1986, warning the government not to act in haste. Now, the reason why she has been cooling her heels abroad is that she and her husband have both been sentenced on corruption charges, and husband Zardari is not only held in prison but is alleged to have been gruesomely tortured quite recently. Cruelty comes more or less naturally to Sharif. What assurances has Benazir received, and from whom, to start contemplating a spectacular return? After all, she was similarly cooling her heels in foreign countries more than a decade ago when Gen. Zia-ul-Haq's body went up in a ball of fire over Bahawalpur in an air crash that has never been adequately explained. Then, too, the Americans had arranged for her to return and go straight into an election that she was bound to win. It is too early to say whether or not they would be able or even wholly willing to stage a second coming for her. They would in any case like to indicate to Sharif that they have options.

When Musharraf told the press of Sharif's impending meeting with Clinton, over a week before the event, too many people thought that he had spoken out of turn. Not so. He seems to have by then worked out with Gen. Zinni not just the politics of Kargil, for which Lanpher was at least equally suitable, but the great technical details involved in the proposed withdrawal, in the contemplated "restoration" of the "sanctity" of the Line of Control (LoC), and in the radical disagreement between Pakistan and India over the implications of the fact that the LoC does not extend to Siachen even on the maps, beyond the point that is known as NJ9842, even though the 1949 agreement records a summary verbal reference that beyond that point the line went "north to the glaciers". He knew what he had offered Zinni on all these counts, and what the latter thought of it.

By then Lanpher and Niaz Naik, the retired Foreign Secretary of Pakistan and a trusted adviser of Nawaz Sharif, had spent the whole weekend in Delhi, conferring with Brajesh Mishra and Vajpayee who also now knew what Zinni had been offered and what Washington's view of that was going to be. Naik returned to Pakistan on June 27, the day Musharraf announced the Sharif visit; the latter, in turn, cut short his visit to China on June 28, in view of his impending visit to Washington, after he had concluded his meetings with all the key Chinese leaders that he was scheduled to meet. Clinton modified his vacation plan to satisfy not only the Pakistan Prime Minister but Vajpayee as well, as we shall see.

AP
Ahead of his visit to the U.S., Nawaz Sharif with Chief of the Army Staff Gen. Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi on July 4. The Pakistan Army high command informed Sharif before launching the Kargil operation, and Sharif, in turn, has ensured that the Army chief is directly involved in the entire diplomatic process.

WHY the urgency? It is worth recalling, I think, that a very large number of intruders have been routinely crossing the LoC from the Pakistan side, year after year, for over a decade now, trained and armed for organising insurrection on Indian territory, leading to very great and constant tragedies in the Valley as well as Jammu. It has been a very long time since either side has treated the LoC with any sense of "sanctity". Why was respect for the "sanctity" of the LoC now so urgently affirmed by all and sundry?

Part of the reason undoubtedly is that the Kargil operation was of a different order. Musharraf himself has said that between 1,500 and 2,000 fighters from the Pakistani side were involved; reports in the Indian media suggest that they were spread across roughly 1,000 sq km, including the majestic heights. As of July 8, the Indian official claim was that 643 intruders and 321 Indian men, including 23 officers, had died. The figure does not include the maimed and the injured.

So, we have a curious situation that speaks volumes about the mentality of ruling circles around the world. The "sanctity" of the LoC meant little for a decade while the terrorised populations of the Valley and Jammu were involved, but restoration of this "sanctity" became so very important when fixed bases on stretches of territory became the issue; in war, territory is always more important than the people who live in those territories. By now it has also become clear that Pakistan started preparing for this operation soon after the nuclear blasts last summer; by October even some reports had appeared to that effect in sections of the British press. The United States, meanwhile, had greatly intensified surveillance over the whole length of the Indo-Pakistan border, including the LoC and the Siachen triangle where the boundaries of India, Pakistan and China meet in glacial silence. It seems improbable that the U.S. did not know of the movement of men and material. There is no public record suggesting that the U.S. shared this information with India or urged Pakistan to abandon the project.

Clinton's first calls to Sharif and Vajpayee came on June 14 and 15, after three weeks of a "war-like situation", as Vajpayee carefully described it. Some ground must by then have been prepared for such calls to be meaningful. Then, over the next two weeks, things moved at dizzying speed until Musharraf announced the prospect of a Clinton-Sharif meeting, which indeed took place a week later. Why so great an urgency that the U.S. President was found at Blair House on the Fourth of July?

By then, the real scale of Pakistan's operation had become quite clear. That Pakistan had established fixed bases meant that it expected to come under attack, suffer casualties, move when absolutely necessary, re-group elsewhere, and so on, until one of three things happened: (a) the Indian response would be so restrained that at least a goodly number of the intruders would be able to hold on until the winter set in; or, (b) the Indian determination to conclude the operation before September would be so great that casualties would mount, the armed forces would start clamouring to cross the LoC and the threat of a larger war would help focus everyone's mind; or, (c) India would seek international mediation and the great powers would oblige and Pakistan could then extract at least minimal promises, threatening more hostilities in other places and at other times.

By mid-June, a combination of (b) and (c) had come to pass, and even (a) could not be entirely ruled out. That Pakistan would be approaching the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) for mediation was part of its plan. What now changed was that India too started imploring the NATO countries for mediation, competing with Pakistan for attention and sympathy. Well before Clinton and Sharif agreed that "concrete steps" shall be taken to respect the LoC in accordance with the Simla Agreement, India had been requesting the G-8 countries to take such "concrete steps" as blocking economic assistance to Pakistan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other multilateral agencies. It seems quite clear by now that Vajpayee's letter to Clinton that Brajesh Mishra handed over to Sandy Berger on the eve of the G-8 meeting in Cologne essentially said that India would soon have to make the decision on crossing the LoC and time was running out for the G-8 countries to do something. By June 26, when Zinni returned to the United States while Lanpher and Naik appeared more or less simultaneously in Delhi, the Indian Army chief, Gen. V.P. Malik, was indicating that he would go to the Union Cabinet for permission to cross the LoC. The urgency for drastic action was at hand.

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ AP
President Bill Clinton. U.S. pressure on India to resolve the Kashmir issue is certain to increase in the coming months, and even if some sections may not call it mediation, India is quite in the middle of it.

EASIER said than done, though. Everyone knew that Pakistan had by then concentrated enough forces on its side of the LoC to engage India in a limited battle within Kashmir, but also that any significant escalation beyond that would also mean that the Kashmir issue would return to the United Nations Security Council. The main favour Clinton did to India was that he took into his own hands the problem that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had sought at one point to mediate, and he moved quickly enough. It is ironic that India and the United States have now become partners in sidelining the United Nations as a dangerous institution that may actually respond to the interests of all its members, while direct Great Power mediation is what we are actively seeking.

The U.S. of course did not go so far as to try and block financial assistance from any quarter at all. On June 29, well before Sharif's visit was officially announced in the United States, State Department spokesman James Rubin said that the U.S. had no plans to influence the IMF. Before Sharif had concluded his visit to Beijing, China and Pakistan signed a fresh agreement for establishing in Pakistan with Chinese assistance a new factory for the manufacture of aircraft for the Pakistan Air Force. In remarks quoted in People's Daily, Prime Minister Zhu Rongji referred to Kashmir as "a historic problem involving territorial, religious, ethnic and other elements." The Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) quickly passed the Pakistani resolution affirming the Kashmiri people's right of self-determination.

The Indian media reported it all, but in small print as it were, refusing to draw the conclusion that in virtually every respect and in all the usual quarters it was business as usual and that Pakistan's great "isolation" in the "international community" was restricted to the scale of its operation in Kargil beyond the LoC, which of course even the Pakistan government must have anticipated before launching the operation. For them, the question had always been: how far will the condemnation go, in material terms, and what else, other than the condemnation, could they earn?

If Gen. Musharraf was the first to announce Sharif's projected visit, he also affirmed the Army's support for the outcome of the visit with remarkable alacrity. He was the first person within Pakistan to use the language that Foreign Office spokesman Tariq Altaf was to use in Washington even before Sharif's delegation left the United States: that Pakistan "will appeal and use its influence" with the mujahideen. The Urdu daily, Jung, reported Musharraf as saying: "The mujahideed will be asked to change their position. It remains to be seen how they will respond." Saying that there was "complete understanding" between the Army and the civilian government, he went on to praise the Sharif-Clinton agreement because, as he put it, it recognised "the need to address the current volatile situation in Kargil within the context of the larger Kashmir situation." This is exactly what Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz was to say in his much publicised interviews in London, on his way back to Pakistan. By the time Sharif got up to present to the nation the agreed position arrived at during the session of the Defence Council, the high-power military-civilian committee, the language had become the official line of the Government of Pakistan.

My guess is that the language had been developed before Sharif went to Washington and that Clinton knew of it, in general terms, before he signed the joint statement. What the United States actually expects and what undertakings Pakistan has actually offered are still shrouded in mystery, all the public posturing in various quarters notwithstanding. At no point has this diplomatic process been even remotely transparent, and there is no reason to believe that it has become so in the wake of a single statement. The Indian position that there can be no ceasefire until after the Kargil intrusion has been withdrawn has certainly been upheld; nothing short of it could be tenable. Similarly, it goes largely in India's favour that the statement calls for "the restoration of the Line of Control in accordance with the Simla Agreement."

On the other hand, the "forces" that are to return have not been identified as personnel of the Pakistan Army, and Pakistan has won at least three further concessions: that Kashmir is indeed an issue between India and Pakistan that is yet to be "resolved"; that the LoC is to be respected by "both" sides; and that it is Clinton who will ensure "expeditious resumption and intensification" of talks to resolve these issues, including Kashmir.

FOUR actions from the Pakistan side can now be expected. First, having held its positions in Kargil long enough to have forced India to seek mediation, it will withdraw all or most of its personnel from the positions which the Indian armed forces have yet not overrun, and the mujahideen will now re-group, to survive elsewhere in the area and periodically to carry out small actions, mostly on a level that does not threaten the overall process but still keeps the pot boiling on a low simmer. Second, Pakistan seems to have used the cover of the Kargil operation to infiltrate a large number of terrorists into the Valley and the Poonch-Rajouri sector, and killings there will revive, as appears to be happening already; the emphasis will be sought to be shifted from "occupation" to "insurgency". Third, Pakistan will remind the United States that it has always regarded the 1984 Indian occupation of Siachen as a "gross violation" of the Simla Agreement and that the seven meetings that have taken place between Pakistan and India over this issue have failed to produce an agreement, the last one having broken down in November 1998, just about the time Pakistan seems to have begun the Kargil operation in earnest.

All this will be used to argue that India is not respecting the LoC either and that while Pakistan will take "concrete steps" to defuse the crisis, none of these problems can be actually resolved without addressing the main issue of Kashmir once and for all. We can undoubtedly show that the LoC never covered Siachen, but that only proves that it is yet to be demarcated there; it does not automatically endorse our claim to it, which is itself based on a successful grab and the further claim that the whole of Jammu and Kashmir - Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir included - is ours in any case. Furthermore, Pakistan can be undoubtedly shown as being the aggressive party on most immediate counts. The key fact remains, however, that there is no international consensus in favour of the Indian position that J&K - even the whole of J&K - is non-negotiable Indian territory. The language of the joint statement describes it as an issue yet to be resolved, which is the crux of the international consensus itself.

IAN HODGSON/ AP
Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Her plan for Kashmir must be seen in the light of the fact that she is the right person for the Americans to send up the trial balloon, with proposals that are not exactly on the table but are very much in the air, ready to land in prime ministerial laps.

To the extent that the Kargil situation gets defused, to that same extent the pressure on India shall increase for resolving the Kashmir issue. The real pressure will probably not come until after the September-October elections. However, once a new government is in place and Clinton begins to prepare for his projected trip to South Asia, pressure will mount for an "expeditious resumption and intensification" of the process, in order to show him something tangible when he arrives. We may not call it mediation, but we are quite in the middle of it.

We need to be soberly sceptical regarding the dominant interpretation in India that the joint statement is some unalloyed victory for us; that a new watershed has been reached in Indo-American relations; that Pakistan is henceforth isolated in the comity of nations; that Sharif is similarly isolated within Pakistan; that the civilian government is paying for the blunders of the Pakistan Army, and so on. Just as the Army high command was careful to inform Nawaz Sharif and take his permission before launching the Kargil operation, Sharif has been careful in not just informing but directly involving his Chief of the Army Staff in the whole diplomatic process. The key negotiations took place not between Sharif and Clinton, not even Sartaj Aziz and Strobe Talbott, but between Musharraf and Zinni. If Sharif loses office over this issue then Musharraf too will go, and, under the circumstances, they can only be replaced by far more rabidly Islamicist generals. The Americans know it and they could hardly have participated in a process that would yield such a dire result. Their position is likely to be much closer to the plan that Benazir published in The New York Times.

BEFORE discussing that plan, a couple of things should be clarified. The first is that precisely because she is currently not holding any office in Pakistan, Benazir is free to spell out in public the contours of a future settlement that Sharif, carrying the weight of prime ministerial office, cannot. And, because of her freedom, she is the right person for the Americans to send up the trial balloons, with proposals that are not exactly on the table but very much in the air, ready to land in prime ministerial laps. Second, Z.A. Bhutto built his entire career on extremely frenzied anti-India hysteria, which then his daughter, Benazir, also fully exploited when she herself was Prime Minister; it is unlikely that she went through so radical a change of heart just because she met Shimon Peres, as she so disingenuously claims. The plan has come from sources, perhaps a conjunction of several sources, which we do not know. And, most important, she and Nawaz Sharif may be mortal enemies of each other but Benazir still aspires to return to Pakistan as Prime Minister, and it is most unlikely that she would publicly present a plan for which she has not already obtained considerable support from policy-making institutions in Pakistan as a whole. As I have emphasised previously, it is simply foolish to think that Pakistan lacks a coherent state authority, beyond the personalities, that set long-term objectives.

The general principle Benazir proposes is that of what she calls "deliberate, incremental advance", so that the hardest decisions are left to an indefinite future. The plan itself has the following components:

1. "The two sections of Kashmir should have open and porous borders. Both sections would be demilitarised and patrolled by either an international peacekeeping force or a joint Indian-Pakistani peacekeeping force."

2. "Both legislative councils would continue to meet separately and on occasion jointly" but "none of these steps would prejudice or prejudge the position of both countries on the disputed areas."

3. "The borders... would be opened for unrestricted trade, cultural cooperation and exchange... leading to "the creation of a South Asian Free Market zone."

4. "Only after all of these confidence-building mechanisms" and a "significant set period of time (Camp David called for a five-year transition), would the parties commence discussions on a formal and final resolution to the Kashmir problem."

CHIEN-MIN CHUNG/AP
Sharif with Chinese Premier Zhu Rongi in Beijing on June 28. Pakistan's "isolation" in the "international community" was restricted to the scale of its operation in Kargil beyond the Line of Control, and in virtually every other respect and in all the usual quarters it was business as usual.

She ends her short piece with the words of warning: "The clock is ticking. The time to act is now." It is plausible that the Pakistan Army staged the Kargil action so that the ticking of the clock may get a bit louder, for all to hear. This, too, is paradoxical. By the middle of summer 1998, insurgency in Kashmir had come substantially under India's control and Pakistan, the inferior military power, had no means to expedite the pace. Then we gifted them Pokhran-II, nuclear parity, competitive weaponisation. When Kargil exploded, the world sat up to listen to their case on Kashmir in a way it had not done in a long time. And we were the ones who had to run for cover, begging the superpower to intervene on our behalf and feeling grateful that it had been even-handed.

One does not know the behind-the-scenes secrets but there is no public evidence of any major tension between the Army and the civilian government in Pakistan; Sharif's own immediate future is probably safe. Second, a lot of war hysteria had been whipped up in Pakistan, as if the time to liberate Kashmir had come, but outside the rabid Islamicists, there was little enthusiasm for the venture. So long as the inner unity of the armed forces remains intact, the government will successfully contain the immediate agitations from the Islamicist extremists; they are powerful but they cannot succeed without a split in the Army, which does not seem to be at hand. Once the dust settles, the government will prevail in arguing that the Kargil operation has helped "internationalise" the Kashmir issue, bringing the day of "liberation" closer. Even the Islamicists will have to come along, just as the BJP has been able to silence the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bajrang Dal and so on by assuring them that the day of the building of the Ram mandir in Ayodhya is drawing nearer.

Pakistani society has not become notably more right-wing or less attached to democratic values owing to the Kargil crisis; these deficits in Pakistan came earlier. Ours has! There is now a widespread consensus that the government should not be criticised while the fighting lasts, as if democratic dissent was a peacetime indulgence. Israel feels more beleaguered than any other nation on earth, and yet it has not been involved in a single military action over the past 30 years without being challenged, by one group or another and for one reason or another, on the streets of Tel Aviv. In India, by contrast, we do not get a decent protest from the Press Council of India, for example, when the government denies us the right to read a Pakistani newspaper, or watch Pakistan Television. A government that has lost the confidence of the Lower House refuses to call into session the Upper House, but the Opposition parties which had defeated this government on the floor are reduced merely to pleading for the favour of being listened to. Kapil Dev and Ajay Jadeja start preaching what Thackeray was preaching last year, and receive accolades from across the country, including Raj Singh Dungarpur, president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, whose offices had been attacked by Thackeray's goons last year.

Meanwhile, an extraordinary consensus develops, all the way from L. K. Advani, against whom charges are about to be framed for his role in the Ayodhya demolition, to Rajeev Dhavan, a lawyer of impeccable liberal credentials and well-deserved repute, that Pakistan was a "rogue state", "terrorist state" and so on, forgetting that no one demanded that India be declared a "rogue state" when a government here was supporting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) or when a Prime Minister colluded in letting loose Bhindranwale upon the country itself. The BJP's own allies seem to have retreated into the background so much that it has effectively become the government of the BJP plus Fernandes alone. It is difficult to foresee the consequence of such subservience for the foreseeable evolution of the polity.

Meanwhile, the clock shall go on ticking, louder and louder, because it now has nuclear energy infused into it.