War, Peace and Blowback in the Subcontinent

Talks between India and Pakistan continue and steps toward normalization. This piece in Outlook gives an optimistic overview of recent moves. The piece also lists a host of provocations, mainly terrorist acts in India, that could have derailed the process but did not. At the same time, a second piece suggests that Indian intelligence is now supporting a rebellion in Balochistan province in Pakistan, using its improving ties with Afghanistan to conduct training camps. An interview with Mushahid Hussein chairman of Pakistan's Senate Foreign Relations committee and a close ally of Pakistani President Musharraf elaborates on the claim.

This would, of course be nothing new in the region. India supported Bangladesh's successful secesson from Pakistan in the early 1970s and the ongoing Sri Lankan Tamil struggle in the 1980s. Pakistan has supported a separatist insurgency in India's part of the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir for the last fifteen years and attempted to do so off and on in previous decades. However, the active support of an insurgency in Pakistan would be a departure from India's strategy in recent years, which has been to try to take the moral high ground by trying to get Pakistan declared a terrorist state. The Pakistani military has been worried for some time that India's attempts to woo Afghanistan are simply an effort to encircle them. So the question is, is it true and how does it fit in with the the "peace process?"

Well in one sense it fits in all too well. Today. It is easy to see how Indian security planners could decide that putting a little pressure on Pakistan's western front would soften Pakistan up and convince them to ease up on Kashmir, especially at a time when the Pakistani military are already tied down in great numbers in the Pushtun areas of Waziristan hunting Taleban. Indeed, Indian security planners are probably chuckling to themselves about the ways in which Pakistan's support for the Taleban, and the connectiones between those and Pakistan's support for the Kashmir insurgency are "blowing back" on Pakistan. And the average Indian newswatcher if they think anything of this, probably think it's about time India did something like this.

Yet, it is worth thinking about whether this effort to open up a new front on Pakistan could itself "blow back" on India. In the 1980s the Indian government's support for Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka eventually led to Rajiv Gandhi's assassination by Tamil separatists. India's geopoltiical strategy toward Afghanistan is not new, it goes back to the 1970s and continued through Indian support for the Northern Alliance. But when the Taleban came to power the "long friendship" between India and Afghanistan did not help. The recent controversy over the conversion of an Afghan Muslim to Christianity does suggest that there might be strong support for a Taleban type regime in the future. India can build relations with Islamist regimes-- witness Indian ties with Iran. Does India need to align itself against Islamist forces in Afghanistan?