Pakistan is in steep decline. Army has resorted to failed strategies of the past

The seeming return of normalcy in Kashmir had coincided with a downward spiral in Pakistan’s political, economic and diplomatic fortunes. In the political arena, an election manifestly rigged by the military establishment to keep the main Opposition party and its leader out of power has led to the installation of arguably one of the weakest civilian governments in the country’s history and to an ever-enlarging army footprint in civilian affairs. The economic situation remains dire, with poverty and unemployment stalking the land, climate change-induced natural disasters adding to the people’s miseries and the country’s rulers having to seek frequent bailouts from the IMF and other benefactors such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and China.

The return of the Afghan Taliban to power in Kabul in August 2021 has led to a regrouping of their ideological brethren, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), in the areas of Afghanistan bordering Pakistan. The TTP has been conducting a relentless campaign of violence in the adjoining Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with the objective of imposing Sharia rule throughout Pakistan. The long-festering insurgency in Balochistan has grown exponentially, with large numbers of educated youth, including women, joining the ranks of organisations such as the Baloch Liberation Front and the Baloch Liberation Army, which claimed responsibility for the recent hijacking of the Jaffar Express and left the security establishment’s preferred narrative of an uncompromising “hard state” in tatters. Protests have broken out in lower-riparian Sindh over the diversion of water from the Indus, as envisaged in a canal-building project in which the army is, predictably, playing a lead role, completing the picture of domestic disarray.

On the external front, a self-obsessed America, at odds with itself and the rest of the world, is no longer dependent on Pakistan following its withdrawal from Afghanistan. The increasing attacks on Chinese personnel working on China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects and the growing local resistance to China’s presence in the strategically located port town of Gwadar have, in the words of a Pakistani commentator, taken the sheen off Pakistan in Chinese eyes.

The incumbent army chief, General Asim Munir, who wears his Islamist credentials on his sleeve, recently delivered an intemperate rant in which he repeated the trope of Kashmir being the “jugular vein” of Pakistan, making his visceral hatred for India and Hindus obvious. His handpicked lieutenants appear to be of a similar bent of mind. In addition to securing the ideological boundaries of Pakistan, he also appears to have taken upon himself the additional burden of securing its economic frontiers, an enterprise that would normally be beyond the military’s ken.

Confronted with multiple crises and failures that have led to a perceptible decline in the army’s domestic popularity, and attributing the mounting debacles on the security front to India, Munir and his principal lieutenants appear to have reverted to the military establishment’s traditional playbook of covert military adventurism-cum-terrorism to compel India to come to the negotiating table for discussions on Kashmir, set off a communal conflagration in the country and settle imaginary scores. These reckless gambits have failed in the past, notably in the case of the Kargil fiasco of 1999 and the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. In both cases, Pakistan forfeited whatever little international credibility it had, with even its traditional friends such as China distancing themselves from these misadventures. Like the Bourbons of France, however, Pakistan’s generals appear to have learnt nothing from their previous miscalculations.

India’s initial response to the attack has been announced and further measures will, doubtless, follow. As expected, Pakistan has retaliated. Experience has shown that there are no easy options in these circumstances and escalatory steps driven by narrow political considerations and the pressure of public passions can lead to cul-de-sacs from where there is no easy retreat. Immediate steps apart, the larger dilemmas regarding India’s Pakistan policy remain.

An argument can well be made that it is in India’s fundamental long-term national interest to construct an enduring peace with Pakistan and, equally, that such a peace is best achieved from a position of strength. The power differential between India and Pakistan is now too great for the latter’s strategists to deny or for it to be offset by weapons of asymmetric warfare such as “jihad”, which have a proven track record of failure in the India-Pakistan context. While Pakistan’s generals may be well advised to shed their delusions of parity and understand these hard realities for what they are, the time may also have come for India to recognise that the only viable way of dealing with a hostile but weaker Pakistan is a carefully thought-out mix of incentives and disincentives that provides meaningful leverage to influence the latter’s strategic calculus. Such an approach would necessarily involve an element of engagement. The slow-motion implosion that Pakistan seems to be undergoing is unlikely to leave India untouched.

The writer is a former special secretary in the Research & Analysis Wing.

Views expressed are personal