Trouble for India-Pakistan Peace Talks
Video Transcript:
Five Indian soldiers were killed yesterday in the disputed region of Kashmir. The Indian government must now decide whether it wants to follow through with an earlier Pakistani proposal to hold a bilateral meeting between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif when the two attend the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York in September.
Tuesday’s attack took place in Poonch district, the same area where an Indian soldier was killed and decapitated in a similar ambush in January. These two flare-ups on the Line of Control, roughly six months apart, played out almost identically. India claims that militants dressed in Pakistani army uniforms carried out the attacks; Pakistan denied the allegations and also accused India of cross-border incursions by special forces. The peace track suffered as a result.
Regardless of whether India engages in a dialogue with the Pakistani leadership, India will likely face a higher threat of attacks in the coming months and years as militant flows in the region adjust to a U.S. exit from Afghanistan.
The 2008 Mumbai attacks forced India to acknowledge a very uncomfortable reality: that Pakistan had lost control over many of its key militant proxies and could thus no longer be held solely responsible for attacks against Indian interests that emanate from Pakistani territory. Pakistan at the same time had little interest in provoking a major confrontation with its larger Indian neighbor. It faced an immense challenge already in trying to manage growing internal militancy and contain elements sympathetic to various militant groups from within the Pakistani security and intelligence apparatus.
The mutual concerns over the degradation of Pakistan’s control over its militant landscape nudged both sides into a dialogue, which now occurs in fits and starts. Both sides still have plenty of reason to maintain that line of communication and avoid significant state to state confrontation, but a credible and substantial peace negotiation that adequately addresses India’s core security concerns over Pakistan-based militancy is probably out of the question for now.
Many of the constraints to the peace process can be traced back to the situation in Afghanistan. As Taliban leader Mullah Omar continues his efforts to carve out a prominent political space for the Taliban following the U.S. withdrawal, Pakistan is working to ensure Islamabad’s influence in Kabul grows in parallel with the Taliban. While Pakistan tries to shape the political evolution in Afghanistan, it will also need to manage a festering domestic jihadist insurgency at home as militants search for new battlefronts. Pakistan will have a lot on its plate, but it will have a better chance of success if it can manage to also downgrade its long-standing conflict with India by at least engaging in peace talks.
But India is legitimately concerned that a shift in militant focus from Afghanistan will raise the threat of militant activity in Kashmir. India is in fact getting hit on both ends of Pakistan. Just two days before the cross-border attack that killed five Indian soldiers, the Indian Consulate in Jalalabad was hit by suspected Pakistani militants. Evidently, there are multiple elements intent on derailing negotiations between Pakistan and India, as well as between Pakistan and Kabul. Now, India can try to hold Pakistan accountable for these attacks, but it also can’t avoid the question of whether Pakistan, in its current distracted and fractured state, has control over these groups and whether it would be able to enforce any security commitments it makes.
