To render Pakistan irrelevant, analyse it meaningfully

I met the first Pakistani in the UN Mission in Angola in 1992, when I was a Major with 15 years of service. I was a staff college graduate and had battled militancy in Punjab. The proxy war in the Kashmir valley was then in its nascent stage. In keeping with the requirements of military diplomacy, I drew on my reserve of Urdu, picked up from movies like Waqt, Taj Mahal and Kanoon, to strike a conversation with the Pakistani. He enquired whether I knew Punjabi and, if so, why I was being a mohajir. That broke in my mind the stereotype of an Urdu-spewing Pakistani. It was a rude reality check. Every time he visited my HQ, I accommodated him in my container, to understand his psyche.

The March 11 hijacking of the Jaffer Express in Pakistan, allegedly by the Balochistan Liberation Army, evoked much interest and even celebrations on social media. But it didn’t wake up our intelligence experts, who should have anticipated an immediate, violent reaction. After all, 380 passengers had been taken hostage and 18 soldiers and 13 civilians killed. It didn’t take long. Within six weeks, the dastardly Pahalgam attack had taken place.

The obvious question is — do we suffer from some sort of complacency in our analysis of the intentions and capabilities of our western neighbour? We have been following the policy of no dialogue and minimum contact with Pakistan for about a decade. It has been recently reiterated that terror and talks/trade will not be permitted; and blood and water cannot be allowed to flow together. These are indeed complex and difficult goals to achieve. One such goal was the restoration of the 2003 ceasefire on the Line of Control in February 2021, aided by backroom parleys, possibly facilitated by the UAE.

After Pahalgam, suddenly our experts decided that Pakistan’s Army chief (now Field Marshal) Syed Asim Munir, was the main culprit. But the first shot had been fired by Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Choudhary, DG-ISPR, immediately after the Jaffer Express fiasco. He vowed ‘badla‘ (revenge) and blamed R&AW for the train hijack. Certainly, this was accentuated by the highly provocative statement on the ‘two-nation’ theory by Munir.

It may be appropriate to recount that the diabolic drift in the Pakistan army was initiated by Gen Zia-ul-Haq, who was IMA-trained, St Stephen’s college-educated and hailed from Jalandhar. Zia gave the Pakistan army a theological twist, with the new motto — ‘Iman, Taqwa, Jihad-fi-Sablillah’ — and, most surprisingly, added the defence of ideological frontiers in its role.

Gen Aslam Beg, another mohajir from Azamgarh, triggered the proxy war in Kashmir. It was sustained by others like Gen Pervez Musharraf, a mohajir with roots in Neharwali Haveli in Delhi.

Now Gen Munir is a sort of outlier and ‘dark horse’, a rare OTS achiever, with an intelligence (DGMI and DGISI) background. His posting profile is peppered with India-focussed appointments. After nearly two and a half years at the helm, there is no point in being surprised at his ‘mullah‘ orientation. Born to an ‘imam’ father, hailing from Jalandhar, he had a madrasa education. Like Zia, his parents are both Punjabi and mohajir. Surprisingly, he earned the title of Hafiz by attending the Koran recitation course in Saudi Arabia, while on diplomatic assignment.

His description of Kashmir as the “jugular vein” is not new; it has been a constant theme with Pakistani generals. Only a few years back, Gen Kayani described the same phrase in Urdu as India‘s ‘shah rug’ — Munir, in fact, has inappropriately termed it as Pakistan’s “jugular vein.”

The timing of Munir’s uncalled-for diatribe was probably triggered by his yearning to recover his plummeting popularity. He was also unsettled by the growing dissent in junior ranks, coupled with recent statements by the former and more moderate Army chief, Gen Jehangir Karamat and other senior veterans, calling for a review of the ongoing mismanaged operations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan.

To quote Sun Tzu on the enemy, “Know thy enemy and know yourself, and in a hundred battles, you will never be in peril." I would be audacious to add a few supplementaries to this seminal wisdom, reflecting on our approach to Pakistan.

First, we know our enemy; unlike the Chinese, they are not complicated. Second, they are irrelevant; so you may well ask, where is the need to formally study them?

In stark contrast, the China Study Group and multiple think tanks focus on the study of China. The MEA runs the Centre for Contemporary China Studies.

While China is the primary and complicated adversary, Pakistan remains the persistent and prickly one. Pakistan considers India the raison-d’etre for its existence, and seeks parity and attention. It certainly has the propensity to continue to surprise us — unveiling the 6th Armoured Division in 1965, invading India at Kargil in 1999 and more recently, using sophisticated Chinese missiles and weaponry in the recent conflict with India.

Tragically, we have no study groups and think-tanks to analyse our western adversary. We must make do with Twitter/TV channel warriors, who capture Karachi, Lahore and PoK periodically.

It is time to make amends so that we begin to acquire a meaningful understanding of Pakistan. Critical to our study will be the ability to differentiate between three segments of the population — the military establishment, mullahs (clergy) and the awaam (public).

Significantly, despite limited or no government contact in the last decade or so, the Internet remains porous. People on both sides of the Radcliffe Line in Punjabcommunicate in Shahmukhi (Punjabi written in the Persian-derived script). But for some mystical reason, the decision to set up the Shahmukhi Linguistic Centre at Panjab University was dropped after the VC changed in 2018; although Panjab University in Lahore did set up its Gurmukhi Department and Chair later.

Former PM Vajpayee once said, “We can choose friends but we cannot choose neighbours." May I humbly add to the seminal wisdom — in order to truly render Pakistan irrelevant, we have to also learn to analyse it meaningfully.

Lt Gen KJ Singh (retd) is former chief of Western Command.

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