PREPOSTEROUS PROPOSITION

Why the media goes into orgasmic fits whenever the United States concocts a delectable dish with distasteful ingredients like India and Pakistan? What is aroma for the US and the media is a unbearable pong for India as it very well knows that for a 'terrorist nation' that wants its obliteration and lusts after terror and nuclear proliferation cooperation will be 'unpatriotic'.

Right from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and AFP to the PTI and the Dawn gave ample space to the purported intelligence sharing between India and Pakistan at the 'prodding of Uncle Sam'. The conviction with which WSJ “intelligence reporter” Siobhan Gorman explains that “it may be right for longtime rivals Pakistan and India to forge an alliance that allows for greater intelligence sharing with the US” is at best a supersonic flight by America into the realm of impossibility.

The peg of US assumption would rankle even the dumbest: “Washington hopes the cooperation will get a lift from last week's Indian elections, in which the incumbent Congress Party won by a wide margin over a Hindu nationalist party traditionally more hostile to Pakistan,” the reports states. Amazing!

And how could the US miss the palate-teasing ingredient Kashmir for it hopes that “a calming of tensions can allow India's Congress Party government, strengthened by its election victory, to resume peace talks with Pakistan over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir". And the American dessert after the platter was too frosty to take even a small scoop: "American officials believe that the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) orchestrated the Mumbai assault specifically to undermine the peace process”.

To remind America and the WSJ, the there Indo-Pak wars (1947, '65 and '71) before the Kargil intrusion ('99) were fought when the Congress was in power. The “Hindu nationalist party” or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in power during the Kargil War. In fact, then Prime Minister (PM) Atal Bihari Vajpayee—who belonged to the BJP—had signed the Lahore Declaration with his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif in Lahore itself on on February 21, 1999. The agreement was supposed to overcome the historically strained bilateral relations between the two nations. But then Pakistan started sending its Northern Light Infantry personnel in the guise of intruders to Kargil under explicit orders from its Chief of Army staff General Pervez Musharraf. And when India retaliated, a full-scale war was inevitable.

Clearly, the squirrelly connection between the Congress' win and such an “alliance” between the two fiercely antagonistic nations defies logic.

The idiotic and fanciful idea—if at all it has materialised as the US claims, and continues—is a sheer mirage. After decades of animosity between a belligerent Pakistan and pacifistic India, the concept is anathema to the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Pakistani military establishment as well. And if India thinks on similar lines too, another 26/11 is not too far as Pakistan has excelled the art of digging trenches under the facade of cooperation.

To expect the ISI, which is closely interwind with the Taliban and the al-Qaeda, to share its secrets is like chasing the chimera. Many years ago, former ISI chief Hamid Gul admitted to History Channel that he had lunched with al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden and was all praises for “doughty and fiercely independent” members of the two terror groups.

The WSJ report further states quoting US officials, “The Central Intelligence Agency arranged for Pakistan and India to share information on LeT, the group widely blamed for last November's terrorist attack on Mumbai, as well as on Taliban commanders who are leading the insurgency against Pakistan's government.” The US is stressing to Indian and Pakistani leaders that they face a common threat in Pakistan-based militant groups.

The Mumbai terror attacks clearly exposed Pakistan's collusion with the LeT. The consequent flip-flop by Islamabad on joint investigation into 26/11, its denial of the Pakistani identity of Ajmal Amir Kasab—the lone surviving terrorist in the Mumbai siege—and lack of action against LeT chief Hafeez Mohammed Sayeed and the other perpetrators of the violence further ripped apart its claims of innocence. Under US pressure, Pakistan just detained six people, partially mollifying the Indian outrage. “We have to satisfy the Mumbai question, and show India that the threat is abating," said a US official involved in developing Washington's South Asia strategy, according to WSJ.

Washington hopes that when India sees the intelligence and evidence that Islamabad is seriously fighting the militants in some areas, it will ease its deployments against Pakistan—which in turn would prompt Islamabad to put even more focus on the battle at home, the report adds.
It mentions Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari's wishful thinking that the Indian government, boosted by the Congress' victory, could result in removal of one or two Army divisions from the Pakistan border in coming months. But an Indian official, according to the report, “documented an escalation of cross-border infiltrations by Pakistani militants into Kashmir”.

Amid the strange possibility of such a preposterous idea, the report also quotes an ISI officer who cautions, “We're not going to tell them everything we know and they're not going to tell us everything they know. Nobody expects that to happen.... But we're talking about [the attack]. We weren't doing that in December." Though the official also says that India and Pakistan have shared “a lot” of information with each other about the Mumbai attack with the CIA initially acting as a conduit but the two countries.

According to America, under this brilliant model of cooperation, “India gets information on groups that threaten it, including the one that carried out the Mumbai attacks”. And Pakistan gets “more trust from India that it is serious about taking on militants”. Finally, the US gets “sharper Pakistani focus on the battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda”. Though the report also mentions the American apprehension by quoting a US official that “Washington isn't under any illusions about the difficulty of erasing decades-old suspicions between India and Pakistan”.

The CIA and other intelligence agencies are tracking the location of cellphones of Taliban commanders and their training camps. The report says that the US shares this information with Pakistan, and sometimes with India, to reinforce the US argument that the Taliban threat to Pakistan is greater than the Indian threat. Uncle Sam definitely gains from such intel, but how sharing reports of progress against militants in Bajaur, Swat, and Buner with India would help us is beyond comprehension.

Similarly, AFP quotes Michele Flournoy, Undersecretary of Defense for policy, “The administration hopes that in the aftermath of elections in India the two governments could resume steps to reduce tensions. I would love to see the Indian government and the Pakistan government re-engage in confidence-building measures and discussions about Kashmir and about other areas of difference.”

The Dawn published the WSJ report verbatim. Most news agencies who splashed the “cooperation” had based their reports on the WSJ story.

Besides, the reports—including the one by WSJ—were one-sided with no Indian version.

The sudden US interest in the region, now called Af-Pak, not only smacks of brazen hypocrisy, but also shows its foreign policy in poor light. America looked the other way after exit of the erstwhile USSR forces from Afghanistan and left the beautiful country to be riven by warlords battling for supremacy, and the ever-booming opium trade.

America continued its biased foreign policy when the Taliban were in the saddle in Afghanistan in September 1996—then Pakistani PM Benazir and its staunchest ally the US, in fact, bolstered the terror group with military and financial support, according to the book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and writer Steve Coll.

India has been reeling under Pakistan-sponsered terrorism since late Pakistani President and Army chief Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq launched Operation Topaz—that visualised cutting India and thereby bleeding it by a thousand cuts—in 1989 in Jammu and Kashmir. Therefore, fanciful ideas such as intel sharing between India and Pakistan don't deserve so much prominence in the media.