Failure of Indo-Pak talks in Islamabad and the WikiLeaks release of classified United States documents on Afghanistan war indicates that Pakistan's army does not want peace with India, a noted scholar has said.
"The military establishment simply does not want peace with India," Sumit Ganguly, from the Indian University in Bloomington, wrote in his column in the Foreign Policy magazine.
"Meaningful progress on contentious bilateral issues would inevitably call into question its extraordinary privileges and its lavish existence. Likewise, it has little or no interest in full-fledged counterterrorism cooperation with the US. A swift and decisive end to the swarm of jihadis operating within Pakistan and along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border would mean an end to the seemingly unending flow of American largesse," Ganguly said.
Asking Washington to 'wake up', the scholar said Pakistan's military was running the show in Islamabad and the WikiLeaks revelations have only confirmed that supporting jihadi terrorist groups aren't the actions of a few, rogue generals -- it's government strategy.
Time has now arrived for the Obama administration to undertake a policy review that explores alternative logistics supply routes into Afghanistan and one that will lower the boom on Pakistan -- unless it shows tangible and immediate progress on the counterterrorism cooperation front, the American scholar of Indian origin said.
"A policy that falls short on these two counts is an invitation for the continued loss of blood and treasure to no viable end," he said.
Ganguly said the American and the Pakistani political establishments are now scrambling to contain the diplomatic damage from last week's revelations -- stressing that the evidence is dated and that US policy and Pakistani behaviour have changed significantly since the Obama administration entered office.
"Don't bet on it. In its quest to establish a firm political foothold in Afghanistan after the US army withdrawal in July 2011, Pakistan's security establishment will soon insist that Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul make peace with two of its most reliable proxies, the forces loyal to Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Taliban network of Sirajuddin Haqqani," he said.
"Not only will Pakistan have managed to reinstall a pliant regime in Afghanistan, but it will also have dramatically limited what Islamabad sees as a dagger pointed at its heart -- India's growing influence to the northwest," Ganguly wrote.
The documents leaked by WikiLeaks, he said, alleges that over the past several years, despite public professions of close cooperation with the US on the antiterrorism front, Pakistan's powerful Inter Services Intelligence directorate had actually abetted and aided the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani jihadist group Lashkar-e-Tayiba, and the Afghan insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
"Beyond these startling revelations, the documents also charged that the ISI had provided information to insurgents about US troop movements, their likely operations, and military capabilities," Ganguly wrote.
