Pakistan's Last Gambit continues? continues..........

This complicity, to the Pakistani mind, is justified where India is concerned. A majority of Pakistanis have for long been made to believe that it is the looming military presence of a ‘hostile’ India on its eastern borders which compels Pakistan to adopt countervailing covert strategies. This is only a part of the picture. The other part, largely unstated and absent in western discourses, is the Pakistan Army’s raison d’être—to complete the ‘unfinished agenda’ of Partition, which is to annex Kashmir, and keep India engaged in a prolonged battle with terrorist groups.

There are signs that such arguments continue to shape the Pakistan Army’s policy towards India. An analysis of Low Intensity Conflict made by a brigadier in Pakistan’s National Defence College in 2004, almost three years after the September 11 attack, underlined the continuing debate on the policy of using terrorist groups to leverage the Kashmir issue. The brigadier’s recommendation was: “Covert state activity must be totally divested from overt activity; jihadi organisations should not be allowed public display of arms, demonstrations, fund raising campaigns and media statements; all overt activity must be strictly state controlled; all centrifugal movements against Indians must be prioritised after analysis of centrifugal potential along with cost–benefit analysis; Kashmir movement must be re- organised on highly professional lines covertly in conformity with the international environments; bases of controlling and directly clandestine movements may be shifted abroad to cover up compromising trails.”

To be continued.........