Yet there the parallels end. Israel is a small country living in a permanent state of siege, highly security-conscious and surrounded by forces hostile to it; India is a giant country whose borders are notoriously permeable, an open society known for its lax and easygoing ways. Whereas Israel’s toughness is seen by many as its principal characteristic, India is seen even by its own citizens as a soft state, its underbelly penetrated easily enough by determined terrorists. Where Israel notoriously exacts grim retribution for every attack on its soil, India has endured with numbing stoicism an endless series of bomb blasts, including at least six other major assaults in different locations in 2008 alone. Terrorism has taken more lives in India than in any country in the world after Iraq, and yet India, unlike Israel, has seemed to be unable to do anything about it.
If Israel has Hamas as its current principal adversary, India has a slew of terrorist organizations to contend with—Lashkar-e-Taiba and its transmogrified cousins, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Jamaat-ud-Dawa and more. But whereas Hamas operates without international recognition from the territory of Gaza, where its legitimacy is questioned even by the Palestinian Authority, India’s murderous enemies function from the soil of a sovereign member state of the United Nations, Pakistan. And that makes all the difference.
Hamas is in no condition to resist Israel’s air and ground attacks in kind, whereas an Indian attack on Pakistani territory, even one targeting terrorist bases and training camps, would invite swift retaliation from the Pakistani Army. Israel can dictate the terms of its military incursion and end it when it judges appropriate, whereas an Indian military action would immediately spark a war with a well-armed neighbour that neither side could win. And at the end of the day, one chilling fact would prevent India from thinking it can take a leaf out of the Israeli playbook: the country that foments, and at the very least condones, the terror attacks on India is a nuclear power.
So India went to the international community with evidence to prove that the Mumbai attacks were planned in Pakistan and conducted by Pakistani citizens who were in contact throughout with handlers in Pakistan. New Delhi had briefly hoped that the proof might enable Islamabad’s weak civilian government to rein in the violent elements in its society. But Islamabad’s reaction has been one of denial. Yet no one doubts that Pakistan’s all-powerful military intelligence apparatus has, over the last two decades, created and supported terror organizations as instruments of Pakistani policy in Afghanistan and India. When the Indian embassy in Kabul was hit by a suicide bomber in July 2008, American intelligence sources told the New York Times that not only was Pakistan’s ISI behind the attack, but the ISI had made little effort to cover its tracks. It knew perfectly well that India would not go to war with Pakistan to avenge the killing of its diplomatic personnel.
And indeed it did not. The fact is that India knows that war will accomplish nothing. Indeed, it is just what the terrorists want—a cause that will rally all Pakistanis to the flag, making common cause with the Islamists against the hated Indian enemy, and providing the army an excuse to abandon the unpopular fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the West for the far more familiar terrain of the Indian border in the East. There is no reason to play into the hands of those who seek that outcome.
And yet—when Indians watched Israel take the fight to the enemy, killing those who launched rockets against it and dismantling many of the sites from which the rockets flew, some could not resist wishing they could do something similar in Pakistan. India understands, though, that the collateral damage would be too high, the price in civilian lives unacceptable and the risks of the conflict spiralling out of control too acute for them to contemplate such an option. So they place their trust in international diplomacy—and so Israel was doing what India could never permit itself to do.
At the same time, for any Indian government, inaction is not an option. By showing restraint, ignoring the calls of hotheads for air strikes and missile attacks and by pressuring the United States to work on its near-bankrupt clients in Islamabad—who have received some $11 billion in military assistance since 9/11, ostensibly to fight Islamist terror but much of it spent on those who have fomented such terror—India has achieved appreciable results. Under US pressure, the Pakistani leadership arrested some twenty militants, including Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi, the reputed operational mastermind of the Mumbai horror, and in February 2009 released a report finally admitting that five of the attackers were Pakistani. This was an important first step, but it did not go far enough: there are still too many evasions and denials, including the suggestion that the attacks were masterminded elsewhere than Pakistan. Also, house arrests and nominal bannings are not enough for Indians: we have seen this movie before. The Lashkar was banned in 2001—by General Musharraf under duress after 9/11—only to re-emerge as the ostensibly humanitarian group Jamaat-ud-Dawa, and in that guise is even more powerful than before. Its head, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, remained free to preach vitriolic hatred against India in his Friday sermons and to serve, at the very least, as a catalyst for murder and mayhem in our country. New Delhi is rightly insisting that Islamabad crack down completely on these militant groups, dismantle their training camps, freeze their bank accounts (not, as Musharraf did, with enough notice for them to be emptied and transferred to other accounts operated by the same people) and arrest and prosecute their leaders.
Though there is little appetite in Pakistan for such action, the UN Sanctions Committee under resolution 1267 has made it easier for Islamabad by proscribing the Jamaat-ud-Dawa and imposing travel bans and asset freezes of specific named individuals, including Saeed. China, which had opposed such a move when the United States and the United Kingdom had proposed it in 2006, supported it in 2008—a clear indication that in the wake of the Mumbai horrors it judged that such pro-Pakistani obstruction would no longer be compatible with its role as a responsible leader of the international system. What is essential is to sustain the pressure: the American decision in April 2012 to announce a bounty of $10 million on Hafiz Saeed’s head is a welcome indication that the world has not given up its quest for justice. I had hoped that if our tragedy gave the semi-secular moderates in Pakistan the opportunity to crack down upon the extremists and murderers in their midst in their own interest, the suffering of a few hundred families in India on 26/11 might not be replicated in the lives of other Indians at the hands of these evil men in the years to come. But if the Pakistanis don’t do so, the rest of us must.
The Indian state is no stranger to political violence within its territory, and it has evolved a very effective technique of dealing with it—combining ruthless law and order tactics with completely open cooptation into the democratic space. The former gives those using violence a disincentive to continue doing so; the latter gives them a positive reason to give up the gun in order to seek their objectives by other means. This has worked in places as far apart as Punjab and Mizoram, so that yesterday’s terrorists become today’s political candidates, tomorrow’s chief ministers, and the day after tomorrow’s leaders of the opposition, those being the vagaries of democracy.
But when you are talking about terror coming from across the border, those options are not available. The terrorists are not people who are seeking a ventilation of political grievances. These are not people who are coming to Mumbai because they want to have their space in making decisions about the country, the community, the future, whatever. These are people coming, unfortunately, with no objective other than destruction. Their objective is to sow terror and fear. And that is very different from the other kinds of terrorism India has dealt with domestically.
When these twenty young men set sail from Pakistan to wreak the havoc they did in Mumbai, I do not know how many of them realistically thought they would ever get back. But clearly, they had no political objectives beyond the undermining of India. They were not asking for the release of imprisoned terrorists. They were not asking for a change of government. They were not seeking anything other than to cause as
much damage and death and destruction as possible, perhaps in order to provoke a war between India and Pakistan that would take the heat off Al Qaeda in Pakistan. For them to pretend to be standing up for the cause of Islam, when they killed forty-nine innocent Muslim civilians in the city of Mumbai, would be a travesty of anything that Islam stands for.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that this kind of terrorism—terrorism as an end in itself, not as a means to something larger—can only be confronted implacably. There is no co-optation formula available. It just has to be nipped in the bud, ideally before it starts, and if that is not possible in its home base, deal with it firmly if and when it actually occurs.
It is fair to ask why 26/11 is the singular event that overwhelms the debate. Why does it overshadow the four wars, and even the preceding twenty years of terrorist support? The answer lies partly in its proximity: just over three years have passed since 26/11 as these words are written, and it looms large still, whereas the formal wars seem to belong to the history books, and the earlier terrorist blasts have been relegated to the footnotes. There is, of course, the continuing danger that 26/11 implies: this mutant species of political violence now offers a copybook template to any future terrorist group. More vital, though, is its intimate immediacy in a psychological sense. As the American novelist Don Delillo has written about terror attacks after 9/11: ‘This catastrophic event changes the way we think and act, moment to moment, week to week, for unknown weeks and months to come, and steely years. Our world, parts of our world, have crumbled into theirs, which means we are living in a place of danger and rage.’ The ‘livestreaming’ of the violence has brought about a new auditory and visual experience, as terrorism has been brought into the homes and living rooms of ordinary citizens by the ubiquity of contemporary mass media. Our policy-making machinery must learn to channel this sense of danger, this rage that seethes within, without letting our foreign policy be held hostage to 26/11.
It is fair to point out that since then Pakistan’s own internal security has been racked by bouts of large-scale suicide attacks, bomb blasts and commando-style operations attacking army and naval bases. The ISI’s response to these has revealed the ambivalence at the heart of its sadomasochistic relationship to terrorism: it suffers the whiplash of the very pain it seeks to inflict on others. Many close observers see in the ISI’s actions a curious inward-looking organizational culture, characterized by small-minded hubris, tactical cleverness, bureaucratic self-preservation and wilful ignorance about genuine long-term security needs, all inflated by pretensions of historical grandeur. The entire enterprise is sustained in an establishment rhetoric couched in military and religious vocabulary, with grandiose strategic ambitions advocated largely by ex-military men who should know better, given Pakistan’s multiple defeats at the hands of India. New Delhi can shake its head at this phenomenon, but it cannot afford either righteous rage or weary resignation in the face of such fundamental (and fundamentalist) hostility. It must remain vigilant even as it seeks to pursue an honourable peace.
Before concluding this section of our analysis, let me return to where I began, at the Gateway of India. Inevitably, after 26/11, the questions began to be asked abroad: ‘Is it all over for India? Can the country ever recover from this?’
Of course, the answers are no and yes, but outsiders cannot be blamed for asking existential questions about a nation that so recently had been seen as poised for take-off. In the wake of the attacks, foreign tourists cancelled reservations in Indian hotels hundreds of miles from Mumbai, and some potential investors in the Indian economy delayed their investment-related plans and visits after seeing attacks upon hotels frequented by international businessmen. While these overreactions, given time, did subside, India has not fully returned to being the economic lodestar it once was in the eyes of international business, at least partly because of the ever-present threat of random violence. Two subsequent bomb blasts in Mumbai and one each in Pune and Delhi, though on a much smaller scale than 26/11, have served as reminders of that possibility.
India can recover from the physical assaults against it. It is striking that both the assaulted hotels, the Taj Mahal and the Trident, reopened their doors within a month of the terrorist attack. We are a land of great resilience that has learned, over arduous millennia, to cope with tragedy. Within twenty-four hours of an earlier Islamist assault on Mumbai, the Stock Exchange bombing in 1993, Mumbai’s traders were back on the floor, their burned-out computers forgotten, doing what they used to before technology had changed their trading styles. Bombs and bullets alone cannot destroy India, because Indians will pick their way through the rubble and carry on as they have done throughout history.
But what can destroy India is a change in the spirit of its people, away from the pluralism and coexistence that has been our greatest strength. The prime minister’s call for calm and restraint in the face of this murderous rampage was heeded; the masses mobilized in candelight processions, not as murderous mobs. My big fear was that political opportunism in a charged election season could have led to some practising the politics of hatred and division. Indeed, I wrote while the attacks were still going on that ‘if these tragic events lead to the demonization of the Muslims of India, the terrorists will have won’. I am heartened that instead Indians stayed united in the face of this tragedy. The victims included Indians of every faith, including forty-nine Muslims out of the 188 killed. There is anger, some of it directed inward, against our security and governance failures, but none of it against any specific community. That is as it should be. For India to be India, its gateway—to the multiple Indias within, and the heaving seas without—must always remain open.
Clearly, the international community would want to see that Pakistan implements its stated commitment to deal with terrorist groups within its territory, including the members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban’s Quetta Shura, the Hezb-e-Islami, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and so many other like-minded terrorist groups that have been proliferating on Pakistani soil. Without this, the gains made in the last few years of international intervention in Afghanistan will be compromised, and it will become difficult to forestall the resumption of violence and terror in Afghanistan. The world has come to realize, at considerable cost, that terrorism cannot be compartmentalized—that any facile attempt to strike Faustian bargains with terrorists often result in such forces turning on the very powers that sustained them in the past. This implies exacting cooperation from Pakistan.
Some in Washington, notably the late Richard Holbrooke, tried to put the burden of this on India, suggesting that settling the Kashmir dispute on Islamabad’s terms would remove the incentive for Pakistan to continue to seek ‘strategic depth’ (in other words, control of a puppet Islamist government) in Kabul. Such an approach would boil down to surrendering to blackmail. It is difficult to believe that any responsible policy-maker in Washington seriously expects India to compromise on its own vital national interests in order to persuade Pakistan to stop threatening the peace. India has taken upon itself the enormous burden of talking peace with a government of Pakistan that in the very recent past has proved to be, at best, ineffective and, at worst, duplicitous about the real threats emanating from its territory and institutions to the rest of South Asia.
In pursuing peace with Pakistan, the Government of India is indeed rolling the dice: every conciliatory gambit is a gamble that peace will not be derailed by the insincerity of the other side. There are not many takers in the Indian political space right now for pursuing a peace process with a government that does not appear to control significant elements of its own military. Few in India are prepared to accept the notion that the world in general, and India in particular, is obliged to live with a state of affairs in Pakistan that incubates terror while the country’s institutions remain either unable or unwilling to push back against the so-called non-state actors that are said to be out of the government’s control. Events in Pakistan, including attacks on its own military headquarters a
nd a naval base, may, we hope, have stiffened Pakistani resolve to confront these ‘non-state actors’. But it remains to be seen whether some in Islamabad are still seduced by the dangerous idea that terrorists who attack the Pakistani military are bad, but those who attack India are to be tacitly encouraged.
Our government is committed to peaceful relations with Pakistan. Indeed, our prime minister personally—and therefore the highest levels of our government—has a vision of a subcontinent living in peace and prosperity, focusing on development, not distracted by hostility and violence. But we need to see evidence of good faith action from Islamabad before our prime minister, who is accountable to Parliament and a public opinion outraged by repeated acts of terror, can reciprocate in full measure.
For the past three years, under sustained American pressure, the Pakistani Army has begun, however selectively, to take on the challenge of fighting some terrorist groups—not the ones lovingly nurtured by the ISI to assault India, but the ones who have escaped the ISI leadership’s control and turned on Pakistan’s own military institutions. Indians, for the most part, feel a great deal of solidarity with the Pakistani people. It is striking that no one in any official position in India has, in any way, given vent to Schad enfreude, or implied that the violence assailing Pakistan itself is a case of Pakistani chickens coming home to roost.
But the unpalatable fact remains that what Pakistan is suffering from today is the direct result of a deliberate policy of inciting, financing, training and equipping militants and jihadis over twenty years as an instrument of state policy. As Dr Frankenstein discovered when he built his monster, it is impossible to control the monster once it’s built.
Attempts by glibly sophisticated Pakistani spokesmen to portray themselves as fellow victims of terror—indeed, to go so far as to compare the number of deaths suffered by Pakistan in its war against terrorism on its own soil with those inflicted upon India—seek to obscure the fundamental difference between the two situations. Pakistanis are not suffering death and destruction from terrorists trained in India. No one travelled from India to attack the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad or the naval base at Mehran. Indians, however, have suffered death and destruction from terrorists trained in and dispatched from Pakistan with the complicity—and some might argue, more—of elements of the Pakistani security forces and establishment. Pakistan has to cauterize a cancer in its own midst, but a cancer that was implanted by itself and its own institutions. And this will only happen if they eliminate the warped thinking, among powerful elements in Islamabad, that a terrorist who sets off a bomb at the Marriott in Islamabad is a bad terrorist whereas one who sets off a bomb at the Taj in Mumbai is a good terrorist. The moment the Pakistani establishment genuinely disavows the nurturing and deployment of terror as an instrument of state policy, and concludes that it faces the same enemy as India and should make common cause with it to stamp out the scourge, is the moment that a genuine prospect of peace will dawn on the subcontinent. Such a sentiment is, alas, far from even glimmering on the horizon.