Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War by Myra MacDonald

Author:Myra MacDonald [MacDonald, Myra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hurst
Published: 2017-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

9

THE NOBLE LIE

THE INDIA-PAKISTAN PEACE TALKS (2004–2007)

“We were making fast progress. That I know.” Pervez Musharraf, out of power and in exile, is talking about the peace agreement on Kashmir that came tantalizingly close in his final years as leader of Pakistan. It is January 2011 and he is in his London home in an unostentatious apartment block near Edgware Road, the favoured area for Pakistani exiles. “We had found the basic parameters…now we were in the process of drafting an agreement. Obviously there were differences on the wording and the expressions.”1 Former prime minister Manmohan Singh echoed those sentiments when he acknowledged that, “at one time, it appeared that an important breakthrough was in sight”.2 The draft agreement was honed through a series of “non-papers” exchanged between India and Pakistan—a diplomatic convention that means nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. In essence it said that India and Pakistan would give maximum autonomy to the people of all of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir while retaining authority over foreign policy, defence and communications on their sides of the Line of Control. There would be no exchange of territory, but both countries promised to work together to make borders irrelevant by encouraging trade, travel and tourism across the LoC. A “joint mechanism” involving the people of J&K along with Indians and Pakistanis would be set up to coordinate areas of mutual interest.3 “Kashmir is not that easy,” said Musharraf. “I don’t know whether we could have shown that kind of guts and leadership that we arrived at a conclusion within six months, but we were making fast progress…”4 He did not hold onto office long enough to find out, and when he was forced out of power, the possibility of a historic agreement between India and Pakistan disappeared.

The story of how close the two countries came to making peace between 2004 and 2007 and why they ultimately failed is also the story of why Pakistan lost the Great South Asian War. The peace deal fell foul of circumstances before it could be finalised—from domestic politics in India to turbulence in Pakistan to international compunctions that went far beyond Kashmir. If India was slow to grab the opportunity for compromise offered by Musharraf, Pakistan dragged its feet in disarming its Islamist militant proxies. But the deal might have survived Musharraf’s departure from office had Pakistan not been a prisoner of its ideology. No attempt had been made to prepare the country for compromise. The draft peace agreement depended on the will of a military ruler and Musharraf’s successors disowned it. Within the Pakistan Army, the presumed threat from India remained the organising principle. In the broader population, views of India and Kashmir were too ingrained. Without a fundamental change in the way Pakistan defined itself, no peace talks were sustainable.

* * *

One of the many consequences of Pakistan being an “insufficiently imagined” country was that it left people all the freer to define its history according to their politics.

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