Firmly in control

Were there to be any doubt as to how robust the new Chief of Army Staff was going to be in respect of relations with India they have been dispelled. The Indian ‘surgical strike’ story that surfaced in September 2016 never had much by way of supporting evidence, and now General Bajwa has added his weight to the matter by refusing to accept that India conducted any ‘surgical strike’. What there probably was was an escalation in firing across the Line of Control (LoC) that was ‘hot’ at the time, which got parlayed into something greater than the sum of its parts. Pakistan, said General Bajwa was ready to respond to any aggression by India and that the rhetoric from across the border was ‘self defeating’.

The year 2016 was more than fractious in terms of the Pakistan-India relationship. It started badly with an attack across the border by militants that had their origin in Pakistan, de-railing the nascent peace process and continued downhill for the rest of the year. In late September, India withdrew from the Saarc summit, thus removing an opportunity for dialogue on the margins and effectively scuttling Saarc completely. In the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York PM Nawaz Sharif maintained that Pakistan wants peace with India but it is “not possible without resolving the Kashmir issue”. Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj responded by accusing Pakistan of ‘nurturing, peddling and exporting terrorism’. Pakistan has maintained a middle-of-the-road course diplomatically and managed to restrain the knee-jerk response to the fulminations of Indian PM Modi. Military responses have been proportional across the LoC even when severely tested as in the incident that saw a school bus targeted and subsequent targeting of the ambulance that responded to the needs of the injured. Now General Bajwa has weighed in, and rightly so — but sadly resolution of this eternally corrosive dispute is as far away as it ever was.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 7^th, 2017.

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