Pakistan’s flawed Indian policy

Let me clarify at the outset that war never solves anything, least of all a tense relationship between two nations. Simultaneously, the other extreme side of war; passivity and friendly gestures, are not the answer either. The wrong approach Pakistan adopts when it comes to India is to downgrade the success of Indian ulterior motives and sanitise the looming Indian threat.

India keeps grabbing land in Kashmir so that the land is literally cultivated for harvesting what would someday yield an Indian identity of the place. Pakistan’s response to that could be summed up as denialism. It keeps making noise about Indian defeat in Kashmir. What is worse is that it creates a passivity inside the minds of the Pakistani citizenry, that India is already on its way out of Kashmir because they have lost it there. Nothing could be further from the practical ground realities though. India may very well be right on the path toward never reversing the annexation of August 5, 2019. The people of Kashmir hate the Indians but the world is never guided by democratic principles. Brute force and aggression always win.

The underestimation of the Indian threat that is created inside Pakistan’s psyche because of the incessant noise made in support of the case for an Indian failure in Kashmir is not going to serve Pakistan’s interests. Foreign threats must not be communicated to the citizenry keeping the very citizenry in mind. Bad news must be conveyed immediately. If our leadership wants to act as a good friend of its citizenry then it should tell the harsh truth even if the public doesn’t want to hear it. The most potent knowledge in winning against an enemy is knowing its strength. Singing songs about why India must leave Kashmir is not going to cut it.

Keeping the same domestic audience in mind, Pakistan’s foreign minister argues in foreign media in a manner that would shame the most well-respected comedians. Opinions can be democratic, facts cannot. Facts must be told regardless of public opinion. Pakistan can learn from the American mistake when it comes to the makeup of foreign threats.

The American government acts on the other side of that extreme. They maximise the foreign threat and scare their citizenry from small and at times nonexistent threats, which achieves the American citizenry’s support of the savagery that follows as aggression in the name of some nice-sounding cause such as Responsibility to Protect, defending human rights and so forth. Pakistan indirectly asks its citizens to brush the threat under the carpet to justify their policies and diplomacy, while the Americans ask their citizens to imagine the threats out there to justify the ensuing aggression.

Both are wrong because they don’t tell the truth about the nature and extent of the foreign threat. The result is that Americans are cognizant of the imagined threat while Pakistanis are incognizant of the real threat.

I am not making a case for Pakistan to adopt the American model of looking for enemies and making case after case for aggression, but rather that the extreme passivity is wrong. That is perhaps one contributing factor in the success of the fifth-generation warfare waged inside Pakistan. The fifth-generation warriors are winning partly because there is less noise about India being an enemy and more noise about sending friendly gestures toward that enemy. And don’t even start me on what case Pakistan is making against India globally.

A few tweets by Imran Khan and some comic interviews by the FM could be summed up as Pakistan’s foreign diplomacy regarding Indian atrocities. One could put one’s money where one’s mouth is but first the mouth has to make the required noise. Seeing no evil doesn’t diminish the evil.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 1^st, 2021.

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