Pathankot Attacks May Signal Shift In Strategy Of Pak Terror Cults

Indian covert agencies now need to manage a strike of their own, so that the message is complete: we will talk and we will act. One without the other is meaningless.

The attack by Pakistan-based terrorists on the Pathankot air base will generate the usual political criticism about the Modi government’s “visionless” policy towards our dangerous neighbour. But if the attack proves anything, it seems that for the first time ever we seem to have a dual approach – one that combines anticipation of the enemy’s next move, while simultaneously pursuing talks for what they are worth. If this is not the case, Narendra Modi’s Lahore visit would make no sense.

Unlike every other time, this attack was anticipated and the intelligence did work, even though one can never have complete intelligence about terrorists. If we did have them, the attack would have been nipped well before it actually happened. However, even after a reasonably successful defence, Indian covert agencies now need to manage a strike of their own, so that the message is complete: we will talk and we will act. One without the other is meaningless.

It would be politically easy to call off talks with Pakistan, especially the foreign secretary-level one planned shortly, but that would a sign of weakness. It will mean we are responding in anger to an obvious provocation, and when actions are dictated by emotion and not cool calculation, we will have shown confusion, not resolve. It will also allow Pakistan to claim we are not sincere about talks and give its real state – the army and ISI and the assorted terror groups under their control – smug satisfaction that their ploy worked. We should not give them that satisfaction.

The first thing to understand about Pakistan is that it is an ideological state, a “greedy” state, a state committed to changing the status quo at any cost, as C Christine Fair notes in her book, Fighting Till the End: The Pakistani Army’s Way of War. Few foreign scholars on India-Pakistan relations have understood the real nature of the Pakistani Deep State – essentially its army, and its appendages. Western scholars are partially blind in trying to somehow place Kashmir at the centre of the problem between the two countries instead of calling a spade a spade.

The central issue is the Pakistani ideology and the Death Cults created in its name. The Pakistani state’s ideology is one of unremitting hostility to “Hindu” India, and by state we do not mean the usual government of Pakistan, which may occasionally want peace with India, but the Deep State.

The unrelenting hostility of the Pakistani state is the result of two realisations: that it has never won a war with India, and possibly never can. This hurts the self-image of the Pakistani army like nothing else, where it is assumed that Allah’s side can never lose to “infidels”. And the war it is fighting is psychic – it is about establishing the faulty logic of a state based on Islam, which needs to be in constant conflict till India is Islamised. This is why repeated defeats and setbacks do not matter. If you are fighting for an ideology, you can never give in. You have to create Death Cults to do your job covertly when the regular army is impotent to do the job.

The implications for India and Indian strategy are thus obvious.

First, Pakistan will never give up terrorism as state policy even if the terrorists it breeds end up destroying it. This is why it now distinguishes between terrorists fighting Pakistan (the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, for example) and those it can use to fight India (LeT and Jaish), the latter being suspected of executing the Pathankot attack.

Second, to defeat Pakisntan, we have to consistently defeat its ideology of Islamism and also its terrorist Death Cults. This is not the job of a few years or of one successful strike against them, but of building a long-term defence-cum-covert offence capability where the costs of Pakistan’s folly are repeatedly made obvious to the Pakistani army. After Pathankot, it is now upto us to score a strike against them with plausible deniability. We should be exactly like them in this: condemn the attacks, offer to help them, and deny any hand in it. Two can play this deadly game.

Third, we have no stake in a united Pakistan. We have to try and focus on its dismemberment and aid all those groups which want independence, whether it is the Balochs or the Sindhis or the frontier tribes. We cannot defeat the Pakistani Deep state without truncating it to a narrow geography where its own people will wonder what they gained from the army’s anti-India stance for nearly 70 years. The war will end when Pakistan becomes a truly secular state and abandons Islam as its ideology. Kashmir is a soluble problem only after this happens, and not before.

Fourth, to defeat Pakistan’s Death Cults, we need to learn to out-think them and figure out what they will do next, now that the strategy of killing civilians through random acts of terrorism is subject to diminishing propaganda returns. Indians tend to shout for a few days and then get on with their daily lives – this gives Pakistan no reason to smile. The chances are Pathankot indicates a shift in strategy.

Consider what the anti-Pakistan terrorists inside Pakistan are doing: apart from attacking Shia mosques, they are directly targeting the army – in Peshawar it was an army school; they have also attacked ISI targets and other armed forces symbols. The chances are the Lashkar and Jaish will now adopt the same tactics – against India. Attacks on business targets could also increase, to create lasting damage to business sentiment. They will think like Osama bin Laden and 9/11. They will focus on demoralising business and state power.

Fifth, Pakistan has also been emboldened by the rise of China and the relative unwillingness of the US to fight battles anywhere. This presents a double-danger for us as China too has territorial claims on us. It is more than likely that China is covertly egging on Pakistan with the idea of entering the picture through a short war in the north-east at a time when we are focusing our energies on the western borders. The Pakistani keenness to demilitarise Siachen is actually likely to be a Chinese strategic priority as well – and so we must be resolute in our efforts to refuse this. We have to prepare for a Chinese effort to grab Tawang, which China regards as unfinished business of the 1962 war.

India needs to think strategically for the long-term. It has to do to Pakistan what it does to us and make sure that the Chinese will get a bloody nose if they try to fish in troubled waters. The West, including the US, has lost its spine and is anyway focused on fighting recession and ISIS. It cannot offer anything more than moral and material support.

This fight is ours. And we have to win it.