Pre-empting Peace Between India and Pakistan

The weekend before last, Pakistan President Asif Zardari made a momentous offer to the country's blood enemy, India: a withdrawal of Pakistan's pre-emptive, first-strike nuclear policy. He also suggested that the two countries, which have gone to war three times, form an economic union. In other words, Zardari made a show of friendship unprecedented in Pakistan's 61-year history.

Three days later, a group of terrorists, possibly members of a Pakistan-nurtured Islamic army, created mayhem in Indian’s largest city, Mumbai, killing at least 172 people. Some specialists on the region call the group – Lashkar-e-Taiba – a “state proxy,” meaning that the government of Pakistan committed an act of war.

The best experts I know find that far-fetched. Lashkar and a few other such groups were formed after the end of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan by the Pakistan Army’s spy agency, the Interservices Intelligence Directorate. But in my own couple of decades of living in, visiting and reporting on Pakistan, it’s become clear that the ISI has lost control of these groups.

The ISI, for instance, had no role as far as I could tell in conceiving, controlling or influencing the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, my Wall Street Journal colleague, by members of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Nor, certainly, was the ISI responsible for last year’s murder of Zardari’s wife, Benazir Bhutto, by a suicide bomber.

The ISI is riven with rogue elements who do support these and other groups. But that is not the same as a state proxy.

There are suggestions that the Mumbai attack was a year in the making, and that the single captured terrorist, Ajmal Amir Qasab, has implicated elements of the Pakistan Navy in the training of the assailants.

The timing of the attack, however, is notable. It has jeopardized Zardari’s peace initiative in its infancy. Barnett Rubin, the New York University expert on the region, told me yesterday that he’s too busy to blog about the events right now. But, in an email exchange, he suggested that it’s worth examining the possibility that the assault was meant in part to scotch any peace between the neighbors.

“Zardari says India is not a threat,” Rubin said. “Without the Indian threat, jihadis have no reason to exist in Pakistan. So logically they should do something to make India threaten Pakistan. A plausible hypothesis to be checked against facts.”

My former colleague Zahid Hussain has an excellent analysis at The Times of London. Also see this Columbia Journalism Review piece by Josh Foust.