Caught between two Sharifs

Prime Minister Narendra Modi surprised the world by inviting the leaders of Saarc countries for his swearing in. He has now made it clear that that was not an isolated event. He has decided to send Foreign Secretary Subrahmanyam Jaishankar to visit the Saarc neighbours, to enhance bilateral and regional cooperation.

Modi himself has already visited Nepal and Bhutan, where traditionally friendly relations are being strengthened. He is scheduled to visit Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Maldives this year. While the internal situation in Maldives raises concerns, the election of Maithripala Sirisena in Sri Lanka appears to have set the course for greater ethnic harmony and a better appreciation of India’s strategic concerns in Colombo. Long-pending issues such as the land boundary demarcation and sharing of river waters with Bangladesh will hopefully be resolved this year.

While one can reasonably express confidence that cooperation with our eastern neighbours will gather momentum in the coming months, the same cannot be said of relations with our western neighbours, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Jaishankar will be dealing in Kabul with a government beset with internal contradictions and rivalries. Moreover, President Ashraf Ghani is under huge pressure from the US and Pakistan to undertake a Pakistan facilitated process of “reconciliation” with the Taliban. This, when terrorism led to colossal civilian casualties and the deaths of 4,634 Afghani security personnel at the hands of the Mullah Omar-led Taliban and the ISI-backed Haqqani Network, operating out of sanctuaries in Pakistan, in 2014. The safety and security of Indian diplomatic missions and nationals in Afghanistan must receive the highest priority.

Jaishankar will arrive in Islamabad to face a familiar problem. He will be dealing with a dysfunctional elected government which has surrendered virtually all its powers on issues of national security and foreign policy, not to speak of internal security and inter-provincial relations, to the Army. Over the past few months, even the conduct of serious issues of foreign policy are in the hands of, not Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, but his namesake and, some would say, his nemesis, army chief General Raheel Sharif. Indeed, the face of Pakistan’s foreign policy in capitals such as Washington, Kabul, London and Beijing over the past three months has not been Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, but General Raheel Sharif.

Nawaz Sharif only paid a visit to Saudi Arabia following information about the impending demise of King Abdullah. The King’s intervention had saved the Pakistani prime minister from a possible death sentence imposed by General Pervez Musharraf’s dispensation.

The peripatetic Raheel Sharif was, in the meantime, busy paying high profile visits to Washington, London, Kabul and Beijing. Raheel Sharif was received personally in Washington by Secretary of State John Kerry, author of the Kerry Lugar Act which opened the purse strings for enhanced American economic assistance to Pakistan. The British prime minister went one better, by receiving Raheel Sharif at 10 Downing Street.

Pakistan’s “all-weather friend”, China, received the general not as an army chief but a visiting statesman. He was received not only by the highest ranking military officer and member of the all-powerful Central Military Commission General Fang Changiong, but also by the head of the Chinese Peoples’ Conference Yu Zhengsheng, Politburo member Meng Jiangzhu and Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

It was Raheel and not Nawaz or his Foreign Policy Adviser Sartaj Aziz who visited Kabul to meet the Afghan leadership immediately after the Peshawar school massacre. Ghani moved post-haste to meet Raheel in Kabul and followed it up by an unprecedented visit by a foreign head of state to meet the army chief at the GHQ in Rawalpindi. Amidst all this, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khwaja Asif, who is constitutionally the general’s boss, was nowhere to be seen

Raheel’s proximity to Musharraf is well known. Musharraf faced serious charges for his declaration of emergency in 2007, and his involvement in the brutal killing of Baloch nationalist leader Nawab Akbar Bugti. Both former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhury and Nawaz Sharif, who was humiliated and incarcerated by Musharraf in October 2000, were gunning for the former military ruler on these serious charges.

Musharraf’s successor, General Ashfaq Kayani, did not show any great enthusiasm for defending his former boss. Raheel Sharif’s elder brother, Major Shabir Sharif, a highly decorated soldier, killed in action in the 1971 conflict, was a close friend of Musharraf, who nurtured Raheel’s career and promoted him to command the 11 Infantry Division. Pakistan’s supreme court and Nawaz Sharif pulled back from acting against Musharraf once Raheel warned them to back off.

Raheel Sharif is the architect of operations against the Tehriq-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). These operations involving the use of artillery, tanks and fighter aircraft have resulted in hundreds of deaths with an estimated 1.5 million Pashtun tribals fleeing their homes. If Musharraf allowed Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar to “disappear”, Raheel has ensured that dreaded terrorists such as Sirajuddin Haqqani have also disappeared. His military operations have not led to the killing or capture of a single terrorist of the Haqqani Network or the Afghan Taliban.

Jaishankar will have to assess whether Raheel Sharif has the will or the inclination to ban and dismantle terrorist groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

Over 40 terrorist training camps are still operational across the LoC. Is Nawaz Sharif sticking to clichés on Jammu and Kashmir, or manifesting the realism prevalent in Pakistan between 2004 and 2007? There is no sign that the perpetrators of the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist strike are being brought to justice. Any return to a comprehensive dialogue process with Pakistan should depend on a clinically realistic assessment of these issues.

The writer is a former High Commissioner to Pakistan