Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century by Shashi Tharoor Page B

Pakistani rulerwho understood that normalizing relations with India would be of great practical benefit to Pakistan itself.
    The terrorists and their patrons clearly wish to thwart any moves in the direction of a rapprochement between the two countries, which would thwart their destructive Islamist agenda. But the Mumbai terror assault only seemed to confirm that—though President Zardari is adept at going on Indian television and saying what his viewers across the border wish to hear—the peacemakers in Islamabad are not the ones who call the shots in that country.
    Pakistan at first predictably denied any connection to the events, but each passing revelation rendered its denials less and less plausible. President Zardari even claimed that the captured terrorist was not Pakistani. It took an intrepid British journalist of Pakistani descent to track down Ajmal Kasab’s native village of Faridkot in Punjab, report his parents’ identities and confirm his background. The parents were promptly spirited away by the Pakistani authorities, the villagers silenced and the next journalist who tried to follow the story, an American, was beaten up for his pains.
    Those first weeks of Pakistani denial after 26/11 rankled, because many in India had thought—having paid too much attention to the earlier positive noises from President Zardari—that when 26/11 happened, it would be a golden opportunity for the civilian government of Pakistan to stand up and say, ‘We’re in this fight together. The people who did this to you are going to do the same thing to us, and we want to work alongside with you. Our intelligence agencies will join you in the investigation.’ Instead of which, we got denial, obfuscation, delay and deceptive sanctimony.
    When Zardari initially agreed to India’s request for the ISI chief to visit New Delhi, he stated that Pakistan ‘will cooperate with India in exposing and apprehending the culprits and masterminds’ behind the attacks. It soon became clear that this was not an objective unanimously shared in Islamabad. The ISI is not exactly keen on cooperating with an investigation into the massacre’s Pakistani links. The Mumbai attacks bore many of the trademarks of the extremist ‘fedayeen’ groups based in Pakistan, notably the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which in the past has benefited from the patronage of the ISI. Whether the Pakistani militaryis orchestrating the violence or merely shielding its perpetrators, it clearly has no interest in seeing its protégés destroyed. It soon became apparent that for all of President Zardari’s soothing words, the Pakistani government cannot ensure that different elements of the state fall in line with the government’s vision. And the country’s civilian government—India’s official interlocutors—dare not cross the red lines drawn by the military, for fear of being toppled. If India is to take Islamabad’s professions of peaceful intent seriously, credible action with visible results is required. It has not been much in evidence in recent years.
    Despite its denials and its disingenuous calls for more proof—all of which had the effect, whether by accident or design, of buying time for the perpetrators to cover their tracks, to husband their resources and to reinvent their identities—Pakistan has never been more isolated in the international community. It is now universally accepted that the massacre in Mumbai was planned in and directed from Pakistani territory, and the inability of the Pakistani government to prevent its soil from being used to mount attacks on another state make a mockery of its pretensions to sovereignty. No one wishes to undermine President Zardari’s civilian government, which remains the one hope for something approaching a moderate, secularist regime in that country. But it is an understatement to point out that Zardari does not enjoy the unstinting support of his own security establishment. And his weakness makes it less and less