05-03-2006, 08:58 PM
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Siachen sellout
No nation in modern world history has vacated a territory it holds just to please an adversary. But that is what the Prime Minister, under US urging, is looking to do by pulling out of Saltoro Ridge, writes Brahma Chellaney
A weakness of almost every Indian Prime Minister has been to portray as path-setting any major foreign visit, especially if it is to the United States or either of the two adversarial States - Pakistan and China. No Indian PM usually wishes to return home to domestic problems without having signed a "momentous" agreement or having achieved some other "historic success" abroad. That in turn has meant making concessions on matters of vital national interest. Â
Now Manmohan Singh is itching to visit Pakistan, although he has admitted more than once in recent weeks that Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf has not kept his word to halt state support for terrorist acts against India. The terrorist bombings in New Delhi, Bangalore and Varanasi since last October have all been linked to front organisations of the Pakistani military's infamous agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence. The ubiquitous ISI has an octopus-like influence within Pakistan.
Without answering the question as to why he wishes to reward General Musharraf for his recalcitrant conduct by paying an official visit to Pakistan, the PM through his handlers has been seeking to prepare the Indian public for his next sellout - an Indian military pullout from the large Saltoro Ridge, of which the Siachen Glacier is a part. Official spinmeisters have conveyed the PM's lack of interest in "empty summitry" with Musharraf. According to them, the PM will travel to Islamabad if he can sign a major agreement, such as on "Siachen", a popular appellation for the entire Saltoro Ridge.
Again, obvious questions have gone unanswered. Why should India vacate a strategically located ridge whose control Pakistan has unsuccessfully sought to wrest militarily? To help Manmohan Singh achieve a "successful visit"? To express India's gratitude to Musharraf for his continued export of terror? To aid Musharraf's despotic hold on power at a time when he is increasingly becoming unpopular at home? To please the US, which wants India to bail out Musharraf through concessions on Kashmir and "Siachen"?
US President George W Bush has for long been taking India's help to make his pet dictator, Musharraf, internationally respectable. This assistance India has rendered continuously since it invited him out of the blue to Agra and helped end his quasi-pariah status. In the period since the Agra summit, India has come a long way, aligning its Pakistan policy more closely with the US stance. That only emboldened Bush to use Indian soil in March to applaud Pakistan as "another important partner and friend of the US" and to claim that India is "better off because America has a close relationship" with Islamabad.
Â
Today, on the three core issues - democracy, nuclear proliferation and terrorism - India, in deference to the US, is loath to put the heat on Pakistan. The PM speaks about democracy in Nepal but is silent on Pakistan. He has been a hawk on Iran and follows the US line in putting the importing state in the international doghouse while not once naming the exporting country (Pakistan) that admits illicitly transferring uranium-enrichment centrifuges and designs to Tehran. The PM's yearning to visit Pakistan testifies to his ambivalent stand on Pakistani-aided terrorism.
The desire to please America by pulling out forces from Saltoro Ridge only shows the costs India is beginning to pay for the vaunted nuclear deal with Washington. For the US, the deal holds multiple benefits - from getting a handle on India's nuclear-weapons programme and leverage on Indian foreign policy to opening the way to lucrative reactor and arms sales. Thanks to the deal, India can expect more of what it has heard in recent weeks - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's emphasis on maintaining an Indo-Pak "nuclear balance", and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher's rude demand that India "absolutely" define its deterrent in the sole context of Pakistan and enter into "mutual understandings" with that country "in both conventional and nuclear areas".
<b>An Indian pullout from Saltoro is one of the "mutual understandings" that the US is encouraging India to enter into with Islamabad. Today, America actively promotes the Indo-Pak "peace" process, even though what India has got so far is not peace but more terrorism. Keeping Kashmir as a live issue and promoting the Hurriyat helps the US to leverage its Pakistan ties with India. In the hype during Bush's India visit, not many noticed that the visiting leader, with the Indian PM by his side, publicly demanded Indo-Pak "progress on all issues, including Kashmir". </b>
No nation in modern world history has vacated a territory it holds just to please an adversary. But that is what the PM, under US urging, is looking to do. What will India gain strategically by forfeiting its control over a key ridge located where the present frontiers of India, China and Pakistan meet? Will it persuade Pakistan to stop using the weapon of terror against India? Can India feel reasonably sure that Pakistan, with its vantage ground position, will not catch it napping by encroaching on the vacated ridge?
Yet a scripted media campaign has been let loose in favour of a Siachen settlement centred on a significant dilution of India's long-standing stance. The public is being told that a breakthrough can be achieved through an "innovative compromise" in which India accepts a military pullback from Saltoro Ridge without Pakistan agreeing to a mutually defined and demarcated Actual Ground Position Line (AGPL). An annexure to the agreement, however, will carry a reference to India's present ridge control. If that is India's definition of an innovative compromise, it is an open invitation to Pakistan to up the ante on all bilateral disputes.
The strategic objective of an Indian withdrawal has to be to end the dispute - not postpone a resolution to a future date - over the undefined line of control in the elongated Saltoro Ridge, the northernmost tip of the Indo-Pak border. A withdrawal without a formal Pakistani endorsement of the AGPL not only will rob India of the leverage it presently enjoys but will also undercut New Delhi's central aim to buttress the sanctity of a clearly delineated, inviolable LOC - an objective that determined the outcome of the 1999 Kargil invasion.
Just as the LOC in Jammu and Kashmir has internationally been accepted as the de facto but uninfringeable Indo-Pak border, a mutually authenticated AGPL will serve as the LOC's northernmost extension. In addition to a formal exchange of maps with the positions held by each side marked on them, both countries also should agree to pull back their troops to points from where it will take the same time to reach the ridge. The two armies cannot go back to the pre-1984 positions, as Islamabad wants, because that will place Pakistani troops at an advantageous position to occupy the ridge. A mutually delineated AGPL will largely measure up to the reference in the old Indo-Pak accord that the line from Point NJ 9842 shall run "thence north to the glaciers".
A pullout without such agreed terms will be tantamount to an unforgivable dereliction of duty that will put India's security in those icy heights at the mercy of Pakistan's good conduct. India's policy-makers ought to have absorbed by now the lessons of the loss of Aksai Chin to China, for which the country is paying long-term strategic costs.<b> If Pakistani forces were to occupy Saltoro following an Indian pullback, they will link up with Chinese troops at Karakoram Pass, expanding the Sino-Pak land corridor. </b>
India should seek peace and tranquillity on a ridge where temperatures touch minus 40 degrees and where altitude sickness and frostbite have caused more casualties than bullets and artillery rounds. But in seeking peace, India must heed the Ronald Reagan dictum: "trust but verify". It will be foolhardy for India to pull out from Saltoro by reposing unverifiable trust in an adversary that has a record of taking it by surprise again and again.
Since independence, India has distinguished itself by reposing reckless trust in adversaries and then crying foul when they deceive it. <b>One such "perfidy" hastened the death of Jawaharlal Nehru, who confessed to the nation the day the Chinese military invaded in 1962 that China had returned "evil for good". Another "perfidy" was recounted by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who in the Lahore Declaration allowed J&K to be singled out by name as a bilateral issue awaiting resolution. Then, a few months later, he bewailed in public that his "bus to Lahore got hijacked and taken to Kargil". When the Musharraf-led Pakistani Army encroached across a clearly delineated frontier into Kargil, it can easily intrude into an un-demarcated Saltoro Ridge. </b>
How often will India cry betrayal? One should trust a friend, not a foe. If India wishes to trust an adversary, that has to be backed by verification on the ground. As Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee himself said on October 7, 2005: "If we vacate the posts and they occupy them tomorrow, how do we establish before the international community that this was what we had?" That is why India had been seeking a mutually defined line of control on Saltoro Ridge. Why yield to Pakistan now when militarily it is in a hopeless position to wrest control of the ridge?
Â
Until the mid-1990s, Pakistan was less willing to reach a settlement because of its belief that the Indian military had put itself in an untenable position by occupying the inhospitable heights. Pakistan's attitude was to let the Indians stew in their own juices. Since then, Pakistan has seen how India has facilitated its hold over the ridge through firm communications and logistical lines. Pakistan now cannot even think of militarily displacing Indian forces, so it craves for a political settlement.
For India, there is little incentive to withdraw from the ridge, where a ceasefire continues to hold. In fact, India needs to leverage its Saltoro hold for securing peace beyond the ridge. A "Siachen" settlement can be part and parcel of a resolution of the Kashmir issue. Yet the PM has been floating fuzzy ideas. In mid-2005, for instance, he called for turning Siachen into a "peace mountain". Rather than search for yet another confidence-building measure with Pakistan, the PM needs to look at the "Siachen" issue strategically.
India has a history of surrendering at the negotiating table what it has won on the battlefield. India gave back Haji Pir to Pakistan under the Tashkent Declaration, and then under the Simla Agreement it returned both territorial gains and large numbers of Pakistani prisoners without securing a Kashmir settlement. Now, it should not give up its 22-year-old, hard-fought control of Saltoro Ridge in its search for elusive peace with Pakistan. After the self-injurious nuclear deal, a <span style='font-size:21pt;line-height:100%'>"Siachen" pullout will firmly establish the PM as "Mr Sellout Singh"</span>.Â
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--emo&:thumbdown--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' /><!--endemo-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Siachen sellout
No nation in modern world history has vacated a territory it holds just to please an adversary. But that is what the Prime Minister, under US urging, is looking to do by pulling out of Saltoro Ridge, writes Brahma Chellaney
A weakness of almost every Indian Prime Minister has been to portray as path-setting any major foreign visit, especially if it is to the United States or either of the two adversarial States - Pakistan and China. No Indian PM usually wishes to return home to domestic problems without having signed a "momentous" agreement or having achieved some other "historic success" abroad. That in turn has meant making concessions on matters of vital national interest. Â
Now Manmohan Singh is itching to visit Pakistan, although he has admitted more than once in recent weeks that Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf has not kept his word to halt state support for terrorist acts against India. The terrorist bombings in New Delhi, Bangalore and Varanasi since last October have all been linked to front organisations of the Pakistani military's infamous agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence. The ubiquitous ISI has an octopus-like influence within Pakistan.
Without answering the question as to why he wishes to reward General Musharraf for his recalcitrant conduct by paying an official visit to Pakistan, the PM through his handlers has been seeking to prepare the Indian public for his next sellout - an Indian military pullout from the large Saltoro Ridge, of which the Siachen Glacier is a part. Official spinmeisters have conveyed the PM's lack of interest in "empty summitry" with Musharraf. According to them, the PM will travel to Islamabad if he can sign a major agreement, such as on "Siachen", a popular appellation for the entire Saltoro Ridge.
Again, obvious questions have gone unanswered. Why should India vacate a strategically located ridge whose control Pakistan has unsuccessfully sought to wrest militarily? To help Manmohan Singh achieve a "successful visit"? To express India's gratitude to Musharraf for his continued export of terror? To aid Musharraf's despotic hold on power at a time when he is increasingly becoming unpopular at home? To please the US, which wants India to bail out Musharraf through concessions on Kashmir and "Siachen"?
US President George W Bush has for long been taking India's help to make his pet dictator, Musharraf, internationally respectable. This assistance India has rendered continuously since it invited him out of the blue to Agra and helped end his quasi-pariah status. In the period since the Agra summit, India has come a long way, aligning its Pakistan policy more closely with the US stance. That only emboldened Bush to use Indian soil in March to applaud Pakistan as "another important partner and friend of the US" and to claim that India is "better off because America has a close relationship" with Islamabad.
Â
Today, on the three core issues - democracy, nuclear proliferation and terrorism - India, in deference to the US, is loath to put the heat on Pakistan. The PM speaks about democracy in Nepal but is silent on Pakistan. He has been a hawk on Iran and follows the US line in putting the importing state in the international doghouse while not once naming the exporting country (Pakistan) that admits illicitly transferring uranium-enrichment centrifuges and designs to Tehran. The PM's yearning to visit Pakistan testifies to his ambivalent stand on Pakistani-aided terrorism.
The desire to please America by pulling out forces from Saltoro Ridge only shows the costs India is beginning to pay for the vaunted nuclear deal with Washington. For the US, the deal holds multiple benefits - from getting a handle on India's nuclear-weapons programme and leverage on Indian foreign policy to opening the way to lucrative reactor and arms sales. Thanks to the deal, India can expect more of what it has heard in recent weeks - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's emphasis on maintaining an Indo-Pak "nuclear balance", and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher's rude demand that India "absolutely" define its deterrent in the sole context of Pakistan and enter into "mutual understandings" with that country "in both conventional and nuclear areas".
<b>An Indian pullout from Saltoro is one of the "mutual understandings" that the US is encouraging India to enter into with Islamabad. Today, America actively promotes the Indo-Pak "peace" process, even though what India has got so far is not peace but more terrorism. Keeping Kashmir as a live issue and promoting the Hurriyat helps the US to leverage its Pakistan ties with India. In the hype during Bush's India visit, not many noticed that the visiting leader, with the Indian PM by his side, publicly demanded Indo-Pak "progress on all issues, including Kashmir". </b>
No nation in modern world history has vacated a territory it holds just to please an adversary. But that is what the PM, under US urging, is looking to do. What will India gain strategically by forfeiting its control over a key ridge located where the present frontiers of India, China and Pakistan meet? Will it persuade Pakistan to stop using the weapon of terror against India? Can India feel reasonably sure that Pakistan, with its vantage ground position, will not catch it napping by encroaching on the vacated ridge?
Yet a scripted media campaign has been let loose in favour of a Siachen settlement centred on a significant dilution of India's long-standing stance. The public is being told that a breakthrough can be achieved through an "innovative compromise" in which India accepts a military pullback from Saltoro Ridge without Pakistan agreeing to a mutually defined and demarcated Actual Ground Position Line (AGPL). An annexure to the agreement, however, will carry a reference to India's present ridge control. If that is India's definition of an innovative compromise, it is an open invitation to Pakistan to up the ante on all bilateral disputes.
The strategic objective of an Indian withdrawal has to be to end the dispute - not postpone a resolution to a future date - over the undefined line of control in the elongated Saltoro Ridge, the northernmost tip of the Indo-Pak border. A withdrawal without a formal Pakistani endorsement of the AGPL not only will rob India of the leverage it presently enjoys but will also undercut New Delhi's central aim to buttress the sanctity of a clearly delineated, inviolable LOC - an objective that determined the outcome of the 1999 Kargil invasion.
Just as the LOC in Jammu and Kashmir has internationally been accepted as the de facto but uninfringeable Indo-Pak border, a mutually authenticated AGPL will serve as the LOC's northernmost extension. In addition to a formal exchange of maps with the positions held by each side marked on them, both countries also should agree to pull back their troops to points from where it will take the same time to reach the ridge. The two armies cannot go back to the pre-1984 positions, as Islamabad wants, because that will place Pakistani troops at an advantageous position to occupy the ridge. A mutually delineated AGPL will largely measure up to the reference in the old Indo-Pak accord that the line from Point NJ 9842 shall run "thence north to the glaciers".
A pullout without such agreed terms will be tantamount to an unforgivable dereliction of duty that will put India's security in those icy heights at the mercy of Pakistan's good conduct. India's policy-makers ought to have absorbed by now the lessons of the loss of Aksai Chin to China, for which the country is paying long-term strategic costs.<b> If Pakistani forces were to occupy Saltoro following an Indian pullback, they will link up with Chinese troops at Karakoram Pass, expanding the Sino-Pak land corridor. </b>
India should seek peace and tranquillity on a ridge where temperatures touch minus 40 degrees and where altitude sickness and frostbite have caused more casualties than bullets and artillery rounds. But in seeking peace, India must heed the Ronald Reagan dictum: "trust but verify". It will be foolhardy for India to pull out from Saltoro by reposing unverifiable trust in an adversary that has a record of taking it by surprise again and again.
Since independence, India has distinguished itself by reposing reckless trust in adversaries and then crying foul when they deceive it. <b>One such "perfidy" hastened the death of Jawaharlal Nehru, who confessed to the nation the day the Chinese military invaded in 1962 that China had returned "evil for good". Another "perfidy" was recounted by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who in the Lahore Declaration allowed J&K to be singled out by name as a bilateral issue awaiting resolution. Then, a few months later, he bewailed in public that his "bus to Lahore got hijacked and taken to Kargil". When the Musharraf-led Pakistani Army encroached across a clearly delineated frontier into Kargil, it can easily intrude into an un-demarcated Saltoro Ridge. </b>
How often will India cry betrayal? One should trust a friend, not a foe. If India wishes to trust an adversary, that has to be backed by verification on the ground. As Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee himself said on October 7, 2005: "If we vacate the posts and they occupy them tomorrow, how do we establish before the international community that this was what we had?" That is why India had been seeking a mutually defined line of control on Saltoro Ridge. Why yield to Pakistan now when militarily it is in a hopeless position to wrest control of the ridge?
Â
Until the mid-1990s, Pakistan was less willing to reach a settlement because of its belief that the Indian military had put itself in an untenable position by occupying the inhospitable heights. Pakistan's attitude was to let the Indians stew in their own juices. Since then, Pakistan has seen how India has facilitated its hold over the ridge through firm communications and logistical lines. Pakistan now cannot even think of militarily displacing Indian forces, so it craves for a political settlement.
For India, there is little incentive to withdraw from the ridge, where a ceasefire continues to hold. In fact, India needs to leverage its Saltoro hold for securing peace beyond the ridge. A "Siachen" settlement can be part and parcel of a resolution of the Kashmir issue. Yet the PM has been floating fuzzy ideas. In mid-2005, for instance, he called for turning Siachen into a "peace mountain". Rather than search for yet another confidence-building measure with Pakistan, the PM needs to look at the "Siachen" issue strategically.
India has a history of surrendering at the negotiating table what it has won on the battlefield. India gave back Haji Pir to Pakistan under the Tashkent Declaration, and then under the Simla Agreement it returned both territorial gains and large numbers of Pakistani prisoners without securing a Kashmir settlement. Now, it should not give up its 22-year-old, hard-fought control of Saltoro Ridge in its search for elusive peace with Pakistan. After the self-injurious nuclear deal, a <span style='font-size:21pt;line-height:100%'>"Siachen" pullout will firmly establish the PM as "Mr Sellout Singh"</span>.Â
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--emo&:thumbdown--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' /><!--endemo-->