Pakistan News and Discussion-8

[Naresh]

[center]<b><span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>India and Pakistan</span></b>[/center]

[center]<b><span style='font-size:21pt;line-height:100%'>Bomb-blast diplomacy</span></b>[/center]

<b>Cross-border terrorism still undermines a shaky peace process</b>

<img src='http://www.economist.com/images/20061007/4006AS1.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
<b>AFP</b>

<b>IT IS hard to be on good terms with the neighbours when they keep blowing up your house. Yet, since 2003, India has sought to make friends with Pakistan while continuing to accuse it of abetting hideous bomb attacks in its cities.</b> Pakistan brushes these accusations aside, while at the same time promising not to allow its soil to be used as a base for terrorism. This attitude makes the bombings seem an insuperable obstacle to peace. They may yet prove so. But they have at least become central to a peace process often marked by bickering over more trivial matters.

When a co-ordinated bomb attack killed more than 180 people in Mumbai on July 11th, Indian officials and politicians were swift to blame it on the Pakistan-based militant groups Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (JEM). Last month Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, gently fretted that the Pakistani government “has not done enough to control these elements.” On September 30th the Mumbai police went much further. They said the attack had been “planned” by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), Pakistan's military-intelligence outfit, and carried out by LET and JEM. Far from merely turning a blind eye to cross-border terrorism, the Pakistani government, in the police's view, was the instigator.

This is an immediate test for an agreement reached in Havana last month between Mr Singh and General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president. The official “dialogue” between their countries had been stalled since the Mumbai bombing. To provide a pretext for resuming it, the two leaders decided to form a vaguely-defined joint “anti-terrorism institutional mechanism”. This, in a sense, will call both sides' bluffs: India will have to produce evidence of Pakistani guilt; Pakistan will have to refute it—or act on it.

But the precedents for such co-operation are not good. In the past few weeks an Indian court has been delivering its long-delayed verdicts on the defendants accused of an earlier co-ordinated bombing in Mumbai, in 1993, in which more than 200 people were killed. It was blamed on an alliance of the ISI and leading dons in the Mumbai mafia, who are believed to have since taken refuge in Pakistan. India has demanded their extradition. Pakistan has ignored this request, and fibs about the gangsters' whereabouts.

<b>Death by hanging</b>

A third bomb attack, similarly blamed by India on Pakistan, has also returned to haunt efforts at reconciliation, especially over Kashmir, the core of the two countries' dispute. This is the suicide attack in December 2001 on India 's parliament in Delhi, in which 14 people were killed. The attack did more than any other act of terrorism to bring the two countries to the brink of war. The five attackers were all killed at the time. But others involved in the conspiracy have been tried. On September 26th one of them, Afzal Guru, was sentenced to death, and the date of execution set for October 20th.

He is a Kashmiri, from Sopore in the Indian-controlled part of the divided territory. In Kashmir the death sentence has been greeted by big protests. Many Kashmiris believe he is innocent, and are incensed by the (very rare) imposition of the death penalty and by the date fixed for its execution : the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan.

Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state, has endured 17 years of brutal insurgency and repression. Many there see the ruling on Mr Guru as a deliberate affront not just to their secessionist hopes—many separatist politicians having championed his cause—but also to their religion. With Kashmiris weary of the war and Pakistan trying to make peace with India, separatist politicos had been squabbling among themselves and losing popularity. The issue has been a godsend for them, and even mainstream politicians have sought to have the death penalty overturned.

Mr Guru's family has appealed to India's president for mercy. That may avert the immediate crisis because the hanging will be delayed so long as he is considering their petition. But with the government already under fire from the opposition for being “soft” on terrorism, it would be unhappy if the president spared Mr Guru.

A further worsening of anti-Indian sentiment in Kashmir is another reason for pessimism about the Indian-Pakistani peace process. It will encourage those in Pakistan who have been stoking the insurgency, as both a Kashmiri “freedom struggle” and a low-cost proxy war against India. Certainly, hardliners in India, convinced that Pakistan is irredeemably wedded to the Kashmir insurgency and to causing terror in Indian cities, think the peace process is doomed.

Yet there are a few optimists. They say that, at least in part because of Pakistan's efforts to restrain the terrorists, the violence in Kashmir, has abated—despite a suicide attack in Srinagar, the capital, on October 4th. Fewer than 900 people have died so far this year, compared with twice that number in both 2005 and 2004. <b>General Musharraf, they argue, is, despite his self-congratulatory new memoirs (see article), isolated politically and under pressure from insurgents in Baluchistan. He needs peace with India for the kudos it would confer and to free his army for domestic conflicts. Reining in the terrorists is so much in his interests that he may even make a serious stab at it.</b>

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