It may have been a more profitable exercise for Pakistan Army Chief General Raheel Sharif if he had done some soul-searching and taken a historical perspective when he declared on Monday that his country was “fully capable of defeating all sorts of external aggression” and that “enemies” — meaning India — will have to pay an “unbearable cost” for aggression.
All wars with India were initiated by Pakistan and it has been shown time and again that the outcomes weren’t exactly flattering to Islamabad. And that is why our militarist neighbour went ahead and made an art form out of low-intensity conflict, another name for training proxy warriors from the ranks of extremist-terrorists it has spawned and nurtured in a bewildering network matrix for about four decades. In light of the facts on the ground it is therefore unlikely that the people of Pakistan will be impressed with the challenging tone of its military brass.
Some international experts have come to believe that Pakistan is now next only to the United States and Russia in the size of its nuclear arsenal, which is said to have grown rapidly. Perhaps that gives its generals some comfort when they seek to ratchet things a bit for the sake of home consumption and issue threats of an “unbearable” cost to this country.
Seen another way, this is also a means to internationalise the India-Pakistan equation by doing a bit of scare-mongering, saying in effect that nuclear conflict may be at risk of breaking out, and therefore urging the great powers to step into the Kashmir imbroglio.
India has handled all this before — at the military and the diplomatic level, and will no doubt be alert to mischief in any form issuing from Islamabad. The Modi government and the principal Opposition party Congress have in unison reminded General Sharif — who spoke of Kashmir being an “unfinished agenda of Partition” (in this he is hardly being original) — that what remains of that issue is to make Pakistan vacate the illegally occupied parts of J&K.
Senior Pakistani figures have been speaking in bombastic tones of late. This is perhaps due to a measure of overconfidence brought on by excessive solicitousness shown by the US and China to Pakistan of late on account of geopolitical considerations. But it may be in the fitness of things if the generals learn to be more modest.
New Delhi’s policy toward Islamabad has been somewhat muddled in recent months, oscillating between gestures of friendship and appreciation of reality on the ground. The imbalance brought about as a result needs to be corrected early so that a strategy of greater practical utility in dealing with Pakistan can be arrived at and consensus built around it.
