LIFTING AN OLD CURSE FROM PAKISTAN
NARENDRA MODI APPEARED TO BELIEVE THAT HIS PERSONALITY and activities were the embodiment of foreign policy, or of the state. His predecessors, by tradition, took office with a relatively low-key ceremony, indoors at Rashtrapati Bhavan, the president’s cream-and-red sandstone palace. Modi organized a much grander affair in 2014, with a huge crowd and a high-kicking show. Bagpipers played and twirled, trumpeters tootled from balconies, tall men in white uniforms lined red carpets. The event had a Disneyfied air of a coronation, set in the sprawling grounds of the palace, the Lutyens centerpiece of colonial architecture from 1929. Sitting near the front in the chuckling company of Gujarati MPs, I was told by one of them how astrology was the best guide for politicians and that “Modi will make India a hundred times stronger.”
Clouds of starlings swooped across the pale evening sky. Men with pikes and knee-high riding boots stood to attention as ministers pledged their loyalty. Most striking, however, were the foreign guests. Leaders from South Asia had formed a group in 1985, SAARC (the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation), which by 2016 accounted for over one-fifth of the world’s population. But they rarely attended each other’s inaugurations, nor did they act as a meaningful regional body, encouraging trade, cross-border travel, or coordination. There was nothing like the routine gathering of leaders in the European Union, for example. Yet all but one of SAARC’s heads of government came to this event. Mahinda Rajapaksa, then Sri Lanka’s president, flashed a Cheshire Cat grin and Hamid Karzai, the Afghan leader, offered an obsequious bow, followed by leaders from Bhutan, Nepal, and the Maldives. Modi and his guests signaled that the neighborhood was a priority and foreign affairs had become a more pressing concern.
The most notable guest was Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister. Modi was reviled by most in Pakistan as a virulent Hindu nationalist. A Pew Research Center poll in 2015 found that only 7 percent of Pakistanis would trust him. Yet Sharif came, defying both Pakistan’s public opinion and, more significant, its powerful army. Both India and Pakistan had leaders ready to explore a new sort of relationship. As ceremonies wrapped up, Sharif strode toward Modi through a swirl of presidents, royalty, and heads of state and shook his hand demonstratively. The two held their first bilateral meeting the next day. That meeting and subsequent ones in the next two years, in Nepal and in Pakistan, showed them exploring how to move on from decades of awful relations. The men had to get beyond the bitterness of a winter of war in Kashmir in 1947 and 1948, a month-long border war in 1965 (which killed perhaps three thousand Indians and nearly four thousand Pakistanis), war between the countries in 1971 over Bangladesh (during which ninety thousand Pakistanis were forced to surrender and the eastern half of Pakistan seceded), and a brief war in 1999, again in Kashmir. If Pakistanis, especially, were sore about the cost of launching and losing most of these conflicts, Indians were furious over the many years of cross-border terrorism launched by groups based in Pakistan. Yet Modi, a right-winger with a big mandate, had the rare domestic freedom to extend a hand—as Nixon had done in relation to China, for example—without being called a sellout. Modi could also cite a precedent: Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the only previous Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) prime minister, had signed a declaration in Lahore in 1999 promising warmer ties with Pakistan. Sharif, coincidentally, had also been Pakistan’s prime minister at that time.
For India, fixing relations with Pakistan would be one key to wider progress abroad. Foreign affairs—the topic of the chapters in the “Ultimate” section that follows—is an arena in which India has the chance to gain far more influence in the coming decades. Mostly that is because India’s global heft, in the first seventy years after independence, proved little more than puny. India boxed far below its weight in military, diplomatic, and economic arenas. Much of what preoccupied India concerned its land borders: foreign affairs was Ultimate in the sense that it dealt with events at or just beyond the limit of its land borders, meaning disputes with Pakistan and with China over their shared (and disputed) frontiers. On the northwestern side, India faced a nuclear-armed state that looked fragile and at times on the verge of failure. On the northeastern side (and beyond), India faced a huge, authoritarian and nuclear-armed state that had already grown into a great power. How it deals with these two challenges will be the ultimate questions of Indian foreign policy in the coming decades. But the key to doing so, and for India to advance along a much broader range of policy challenges, would be to get the right relationships farther afield, especially with another power active in Asia: the United States.
Foreign policy for India began with Pakistan. Animosity between Pakistan and India was just about the most futile and prolonged of cross-border confrontations anywhere. It achieved nothing useful for either side (other than for a few self-interested men in uniform). Border clashes, frequent terrorism, disputes over territory in Kashmir, rows over water sharing, propaganda barrages, and other miseries persisted for decades. From the 1970s onward the two countries pursued a nuclear-arms race, even as violence sputtered on their borders. That combination of hostilities led various commentators to judge the India-Pakistan border to be the world’s most dangerous.
Some theorists believed that nuclear arms worked as a deterrent to a large-scale conventional war. Their existence did not prevent a Pakistani military incursion into Kargil, in Kashmir, in 1999, which could have escalated. In any case, there were enormous costs to the perpetual low-level confrontation. Those costs mounted in different forms: decades of forfeited trade and prosperity, lives lost, families divided, and huge public spending on armed forces that could have been used more productively. Many millions of Pakistanis and Indians were poorer and more insecure as a result of the mutual hostilities. Yet, over decades, despite occasional peace efforts, it was rare to hear either side seriously talk about negotiating a resolution.
Relations were poisoned from the start by Partition—the midnight furies unleashed as formerly British India won independence, in 1947, splitting simultaneously and with little preparation into two countries. Many Indian Muslims had said they feared domination by the majority Hindus, so they demanded a homeland. Secessions, geopolitical divorces, are never happy events—as North and South Koreans might testify, or Eritreans and Ethiopians, or Bangladeshis (East Pakistanis) who split from western Pakistan. Pakistan’s break from India was certainly bloody, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions displaced as many Muslims shifted to Pakistan, while many Hindus and Sikhs were uprooted to India. Religion played a big and destructive part: almost the only unifying idea of Pakistan, which would prove close to disastrous because it legitimized those who pursued ever stronger forms of religious fanaticism, was to create a Muslim-majority homeland. Many of its leaders, civilian and military, resorted to stoking up ever stronger Islamic identity after independence. Grappling for a way to bind together an ungainly territory, they launched appeals to religion. At the same time, Pakistan’s army was quick to suspend democracy and grab the lion’s share of national resources for itself. India, to its enormous credit, instead defined itself as secular and democratic and proved vastly more stable and moderate as a result.
Partition was horrific. At least 14 million people were displaced, in one of the biggest forced migrations in history. In some cases, human caravans of trudging refugees stretched more than 50 miles. Moments of dramatic horror followed in terrifying succession: Sikh nationalists blew up a train in Punjab and massacred its Muslim passengers; Muslim thugs bombed Hindu-occupied homes in Lahore and relished hearing the panicked screams of victims burnt alive; neighbors slaughtered each other. Less well known, in 1948 Hindu extremists, the Indian army, and others massacred perhaps forty thousand Muslims in Hyderabad as rebels were defeated there, part of the process of incorporating former princely states into Indian territory (in this case, against the wishes of its last ruler, the Nizam, Osman Ali Khan).
The man most responsible for Partition was Pakistan’s founding leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, an urbane lawyer who, ironically, had tried to avoid whipping up religious sentiments in politics until, late in life, he resorted to doing just that. He fell into a bitter rivalry with Mahatma Gandhi over India’s independence campaign. It was Jinnah’s call for a separate homeland, and the irresponsibly hasty retreat of Britain, that did most to unleash murderous religious tensions. Jawaharlal Nehru shouldered some blame, too, mostly for arrogance toward Jinnah, feeding his rival’s fear that India might “strangle Pakistan at birth” by denying it the economic means to prosper or to defend itself militarily. Pakistan’s reckless first invasion of Kashmir, using proxy fighters soon after independence, ensured that bitter confrontation would continue for many years.
Seven decades on, what prevented India and Pakistan from ending their confrontation? If those who had the power to make decisions wanted to end the conflict, there appeared to be no impossibly great obstacles to doing so. At issue, in effect, was where the shared border should run and whether Indian-run Kashmir should have a chance to hold a referendum for independence. Delineating the border should have been possible, and nobody thought a referendum in Kashmir was remotely likely. Pakistanis occasionally alleged that Indians wished to undo Partition and seize their country, or that India hoped to break apart Pakistan (for example, by stirring up rebellions in Baluchistan), citing the example of India helping the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971. Such claims were not convincing. Yet some groups benefited from the persistence of cross-border clashes, sustained threats of terrorism, or instability, even if nobody wanted to trigger outright, general war.
India’s foreign policy thinkers usually said that normal relations with Pakistan were desirable and possible, one distant day. Strategists in Delhi imagined peace as appealing in itself, and as a means to an end—for example, to allow future trade with central Asia, via Afghanistan; to import oil and gas; and to export agricultural, industrial, or mineral goods, even overland to Europe. Trade with central Asia was well remembered from Mughal times, notably involving much-fancied grapes that were brought each season to Delhi from Afghanistan. Those pondering rivalry with China also imagined binding central Asian states closer to India.
Until relations with Pakistan improved, however, India would have to find ways to leapfrog its neighbor. Since the early 2000s India had been developing an Iranian port, Chabahar, in the Gulf of Oman, linked by road—Route 606—to Afghanistan. The idea was to use Chabahar for trade (and potentially military purposes), and Indian officials said that extension of the port would come without delay. Modi visited Iran in 2016 and pledged to spend $500 million to make Chabahar a large-scale cargo port, part of a $1 billion renovation, though one official grumbled about painfully slow-moving Iranian bureaucrats. (When Indian civil servants say that their counterparts are slow, you know progress must be glacial.) Pakistanis claimed not to care too much about the Indian activities in Iran, though these were parallel to Chinese building activities in Pakistan, notably at Gwadar port, less than 100 miles east of Chabahar. A veteran defense analyst in Lahore, Hasan Askari Rizvi, once explained to me that “Chabahar is seen in Pakistan as an attempt by India to increase its influence in Iran. It is seen with concern, but not anxiety.” In fact, leapfrogging was difficult for India: large-scale, overland trade with central Asia depended on making up with Pakistan.
India had other reasons to crave stability on its western frontier. Pakistan was a distraction from dealing with looming concerns over China’s growing capability and significance in the region. As of 2016 an estimated 300,000 Indian soldiers (no official figures were made public) were camped in Kashmir to deter Pakistani invaders and respond to Pakistani-trained insurgents. For decades India’s strategists had been preoccupied by the threat of land wars over the western border. But the growing military might of China increasingly needed attention to other borders, notably in the northeast of India, as well as more investment in naval, air, space, and cyber power. The more India was bogged down by its western border, the harder it was to pay attention in the east.
Warmer relations with Pakistan would bring India other benefits. Open trade with Pakistan’s 180 million people, a handy neighborhood market, would boost both economies. It was revealing to be in Amritsar, in India’s Punjab, which had less buzz than many other Indian cities. It had small industry, decent hospitals, and an airport, plus tourist attractions including the Sikhs’ Golden Temple. Tourists flocked each evening to a border ceremony at Wagah, where Indian and Pakistani soldiers goose-stepped in a pantomime of confrontation, seemingly choreographed by Monty Python. But Amritsar had a melancholy air of forgotten glory, stuck at the end of a blocked road. Small traders in its scruffy Liberty Market huffed about Pakistan (“a dirty country,” said one cellphone seller) but also complained that they suffered because of limited border trade. Barely an hour’s drive away was massive Lahore: with 11 million residents in 2016, one of the biggest cities in the world. An exporter in Amritsar, munching on a plate of buttered chicken, talked wistfully of profits he would make if only he could get his galvanized steel to Lahore. Others dreamt of selling car tires, farm machinery, and pharmaceuticals to Pakistan. In fact, few goods crossed. Goods worth just $165 million flowed over the border in 2001, rising to more like $2 billion by 2016. Economists suggested that the potential value of trade was some ten times higher.
India had incentives to improve relations. Yet few among its politicians, soldiers, policymakers, diplomats, and analysts expressed urgency in doing so because of the domestic political risk. Indians did not trust partners in Pakistan after too many bitter setbacks, notably in the form of recurrent terrorist attacks that were launched from Pakistani soil, almost certainly with the support of (at least parts of) the Pakistani army. Indians said that their previous gestures of reconciliation, such as granting Pakistan the status of a favored trading partner, had not been reciprocated. And any warming of diplomatic ties over the years was routinely followed by new violence from over the border. Not long after Modi paid a surprise visit to Lahore on Christmas Day, December 2015, for example, well-trained suicide fighters from Pakistan attacked a military base in Indian Punjab, killing fourteen people. In September 2016, militants killed nineteen Indian soldiers in Uri, Kashmir, the worst such attack in more than a decade. India’s government accused Pakistan of being a “terrorist state,” saying it supported that attack and others. India retaliated by launching a brief military assault across the line of control, just into Pakistani-controlled territory, claiming that its soldiers had hit camps that housed terrorists. The main purpose of the operation, it appeared, was to reassure India’s chest-thumping television hosts that some sort of military retaliation, widely called “surgical strikes,” had taken place.
India was cautious about reaching out to Pakistan for other reasons. As a “status quo” power, occupying almost all the territory it wanted, the most valuable bits of the Kashmir valley, India’s policymakers felt no urgency to act. Indians knew they were growing stronger than Pakistan, with an economy already eight times larger by 2016. Indians were getting richer: average incomes had been lower than Pakistani ones in the twentieth century, but from early in the first decade of the new century Indians were the better off. By 2015, according to the World Bank, Indian incomes averaged $6,200 (measured by what their money could buy), whereas those of Pakistanis averaged more like $4,900. That gap promised to widen, as India’s economy consistently grew more quickly than Pakistan’s.
India’s government generally functioned better, too, as symbolized by the eradication of polio there (the country was certified free of the disease in 2014), even as cases persisted in Pakistan—just about the last reservoir of the disease that existed anywhere in the world. UN comparisons of health, schooling, and other social trends showed India nudging ahead. Terrorism, an occasional horror in India, had become a steady scourge in Pakistan, where extremists killed 49,000 people in the decade from 2003 to 2013. Responses to natural calamities were also revealing of the relative capacities of the two states. When the Indus River flooded much of central Pakistan, in 2010, its then president, Asif Ali Zardari, took off on a diplomatic tour in Europe, including a brief holiday at his private chateau in northern France. He was accused of abandoning his people. Indian authorities, by contrast, reacted relatively well to natural calamities—for example, giving prompt aid to Nepal after an earthquake killed 9,000 people in 2015.
The bigger country had other advantages as well. Western powers increasingly aligned with India, especially as evidence grew that some in authority in Pakistan were promoting Islamist terrorism beyond its borders. (In 2016 two lawmakers in America’s Congress proposed that Pakistan should be designated as a state sponsor of terrorism.) Westerners paid close attention to Pakistan as a partner that helped in some counterterrorism activity, plus as a nuclear-weapons power. But India was courted in a far more substantial manner: for wider trade, investment, diplomatic, and strategic reasons. America, decisively, had struck a civil-nuclear deal with India in 2005, trusting it not to share nuclear materials or information and in the hope that India would develop more nuclear power stations in cooperation with American investors. Under successive presidents from the 1990s onward—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—America’s policy grew more explicitly to bring India into a broadly pro-Western camp. Donald Trump, the incoming American president in 2017, also appeared to be pro-Indian. He had told a group of Indian-American donors during his election campaign that he was a “big fan” of India. He and Modi spoke the day after Trump’s election. However, some analysts, such as Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution, warned that foreign policy under Trump could prove more “transactional”—with America more aggressively demanding support from India in return for help—and more withdrawn from Asian affairs in general.1
Because Indian strategists understood that their relative clout over Pakistan would grow, it might have seemed rational to wait to make peace overtures when its advantages were even greater. That was not, however, the calculation made by Modi, who craved a place in history for ending a prolonged conflict. For him, there was more pressure to act. Modi’s attitude toward the neighborhood had evolved, and softened, the higher he rose in politics. In the 1960s, as a young Hindu nationalist volunteer, he had patrolled his home town, Vadnagar, in Gujarat, to guard against imaginary Pakistani invaders. At a time when his views had been shaped most by those Hindu nationalists, he absorbed the idea that Partition, the loss of 20 percent of British Indian territory and over 17 percent of its population, was a historical abomination. As a spokesman for the BJP when al Qaeda terrorists struck America, in 2001, he chose to condemn the entire religion of Islam, calling it especially violent because since the fourteenth century it had tried to “put its flag in the whole world and the [terrorist] situation today is the result of that.”
By the time Modi was Gujarat chief minister, in 2012, he told me that having normal relations with Pakistan would be impossible unless Pakistan prevented groups on its soil from attacking India: “We must have a close tie-up with all our neighboring countries, but not at the cost of our national security. We must have very good relations with Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, everywhere. But Pakistan should stop the terrorism activity,” he said. Asked if India could encourage moderate Pakistanis, he batted away my liberal idea, saying that to “encourage means I have to interfere in their domestic politics of Pakistan” and “first they have to hand over the terrorists, these are the basic issues.” The people he particularly had in mind were those handlers in Pakistan responsible for directing horrific terrorist attacks on railway stations, hotels, and other soft targets in Mumbai in 2008. Before the election in 2014, he also talked tough on securing India’s borders, executing convicted terrorists, and crushing any infiltrators from Pakistan, while condemning Manmohan Singh for his moderation and caution.
But in subsequent discussions with him about Pakistan, in 2015, Modi the prime minister had softened. Rumors by then swirled that he yearned to get a Nobel Peace Prize. (A member of the relevant committee, in Oslo, once told me, later, of visits he had from Indian lobbyists who made the case.) His policy on Pakistan looked somewhat incoherent. Bonhomie with Nawaz Sharif at the inauguration gave way to snarling hostility over the border late in 2014. Attempts to hold diplomatic talks had been scrapped by Modi on a pretext, because of a state election in Indian-run Kashmir that autumn. The worst violence between the two countries in a decade erupted. Modi blew hot and cold, weakening the hand of potential partners, notably Sharif, along with any moderate voices inside Pakistan’s army. In the summer of 2015 Modi said that his approach was simple, only to seek “friendship.” “I keep trying to find new pathways, new avenues, to reach out to Pakistan,” he said. Some pathways, dealing directly with Sharif, were followed outside of public view. A year later, however, relations were once again dire.
One big concern, though Modi waved it away in discussion with me, was Pakistan’s relationship with China. China had helped Pakistan get a nuclear bomb, and was the biggest supplier of military equipment to Pakistan. China was also building civilian nuclear reactors for Pakistan. In 2015 China promised to invest $46 billion in Pakistan as one part of its immense “one belt, one road” infrastructure expansion, to boost Chinese trade especially with Europe and the Middle East. But Modi, chatting on the eve of a visit to Beijing, said blandly that India could not object: “In today’s world, economic relationships are quite globalized. Each country seeks its own matrix of economic and commercial relations. As far as China and Pakistan are concerned, it is for them to decide the direction and speed of their economic engagement.”
Modi found reaching out to Pakistan difficult. In December 2015 he paid his surprise visit there to see Sharif in Lahore—only three other Indians knew of his plan to go. It was a significant act, the first visit by an Indian leader in eleven years—a typical piece of Modi diplomatic theater, yet also the sort of gesture that his predecessor had yearned to make for a decade but never managed. However, policy changes did not follow quickly. Expectation rose, for example, that Pakistan would finally move to open up for more trade over the shared border, but movement was glacial or nonexistent in the first half of Modi’s term.
Few Indian politicians showed strong interest in foreign affairs—a fact that would have to change in subsequent decades. Even the foreign minister of India, in 2012, S. M. Krishna, then nearing eighty, had seemed only dimly aware of some aspects of foreign affairs, such as whether India and Afghanistan shared a border (he told me, accurately, that they did not, whereas it was official Indian policy to claim that they did). Hardly any Indian politicians actually visited Pakistan, nor did many Pakistanis get to India. As a visitor to each country I was often asked to describe life just over the border, just as I imagine East and West Germans used to crave information about the lives of their former compatriots during the Cold War, and as North and South Koreans might do today.
One love affair was shared by both countries: cricket. Passion for the game overrode almost everything else. At times, cross-border relations were so bad that the national teams refused to meet on the field, and—to India’s shame—even the most dashing Pakistani players were refused entry into the Indian Premier League, the most lucrative league in world cricket. Cricket could surely be a force to help to unite people across the border. Politicians from either side did try to use the game to manufacture excuses to meet, a process dubbed “cricket diplomacy.” India hosted a cricket world cup (with Sri Lanka and Bangladesh) in 2011, and its team met Pakistan in the semi-final at Mohali, a venue in Punjab, close to the shared border. The atmosphere in the stadium was electric, and fans from both countries mingled happily. I sat beside an extended family of nine visiting from Karachi, in Pakistan, who spoke warmly of the welcome they had received in India, and who exchanged only light-hearted banter with the local crowd. Bollywood songs set the crowd dancing every few minutes. Nearby, two young Indian fans, wearing face paint, held up a placard that read earnestly: “Our aim is to bring peace, so please co-operate.” Celebrities appeared, such as Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, who sat among the fans for a time, in the blazing sunshine. Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, also appeared, having accepted an invitation to visit from Manmohan Singh, India’s leader. The two men earned cheers as they strolled together on the grass before the game, and hundreds of millions of viewers watched on television. For a moment, at least, it was hard to remember why the two countries opposed each other.
Specialists set much policy in India. Under Singh, starting in 2010, the national security adviser was Shivshankar Menon, a bright man and former high commissioner in Islamabad, who doubted that progress would ever be possible with Pakistan. He saw too many internal problems—notably Islamist radicalization, including of Pakistan’s armed forces—for Pakistan to make good on its diplomats’ promises. Nor would closer ties between India and America help to make Pakistan more conciliatory, he said. India could not expect a third party to fix its problems. Menon had a sophisticated, subtle grasp of foreign policy and was risk-averse. His successor, under Modi, had a different outlook and character. Ajit Doval was an action man, assertive, expecting to shape circumstances. He believed, like Modi, in bold gestures and leadership, but appeared less sure of strategy. Discussing Modi and foreign policy, he said that “personalities are policies” and stressed “leadership quality” to solve most problems, calling Modi “a tremendous communicator [who] is strongly trying to raise India, he is passionate about India acquiring its economic and political potential.” Doval was also ambitious, lamenting that “India punches below its weight. India has its geographical position, resources, [financial] capital, human capital. India has not achieved as much as it can.”
Doval believed that force of personality could achieve more for Indian foreign policy than any number of quiet institutional changes or diplomatic interactions. It was unclear whether he and Modi calculated that dramatic elements of foreign affairs—surprise meetings of leaders, state visits, grand speeches—were the means to more substantial change (such as settling disputes over who should control which part of Kashmir and agreeing on the border line between the two countries), or whether such gestures were the sum of policy. Modi did install as his top diplomat a Tamil who was quick and aggressive in conversation, but who, like Menon, was more cautious in his style, while wanting substantive changes. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said India had to become quietly stronger in the region, to be a “leading power, not just a balancing power.” He talked of getting much friendlier relations across South Asia, watching to see if Pakistan “gets worried,” and, later, negotiating from a position of greater strength. This meant persuading skeptical neighbors that India was a benign presence. “You cannot be a leading power if your neighborhood is not with you. You need a neighborhood that roots for you,” Jaishankar said. For him, progress in Pakistan began with settling borders and tensions elsewhere, specifically Bangladesh; warming relations with Sri Lanka; and generating more economic activity across South Asia.
I was able to report from both sides of the India-Pakistan border, and to hear how strategists, politicians, diplomats, and soldiers talked about one another. In May 2013, a year before Modi came to power, Pakistan held an election that propelled Nawaz Sharif into office. Immediately afterward he invited foreign journalists to his glitzy home near Lahore to discuss his plans as prime minister over an enormous lunch. The host—portly, in a blue suit, grey waistcoat, and shoes with large golden buckles—had won an unusually big mandate from Pakistani voters. His story somewhat prefigured Modi’s rise. As a right-winger, with a record of building infrastructure in his state, Sharif once favored religious extremists but had become more moderate and now hankered to make history by promoting trade and peace with the old rival next door. He had campaigned by promising closer ties with India to generate economic recovery at home.
Sharif’s efforts were complicated by one big factor: the army. The generals, almost since the birth of Pakistan, had undermined democracy and kept most control over its foreign and security policy. Sharif had to win support from factions of the army that might accept warmer ties with India. The last time he had tried to reach out, as Pakistan’s prime minister in 1999, the army chief of the day, Pervez Musharraf, destroyed a putative peace initiative with Vajpayee, India’s then prime minister. Musharraf ordered soldiers to infiltrate Indian-run territory in Kashmir and to seize a mountainous area called Kargil. This provoked a short and worrying war that Pakistan lost. The war eventually was followed by Musharraf, the reckless general, toppling Sharif in a coup. He ruled as dictator of Pakistan for the best part of a decade, a particularly dire period in the country’s history. An obvious risk for any future India-Pakistan peace effort would be that another Pakistani general might emulate Musharraf.
But democracy went on to grow somewhat deeper roots in Pakistan. For the first time, in 2013, an elected ruler completed a full term and handed power to an elected successor. It became possible to imagine the army getting less adventurous and less influential. One factor was the economy. Some in the army were persuaded that more trade with India would boost their own resources. Another factor was the chastening of the army, in 2011, after American special forces killed Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda’s leader, in Pakistan. For years, as America searched for its most-wanted enemy, bin Laden had been living comfortably in a compound in Abbottabad, a pleasant military town near Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.
My visit to bin Laden’s home, number 25 on a (normally) sleepy street, in Abbottabad, the day after Obama said Navy Seals had killed him there, in May 2011, was a revealing experience. Clambering along bin Laden’s garden walls to peer into the compound, ringing his doorbell, and speaking to neighbors and other residents helped me to build a sense of how he had lived there—and of what transpired when helicopters arrived during the night raid. Some neighbors said they had feared that India was invading. A few discussed the reticent, long-term occupants of number 25. It was reasonable to conclude that bin Laden had enjoyed some sort of protection from military spies who had known of his presence in Abbottabad. Bin Laden’s home was a few minutes’ walk from a military academy where the army chief regularly visited. A neighbor said police swept the area weekly, checking residents’ IDs and sometimes looking into homes. Police also maintained networks of informers among guards and others. It was hard to believe they would have not stumbled on the world’s most-wanted man unless ordered to avoid number 25 by someone in authority. The reportedly small number of weapons at the site, at the time the Americans attacked, also suggested that bin Laden relied, perhaps not by choice, on others to guard him.
Some in office in America concluded Pakistan’s military spies had known about bin Laden (though America’s public stance was firmly otherwise). One indication of this was the dramatic deterioration in bilateral relations that began shortly before the killing of bin Laden and then continued for more than a year. In November 2011 America’s army in Afghanistan shelled and killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers, supposedly allies, on the border. Terrorist attacks on Western and Indian targets in Kabul, the Afghan capital, were traced to groups backed by Pakistan’s army. Because Pakistani generals felt squeezed, and were unsure whether American funds and weaponry would continue to flow to them, as they had for decades, more space opened for civilian leaders to influence foreign policy. It was even possible to hope that a more chastened Pakistan would reduce its traditional hostility toward India. Around this time, Pakistan’s generals did start saying that the greatest military concern was no longer from India but from domestic, Islamist, terrorist groups—a big change in outlook.
When Nawaz Sharif took office in 2013, hosting foreign correspondents in his enormous drawing room with heavy chandeliers, gold-trimmed velvet curtains, and wall-sized mirrors, he had reasons to believe he could shift Pakistan’s policy on India. Sharif sounded sincere in talking of trade and warmth toward India, seeking cross-border visits by leaders and more economic ties. In 1996 India had granted Pakistan “most favored nation” trading status, but Pakistan, some two decades on, had failed to reciprocate. Under Manmohan Singh India rebuilt and expanded its customs post at Wagah, to handle one thousand lorries a day. Constructed in pink and yellow stone, it remained mostly empty when I visited in 2015. A truck driver flicked at flies; tannoy speakers played elevator music in a big, almost deserted vehicle park. But at least the post stood ready, should trade one day grow. Pakistan had done nothing to prepare its side of the border.
More trade would encourage lobbies for peace in both countries. Sharif’s main foreign policy adviser, Sartaj Aziz, a twinkly-eyed man who believed in free markets and remained spry in his late-eighties, said that all of South Asia needed economic revival and that “the peace constituency in Pakistan is stronger than in the past.” Aziz said he planned to open a back channel for negotiations with Modi, “away from the glare of the cameras,” just as Sharif and Vajpayee had done for eighteen months before their Lahore declaration in 1999. But would Pakistan’s army chiefs accept serious talks? Aziz was optimistic, saying, “the army is ready to go along, but it will also watch the size of India’s defense budget and we cannot accept military imbalance.” Some in the “establishment on both sides of the border” had no interest in peace, he added, blaming India’s nationalist media for antagonistically stoking “sensation, drama, and intensity.”
On the Pakistani side, the “establishment” meant hard-line military men and spies, plus old business leaders who feared foreign competition. Sharif’s brother, Shahbaz Sharif—sometimes referred to as the brains in Pakistan’s government—once said in conversation that “security agencies on both sides need to understand, a security-led vision is obviously driven by economic security.” He meant that the army could get more money if trade grew with India. Imran Khan, a populist opposition politician who expected one day to become prime minister, said he wanted warmer relations with India, too.
The sticking point was—as always—inside the army, especially among military spies, and those with conservative, religious leanings. Talking to them or to the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) was difficult. Previously an ISI spokesman, a man with a ponytail, would meet for tea in hotel lobbies in Islamabad, to spell out how foolishly Americans were behaving in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to claim that India fomented violence in Baluchistan, or to deny any wrongdoing by his employers. He naturally denied that the ISI had harbored bin Laden. He also denied that the ISI beat to death a Pakistani journalist who had investigated the ties between officials and Islamist extremists including al Qaeda.
Once with two colleagues I chatted, in the basement of a house in Islamabad, with an ISI colonel and a junior officer. Over a breakfast of sliced fruit and black coffee I asked whether military spies would scupper the civilians’ efforts to reach out to India. The colonel was trim, clean-shaven, well-spoken, and Western educated. He was hardly encouraging. He claimed that “India promotes insurgency in Pakistan,” undermining the whole region, and alleged that “India sends finance to mafia, who help to support insurgents in Baluchistan. A lot of criminals are involved.” He admitted that finding evidence was tricky, but said India stirred violence in northern Pakistan, specifically in Gilgit Baltistan, where Sunni and Shia Muslims clashed. He accused India of trying to block China’s expansion of the Karakoram highway, which links Tibet to the Indian Ocean at Gwadar port: “The invisible hands, the third party,” he said, “somehow they spread sectarian disharmony. Some invisible hands do mischief to create sectarian bloodshed. There are killings in that area, law and order problems, international players are active.” He alleged that agents paid by India had been kidnapping Chinese workers, claiming that America had ordered India to do this. He added that “if the Americans want to pinch China, why should they use India on us?” As for India in Afghanistan, he said, “India can do anything, but don’t disturb the balance. Don’t pinch us from the West. I see clear traces of involvement by India, interfering in our affairs.”
Such paranoia was not encouraging for stability in the region. Pakistani diplomats were usually, but not always, more sophisticated than the men in uniform. But at times they made similar allegations, presumably under orders. Pakistan’s high commissioner in Delhi once suggested to a room packed with journalists that Indian money and backing was behind a horrific massacre by the Taliban of 141 people, mostly children, at an army school in Peshawar in December 2014. Over the years Pakistani officials claimed that India was somehow behind gang violence in Karachi, separatists in Baluchistan, sectarian killings all over Pakistan, and bombings such as at the Marriott hotel in Islamabad. The allegations seemed outlandish and lacked evidence to back them up.
One reason why Pakistani military leaders were quick to allege conspiracies by others was that they found conducting their own operations in the shadows attractive. Leaders from Pakistan’s army admitted they had sent jihadi fighters into India, in effect confessing to being state sponsors of terrorism. Musharraf, for example, said in 2010 that training jihadis to attack in Indian Kashmir was legitimate, claiming: “It is the right of any country to promote its own interests when India is not prepared to discuss Kashmir at the United Nations and resolve the dispute in a peaceful manner.” Underlying the claim was a justification of asymmetry: Pakistan is so much smaller than India it needed to “bleed” Indian resources and somehow stir sympathy and attention from elsewhere in the world. Yet such groups mostly killed a few low-ranking recruits or civilians, spread fear, provoked repression, and achieved no serious military goal, beyond tying up Indian soldiers in Kashmir.
The Mumbai terrorist attack in November 2008 saw 166 people—including Americans and several other foreigners—killed in a train station, luxury hotels, and elsewhere. It was the more horrifying for being televised and protracted, spread over four days, a “spectacular” terrorist attack. It would later be emulated, in method, by terrorists in Nairobi (in a shopping mall, in 2013) and in Paris (at cafés, a football stadium, and a concert hall, in 2015). The Mumbai attack was organized by a group based in Pakistan and conducted by ten young Pakistani men recruited by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), an extremist Salafi outfit. It was probably guided by an officer who had been in Pakistan’s military spy network, the ISI.
Groups such as LeT were tolerated, even supported, by Pakistan’s army, which dared not (and did not wish to) confront all Islamist extremists in the country. Some in the army sympathized with extremist groups, especially the LeT and its goals and methods. The result was that extremists grew stronger inside Pakistan, spreading violence there and abroad. As America’s ambassador to Islamabad, Cameron Munter, said to me in May 2011, just after bin Laden was killed, “if you grow vipers in your back yard, you’re going to get bitten.”2 An academic in Islamabad suggested that army men would never stop using extremist groups, as they “slap the jihadis with one hand and feed them with the other.” That pointed to a persistent threat for Modi and Sharif, as they sought ways to improve relations. Such groups—encouraged by some within Pakistan’s army—could launch spectacular terrorist attacks, like that seen in Mumbai or the many in Kashmir, whenever they wished to scupper peace efforts.
The men in uniform in Pakistan remained extraordinarily powerful, not least by controlling parts of its economy. Many in the army “are businessmen in protected industries, and some are propped up by the cement industry, textiles, and all fear the cold wind of competition with India,” said an ambassador in Islamabad. “The military runs bakeries, big landlords have agricultural interests, old families fear being smashed by competition,” he added. Christine Fair, an American academic who wrote a biting history of Pakistan’s army, called it an extraordinarily successful machine for extorting resources, including aid from America, for private benefit of the generals. She summed it up as a massive “self-licking ice-cream cone.”3 The world’s sixth-largest army, it extracted roughly a fifth of all public spending, more if you counted the costs of military pensions and the country’s fast-expanding nuclear arsenal. Pakistan produced, in 2016, roughly 220 pounds of highly enriched uranium a year, enough for four or five new nuclear warheads, to add to a stockpile of warheads some 100 strong. The only way to justify such spending, given widespread poverty, was to whip up fears of India. “We have become delusional, psychotic, fearing how to protect ourselves from the rest of the world,” said an academic in Islamabad.
Would Modi and Sharif find some sort of reconciliation, and overcome this? Modi yearned to do something historic, but as of this writing in 2016, no evident progress had been made since he came to power. In Sharif he faced a man with a similar personality, a willing partner, but who was politically weakened by years of protests and as the army regained the upper hand. Pakistan’s army retained its sway on foreign and security policy, and appeared to be vetoing any big improvement in ties. Until moderate voices in Pakistan’s army spoke out for the benefits of peace with India, it was hard to see anyone else being able to force a deal. For that to happen, the army had to see a strong enough incentive to change its anti-India stance. The gradual decline in American aid to Pakistan might be one factor to encourage that. But then another big power had a role to play: China.