Pakistan has suffered losses fighting with India over Kashmir

Absent governance

Pakistan sinks in amnesia when discussing foreign policy and behaves like a state with its internal sovereignty intact. It has actually handed over the conduct of its foreign policy to jihadi elements it no longer controls. It also forgets that any "reformulation" of policy by the elected government may run up against the ingrained mindset of these non-state elements.

Indeed what is amply proved on the streets is the capacity of these "instruments" of policy to also be the formulators of policy. Many "incidents" have to be "owned" by the state through the paradox of denial, that is, instead of punishing the instrument, denying that the instrument has orchestrated an event.

Pakistan has suffered economic damage pursuing the unchanging "principled" policy of revisionist challenge to India but this may not have hurt it enough to make it repent.

In his latest comment, ex-World Bank Pakistani economist Shahid Javed Burki says: "The past process was 'India-centric' in the sense that Pakistan tried, sometimes with desperation, to balance India’s growing military might. That approach proved costly."

In a 2007 report, I estimated the cost to Pakistan of the running dispute with India over Kashmir and other issues. I estimated that the Kashmir dispute alone had cost Pakistan 2.25 per cent to 3.20 per cent a year of growth loss in GDP terms.

"Compounded over a period of six decades, this suggests the magnitude of the colossal damage Pakistan has done to its economy by following this particular quarrel with India. This study used purely economic factors; it did not take into account the undeniable fact that some of the cost of this approach towards India contributed to the rise of Islamic extremism in the country. That, too, has resulted in serious economic losses."

Narendra Modi thinks India too has damaged its economy through the anti-business Nehruvian model, which his predecessor prime minister began to overturn but failed to complete the job. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif can hit it off with Prime Minister Modi but will be hampered by elements that force the world to call Pakistan a failed state by reason of lost "internal sovereignty".

Modi will take the trade-first option offered by Sharif; but if he is squeezed on the "Kashmir-first" option he will join the rest of the world on squeezing Sharif with "do-more" pressure against Pakistan’s "instruments of foreign policy", the non-state actors.

Internal demons

An impetuous interior minister in Islamabad stubbed his toe on the presence, in Pakistan, of a Mumbai don named Dawood Ibrahim. He assumed that Modi had made progress with Pakistan conditional to Pakistan coughing up Dawood Ibrahim, wanted for terrorism in India.

It developed that Modi hadn’t said anything about Dawood Ibrahim. But in the coming days, the Mumbai don and many others in the gallery of non-state rogues, let off with fig leaf verdicts by Pakistani courts according to international opinion, will become a major agenda of bilateral discussion.

Pakistan will balk; and Pakistan will suffer for being transfixed in a policy rut. Most foreign policy experts in Pakistan study events keeping their eyes averted from how much Modi can gain from international reaction to Pakistan’s gallery of internal rogues.

In 2008, a UN Security Council committee, on India’s request, designated Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the frontal organisation of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), as a global terrorist organisation and its leader Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, chief of operations of LeT, and Haji Muhammad Ashraf, chief of finance of the group, as terrorists. America went ahead and placed $10 million on Saeed’s head.

While in jail, Lakhvi has been allowed to wed again and, after regular cohabitation, become the father of a baby. Unfortunately for Pakistan, in 2012, a terrorist called Abu Jandal but actually Zabihuddin of India, repatriated to India by seemingly friendly-to-Pakistan Saudi Arabia, revealed all.

While Zabihuddin was doing R&R in Saudi Arabia after training in Pakistan, Lakhvi phoned him triumphantly from his Rawalpindi prison to tell him that he was having the time of his life four years after his trial started with no end in sight in 2013.

In 2013, the Supreme Court of India pronounced that the 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai, which killed 257 people, were the result of "the management and conspiracy of the blasts by Dawood Ibrahim and Tiger Memon, and that it was executed with the help of the ISI which played a vital role in imparting training to the accused".

Dawood Ibrahim is officially not in Pakistan but his movement is apparently not restricted by any niceties of security although some Karachi publications have come under pressure for reporting his whereabouts. Rumours hit Lahore in April when he visited the city to shop for another wedding in the family.

(Reprinted with publisher's permission.)

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