Hoping against hope

The second factor pertains to how Pakistan and India look at each other despite normalisation. Pakistan still perceives India as the primary security threat; India returns the favour. These responses have been institutionalised. Getting the two capitals to cooperate as closely as the tragedy in the wake of the quake calls for, is to put a very high premium on hope.

Help has of course come from India. Pakistan has accepted some of it, politely refused other offers such as helicopters and Indian personnel on the ground in its part of Kashmir. This is despite the fact that Pakistan badly needs helicopters and there are still many areas where rescue workers and relief supplies have not reached. Given the magnitude of the crisis — according to WHO estimates, the quake has affected more than 3 million people which makes it a bigger calamity than the December 2004 tsunami which hit 11 littoral states of the Indian Ocean and displaced 1.5 million people — that Pakistan needs help from wherever it can come. So what is it that stops it from accepting India’s offers of chipping in with rescue and relief flights and sending in personnel to join the effort?

Officials raise various objections to accepting India’s offers of help beyond a certain point. India would not have accepted a similar Pakistani offer to send in helicopters and army and paramilitary personnel in Jammu and Kashmir. That is true, but that is also precisely the problem. Nonetheless, this is the starting point of the statist positions – and institutionalised mindset – and gives a foretaste of what other objections can be raised.

Indian army helicopters flying over Azad Kashmir would mean they could reconnoitre the area and collect crucial intelligence about our ORBAT (order of battle) and various other strategic assets that must remain secret from India. The problem with this reasoning is that we have the US Chinooks flying in and out of the area and the Americans, with their equipment and resources, are much better placed to recce the area and pick up intelligence on our assets, whatever their nature might be, than the Indians. Of course, it is quite absurd to think that India already does not have an intelligence network in the area and is not using humint (human intelligence) and sigint (signal intelligence) to gather information.

In a semi-facetious manner one could stretch the point to argue that given the growing strategic relations between India and the US, the information we are presumably denying India could, at some point in the future, be passed on to it by the Americans. If security is indeed the factor guiding the policy of keeping the Indians out of the area, then a similar policy should have applied to the Americans also. Remember this is an area where there presumably are jihadi training camps and the Americans could even pick up the Al Qaeda spoor. As for the argument about the disputed nature of the region, the nature of the dispute or Pakistan’s control of the area would hardly be diluted just because Indian personnel helped rescue Pakistanis. The fact is that these arguments are begotten of the institutional mindset that has evolved over more than five decades. It is true of both states. India would have acted no differently than Pakistan. It has refused to share seismic data with Pakistan because, so the argument goes, such data could be used by Pakistan to identiy the location of any future nuclear test(s). India is also reluctant to join the Global Seismographic Network run by the Washington-based IRIS (Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology) consortium that monitors earthquakes at 128 stations worldwide. Neither India nor Pakistan is plugged into IRIS.

To this is added, in Pakistan’s case, the internal political factor. The political and religio-political opposition are arrayed against Musharraf and his party, the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q, and its allies. The policy of keeping the regular political parties completely out of the political arena has resulted in vertical polarisation. The opposition knows that the Q-League has no real political clout without Musharraf’s patronage. The thrust fault that has caused the quake has also made the political fault active. Dour-faced officials and ministers can be seen on TV channels trying to inform the public that the government is doing everything it can to mitigate the misery of the survivors. However, people in greater numbers are contributing to private funds than the President’s Relief Fund set up for the quake victims.

The army, as a group, has done commendable work and continues to work round-the-clock in quake-affected areas. Yet, it has drawn flak from the people because Musharraf’s system has placed it in the centre of country’s politics. This is unfortunate because under a civilian government, it would have extracted praise for its efforts. The structural flaws in the system are now working to its disadvantage. Given the internal dynamics, the institutional bias evinced by both sides against each other, and in this case, the dialectic between the two will not allow Islamabad to accept India’s offer to induct personnel and equipment for relief efforts in AJK.

It would stretch optimism to think in terms of joint disaster management at this juncture or setting up a mechanism to address any future natural calamities jointly, although this kind of close cooperation is exactly what could have given a quantum jump to normalisation. Indeed, it would be a plus if the two sides could even agree to share seismic data and establish a cooperative system for early warning of such disasters. Beyond this would be the triumph of hope over experience.

The writer is News Editor of The Friday Times and Contributing Editor of Daily Times