NEW DELHI: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf chairman Imran Khan has alleged that India has been subverting Pakistan to take the heat off a beleaguered Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, but this tactic is not borne out by former Indian national security adviser Shivshankar Menon’s description of earlier responses in his book quoted on Friday.

Mr Khan has contended, or implied, that there has been evident bonhomie between Mr Sharif and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Seeing his friend in considerable difficulty over the Panama Papers affair, Mr Modi has leaned on the military and the intelligence apparatus to take the heat off his friend who faces a debilitating money scam. It could be so, but is it?

Examine: Sharif under siege

In a newspaper report on Friday, a chapter from Mr Menon’s new book describes how after the Mumbai terror attack in Nov 2008, then prime minister Manmohan Singh was tendered the advice to go on the offensive against “Pakistan-based groups”. However, the phlegmatic politician decided that a strike by India against targets in Pakistan would weaken the civilian government and give more muscle to Pakistan’s military.

Mr Menon wrote in his book that he pressed for immediate military retaliation “either against the LeT in Muridke, in Punjab province, or their camps in Pakistan-occupied [Azad] Kashmir, or against the ISI”. He believed it “would have been emotionally satisfying” for the enraged Indians.

Mr Menon calculated that a military retaliation would have “gone a long way in erasing the shame of the incompetence that India’s police and security agencies displayed in the glare of the world’s television lights for full three days”.

In the chapter titled ‘Restraint or Riposte: The Mumbai Attack and Cross-Border Terrorism from Pakistan’ in his book Choices: Inside the making of India’s Foreign Policy, released in the United States and United Kingdom, Mr Menon said: “On sober reflection and in hindsight… the decision not to retaliate militarily and to concentrate on diplomatic, covert, and other means was the right one for that time and place.”

According to him: “The simple answer to why India did not immediately attack Pakistan is that after examining the options at the highest levels of government, the decision-makers concluded that more was to be gained from not attacking Pakistan than from attacking it.”

An Indian attack on Pakistan, he wrote, would have united the country behind the Pakistan Army and weakened the recently elected civilian government of Asif Ali Zardari.

“A limited strike on selected terrorist targets — say, the LeT headquarters in Muridke or LeT camps in Pakistan-occupied [Azad] Kashmir — would have had limited practical utility and hardly any effect on the organisation.”

Between Nov 26 and 28 in 2008, 166 people, including 26 foreigners, were killed in spectacular terror strikes at different locations in Mumbai by 10 attackers suspected to be Pakistanis working for Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Mr Menon noted that there had been other, more deadly terrorist attacks in Mumbai before 26/11, all linked to Pakistan, but “nothing matched the level of organisation, the sheer savagery, and the television-style spectacle” of this terror attack.

“The cross-border terrorists pose no existential threat to India,” he observed, but “failure in India’s nation-building endeavour or prolonged economic failure would be”.

Arguing against the idea that one military action will end the conflict, he cautioned that “India’s immediate political objective must recognise that this is a long conflict that cannot be solved — that is protracted and intractable”.

This is an idea that most Indians “are reluctant to accept and some find intolerable”.

Israeli model

Mr Menon pointed out that the Israeli model “often quoted or misquoted, in support of military action as the answer” in India “is limited in time and effect”. Israeli tactics of short responses against non-state actors, not their state sponsors, seeks cumulative deterrence, but the “use of deterrence in asymmetric warfare is questionable unless the non-state actors take over territory and act as governments”.

“India-Pakistan relations are one of the few major failures of Indian foreign policy,” wrote Mr Menon, where the two neighbours have not been able to even achieve “a modus vivendi whereby each country goes its own way and leaves the other in peace”.

He lamented the failure of efforts during 2004-07 between Manmohan Singh and Gen Pervez Musharraf, which were stymied in 2007 by Pakistan’s domestic politics.

“To me,” Menon noted about the joint statement between Singh and then prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani in July 2009 at Sharm El Sheikh, it “was another opportunity squandered in the long list of missed half chances in India-Pakistan relations”.

On Tuesday Imran Khan accused India of trying to sabotage his party’s ‘reform movement’, escalating earlier claims that the eastern neighbour’s aggressive designs along the Line of Control (LoC) were an effort to take some pressure off Mr Sharif.

If he is right then Mr Modi has made a departure from not doing anything to harm a civilian government against the military.

If Mr Khan’s assertion has any merit, it also implies that the Modi government miscalculated in stepping up the ante on Pakistan because it is said to have only helped in the consolidation of the military as the ‘go to’ problem solvers.

Speaking to reporters outside his Bani Gala residence before leaving for Quetta, the PTI chief said that since India was aware it could not defeat a nuclear-armed state militarily, it was trying to “implode” Pakistan under a new “doctrine”.

“It is strange that whenever we start doing something, something major happens in the country,” Mr Khan said, an apparent reference to the terrorist attack on a police training centre in Quetta the previous night.

Published in Dawn October 29th, 2016