Pakistan Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani’s recent soul-stirring call for peace and development – and withdrawal of Indian troops from the Siachen Glacier because it was such a waste of money and human beings! – has now been shown up to be of the same kind of perfidy indulged in by his predecessor and mentor the military dictator General Pervez Musharraf designer and executor of the Kargil fiasco. Talking peace while preparing for war of the sleazy type is Pakistan’s forte and it appears its military personnel have refined it to perfection. Even as General Kayani, after visiting the site of the massive avalanche in Gyari in north Pakistan-occupied Kashmir where nearly 200 Pakistani troops of the Northern Light Infantry were buried alive, talked of peace and development his footsoldiers were busy digging a tunnel in the Akhnoor sector of the Samba bulge that gives access to India’s lines of communications to Jammu and Kashmir. The intention was to cut Kashmir at the jugular and the hope was that the valley would fall like a ripe plum into Pakistan’s lap.
Kayani’s Siachen gambit too reeked of perfidy because, after handing over the defence of the northern segment of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to China which had already deployed up to 11,000 troops disguised as labourers, technicians and engineers, he wants only a bilateral Indo-Pak deal which would leave the whole of northern Kashmir in Chinese hands.
This division of labour in north Kashmir appears to have a pattern given that Pakistan has begun to apply the same kind of tactics that it has done through the use of cross-border terrorism combined with artillery support by the Pakistan Army along its border with Afghanistan. And, of course, there is deniability galore even when proof is proferred of blatant Pakistani involvement. President Karzai of Afghanistan has had to warn Pakistan of serious consequences for its acts of terrorism against Afghans who are preparing themselves for the transition that will need to happen when the majority of International Security Assistance Force which includes NATO and US troops is withdrawn. Pakistan sees it as a window of opportunity to reestablish its hegemony in Afghanistan and regain the strategic depth it lost when the Americans swept the Taliban out of Kabul It is with this intention that it has kept the Haqqani faction of the Taliban under cover and has occasionally used it as a hatchet-arm against the US and Indian embassies in Kabul and the ISAF in north east Afghanistan.
The discovery of the tunnel in the Akhnoor sector of the international border between Pakistan and India this week also carries with it a pattern that has become common on both sides of Pakistan’s borders. The tunneling is a replica of what was enacted by the Taliban when they dug a channel with such accuracy as to be able to reach the cell in which political prisoners – largely Taliban commanders – were held. It helped more than 500 battlehardened Islamic fundamentalist jihadis to escape from Kandahar jail. At that time an Indian analyst had predicted that similar techniques would be utilized against India in the near future. His analysis was based on the commonality of techniques and mindsets between Pakistan, North Korea and China.
