No one, least of all New Delhi, should be surprised that Islamabad has dismissed the dossier containing Mumbai evidence as merely information. It baffles me why any reasonably intelligent person would think that Pakistan would own up any of the players in the Mumbai attacks. It has been Pakistan’s state policy to brazen out of such accusations.
Having said that, I have this niggling feeling that India may not have furnished a carefully laid out dossier which would not only compel the generally incredulous Pakistani establishment but even rise to the level of evidence admissible in a court of law. Not having seen the dossier, it would be unfair to express misgivings about it. But I am merely wondering aloud on the basis of India’s past record. It is not for a lack of substance that India’s case goes by default. It is generally a matter of style and the way such information is packaged that tends to undermine it.
For a state whose natural reflex action is denial, India has to be even more fastidious in what it presents to Pakistan. At a time when the country’s is cornered from many different directions and is as close to it has ever been to being a failed state, one can hardly expect it rulers to admit that some of their people may have orchestrated the latest strike. If the Pakistani nation-state was a person, he or she would be showing all signs of passive aggressive behavior. It is no longer possible to explain it as an occasional behavioral trait. It now appears to be pathological. Fortunately, Pakistan is not an individual and still has some institutional corrective ability.
India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has mounted an extraordinary attack on Pakistan calling it a “fragile” and “irresponsible” government which has used terrorism as a state policy. This is by far the most explicit condemnation from a generally reticent political figure. Whether it resolves into something more dramatic, say for instance surgical military strikes against targets in Pakistan, is an open question. It is tempting to deride the comments as an example of impotent rage that India has been known to express; potent rage being military strikes of the kind Israel is currently carrying out in Gaza.
At some level, from a short-term perspective, it might make sense for India to mete out some matching punishment to those elements that carried out the Mumbai attacks. The only problem with surgical strikes as a device to raise the stakes against such future attacks is that they do not really end anything. The Israel-Gaza conflict is yet another illustration, if any more illustrations were needed, of the futility of wars. The only way one can rationalize limited military strikes from time to time as a necessary evil is to convince oneself that they are a price democracies must pay to defend the principle of democracy.
I am not sure if any political leadership can tell its people that in order for them to remain a democracy in the face of the odds as heavy as India is facing they would have to be ready to pay a recurring price in blood and treasure. There is no permanent solution to terror other than fundamentally reforming entire societies, a task which seems beyond the capacity of most countries in the world.