US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele A Flournoy has said the “deeply historic distrust’ with India is hindering Pakistan’s focus on the war on terror. Let it be known to her that that very “deeply historic distrust” is a direct consequence of another empire at another time trying to fashion the region in its own image.
"The only way that you are going to give the Pakistani government and armed forces the confidence to shift their focus is to address some of those areas of tension to try to reduce tension between the countries," Flournoy was quoted as telling the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
I do not want to read more into her comment but my first reaction to it is that she is suggesting that Pakistan would have focused on battling terrorism had it not been for India’s looming presence. It is now a widely accepted fact that significant elements of the Pakistani army and intelligence apparatus created and propped up many of the very jihadi groups they are in a quandary over now to carry out a non-state proxy war against India. India’s assertion since the late 1980s and early 1990s that such groups were being facilitated by at least some of the Pakistani army to infiltrate through the Kashmir border were dismissed by the pre 9/11 international community then.
So it is disingenuous now to spin the whole mess as a result of Pakistan’s inability to take on jihadi groups because of the “deeply historic distrust.” It is true that Pakistan is now discovering to its own chagrin that those very groups are now turning on its own people and state. That ought to motivate them to eliminate the menace.
It is not possible to look at the current India-Pakistan dynamic without going back to its history some six to seven decades ago when the retiring British empire divided the region in an extraordinarily random manner. I am not for a moment suggesting that since then India and Pakistan have introduces their own very unique subcontinental complexities to the paranoia that existed at the time of the partition. For a historic reference it is important for the US to remember how facts have played out in the past couple of decades as well.