Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that if India takes one step towards peace talks, his country will take two.
Here is an idea. Let New Delhi take that one step and ask Islamabad to hand over Hafiz Saeed, the alleged mastermind behind the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, and suspected mob boss Dawood Ibrahim. Islamabad then can take two steps and hand over both, one after the other in rapid succession, perhaps an hour apart. Howzat, Mr. Khan?
Reading Khan’s seemingly sincere comments to a group of visiting Indian journalists I try hard to be optimistic and open-minded. Employing rather Trumpian logic he describes the Indian demand over these two men as “inherited issues” for which his government should not be blamed. That is how successive governments work, Mr. Prime Minister. You inherit both triumphs and disasters. There is no cherry-picking here.
Khan also says that India and Pakistan “cannot live in the past.” The best way to deal with the past is to make it present—disinherit the two men as a gesture to pump life into the long comatose talks. If New Delhi still fails to respond with matching sincerity, then Khan would be justified in questioning its intentions.
Of course, the idea that Islamabad would even consider handing over Saeed and Ibrahim is absurd on its face. More than Ibrahim, it is Saeed whose fortunes are so intertwined with Pakistan’s domestic politics. The relatively nascent Khan administration would not like to mess around with all that at a time when it faces much deeper existential issues over its massive debt obligations.
Pakistan is in the midst of negotiating an economic bailout package with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) of anywhere between $6 billion and $12 billion. There have been fears expressed that Islamabad may use that prospective IMF bailout to service its debt to China. It is a nation-state version rolling one’s credit card debts.
However, those apprehensions appear to have been allayed by David Malpass, the U.S. department of Treasury’s undersecretary for international affairs. He has been quoted as telling a US Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee yesterday, “We think the maturity of the Chinese debt comes after the IMF would have been repaid.” He implied that “From the standpoint of IMF money being used to pay Chinese money” was not the main U.S. worry.
Any IMF bailout is bound to come with severe conditions imposing fundamental economic reform, austerity and spending transparency. That imposition may not augur well for the new prime minister trying to make his mark. It would be living in a fool’s paradise to even suggest it but over the last three decades Islamabad could have found ways to mend fences with New Delhi to such an extent that its own economy would have strengthened along with India’s and saved itself the humiliation that always comes with being in debt. That mending of the fences would have necessarily required not using an assortment of jihadists and other misanthropic groups to foment trouble in Kashmir and elsewhere as a state policy.