For the first time, Pakistan has admitted that the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks were planned and directed from its soil by Lashkar-e-Taiba. Recently installed Prime Minister Imran Khan deserves qualified praise for stating as much – something his predecessors and principally Nawaz Sharif failed to admit either by way of a pregnant silence or by feigning ignorance. But, to see this as a step forward on the part of Khan in facilitating a resumption of the stalled India-Pakistan dialogue is to ignore the ground realities there.
Fact of the matter is that the Pakistani establishment, somewhat openly controlled by the Army brass with able support from military intelligence the ISI, has been playing hide and seek vis-à-vis the numerous wounds that the terrorist and other outfits there kept inflicting on India. Such heinous acts had reached highly provocative levels in recent years. After 26/11 came the “terrorist” attacks on Pathankot and Uri military establishments, in which personnel of the Pakistani army or those trained by the military were involved. These had the proportions of a mini war, but India bore the brunt with considerable patience and avoided effective retaliation. Rightly or wrongly, neither the Manmohan Singh government nor the Modi dispensation took matters to extremes.
The Manmohan Singh government was obviously weak-kneed. The maximum that the Modi government did was a set of surgical strikes on the night of September 2016 – nearly two years after the NDA government took power. This was no great shakes. Just a handful of casualties were inflicted, very little harm was caused to enemy infrastructure and no noticeable benefits came of it. A top soldier involved in the offensive has now disapproved of the political hype that followed. The Opposition had been rubbishing the government claims for long.
Imran Khan saying — in his first interview to a foreign (American) journal — that he has asked his government to “find out the status of the case” and that “resolving this case is in Pakistan’s interest”, means little. Fact is, even if the PM wants to fix the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks – which would essentially mean handing them over to India – this could be nothing more than wishful thinking. The role of courts there apart, the military is bound to block such efforts; and the military has a vested interest in keeping the Kashmir fire alive, for the reason that it’s the Kashmir card that gives the soldiers the legitimacy to keep the political establishment there under their control.