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| Image: Flickr User - U.S. Department of Defense Current Photos |
By Sarah Watson
“U.S. help to improve India’s homeland security measures could minimize the impact of (inevitable) future Pathankots.”
The January 2 terrorist attack on an Indian Air Force base in the Punjab garrison town of Pathankot is just the latest note in what has become a wearily predictable tune. India initially announced at the start of the attack that it would continue to seek to exploit the opening that followed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Lahore. But the long period of time it took to end the attack and the ongoing revelations of Indian incompetence have wrong-footed Modi’s administration and increased its need to appear strong to its citizens. As a result, it has retreated from its initial assertions and the future of the talks is in doubt. Whether or not talks continue, the India-Pakistan dialogue is too important to be held hostage by these constant aggravations. If the United States is really invested in keeping the dialogue on track, it should work with India to improve its homeland security capacity so that the next attack will have a far smaller chance of derailing the process.
The United States has proven time and time again that it is unable or unwilling to exert leverage on Pakistan to detain terrorists on its soil — as seen in the case of Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed. Saeed has had a $10 million U.S. government bounty on his head for more than three and a half years, but he continues to regularly appear at public rallies in Pakistan, often sharing the stage with elected officials. Pakistan also has a history of arresting terrorist leaders (like Saeed) under U.S. and international pressure and then quietly releasing them when the rest of the world has moved on. There’s no reason to believe that the situation will be different for the architects of this attack, the leaders of terrorist group Jaish-e-Muhammad. In the long term, there are tools that the United States can use to push Pakistan to cease its support for terrorists groups, but these will require time, and in any case success is far from certain.
The United States can’t stop elements of the Pakistani state from supporting groups that attack within India, and it can’t make Pakistan catch and punish the leaders of the groups themselves. But it can at least help to stop future incidents from derailing the peace process. If the attackers had been caught before they even arrived at the airbase, or before India’s muddled response managed to turn the attack into a multi-day siege, or before seven Indian servicemen were killed, it would not have had nearly the impact on India-Pakistan relations that it is proving to have.
Read the full story at The Diplomat