Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [111]
On strategy towards India, his views were the following:
We say that if India tries to break up Pakistan by supporting insurgents like the Baloch nationalists then our response should be to break up India. In any case, we owe them payback for what they did to us in East Pakistan ... India is not nearly as strong as it looks. The faultlines of the Indian Federation are much deeper than those of Pakistan: Kashmir, the Naxalites, Khalistan, Nagaland, all kinds of conflicts between upper and lower castes, tribals, Hindus and other religions and so on. If we were to support these insurgencies, India would cease to exist.26
I hasten to add that, Kashmir aside, there is in fact no evidence that the ISI is supporting any of these insurgencies within India. Nonetheless, this kind of attitude is deeply troubling, especially because India’s growing problem with the Naxalite Maoist peasant rebellion means that Mr Hamid’s words, while horribly dangerous, are not as stupid (seen from the perspective of an ultra-hardline Pakistani) as they might first appear.
To understand ISI attitudes, and Kashmir strategy in particular, it is necessary to understand that they saw victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan very much as their own victory. It became their central institutional myth. Because of the huge funds flowing from the US and Saudi Arabia to help the Mujahidin, which the ISI administered and used for its own purposes, the Afghan jihad of the 1980s was the key episode in giving the ISI an autonomous financial base and boosting ISI power within the military and the state as a whole.
The ISI became quite convinced that what they had done to the Soviets in Afghanistan they could do to India in Kashmir, using the same instruments – Islamist militants (the fundamental political and geopolitical mistakes involved in this belief should hardly need repeating). The spontaneous mass uprising of Kashmiri Muslims against Indian rule from 1988 on (initially in protest against the rigged state elections of the previous year) seemed to give a great chance of success. However, to a much greater extent than in Afghanistan, these militants were to be recruited not just in the country concerned, but from within Pakistan (and to a lesser extent the wider Muslim world).
The ISI’s Kashmir strategy reflected the longstanding Pakistani strategy of promoting Kashmiri accession to Pakistan, and not Kashmiri independence. They therefore used pro-Pakistani Islamist groups to sideline the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, which initially led the Kashmir uprising. This strategy included the murder by the ISI-backed Islamist militant groups of a considerable number of JKLF leaders and activists – even as these were also being targeted and killed by Indian security forces.
The Islamist radical groups, madrasahs and networks which had served to raise Pakistani volunteers for the Afghan jihad had always hated India, and were only too ready to accept Pakistani military help, including funding, weapons supplies, provision of intelligence, and the creation of training camps run by the Pakistani military.
However, just as in Afghanistan first the Mujahidin and then the Taleban escaped from the US and Pakistani scripts and ran amok on their own accounts, so the militants in Kashmir began to alienate much of the native Kashmiri population with their ruthlessness and ideological fanaticism; to splinter and splinter again into ever-smaller groups and fight with each other despite ISI efforts to promote co-operation, and to prey on Kashmiri civilians. Lashkar-e-Taiba’s greater discipline in this regard was reportedly one factor in the increasing