Pulwama

On Valentine’s Day in February 2019, a convoy of buses carrying paramilitary personnel snaked its way from Jammu to Srinagar on National Highway 44. Just short of Lethapora, a little town in Pulwama district, a loud explosion drowned out the quiet hum of the cavalcade. It was 3.15 p.m. A bloodied Kashmir once again became the central focus of India’s attention and of the bilateral relationship.

When we saw the first ticker reports of this explosion at the Indian high commission in Islamabad, we assumed we were seeing one more of those terrible terrorist attacks in the violence-ridden state, with perhaps a handful injured or dead. As the story developed, and news started trickling in of a large number of deaths of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel, it became clear that this was bigger than the standard grenade attack that we had got used to in Kashmir. We watched alarmed as reports confirmed that some forty security men had perished in the explosion.

Soon, a video emerged of the Jaish-e-Mohammed claiming credit for the explosion, but attributing it to a local Kashmiri youth. The chief of the outfit, Maulana Masood Azhar, was known to reside in Bahawalpur, in Pakistan’s south Punjab, in the protective embrace of the ISI. Chatter soon emerged of celebrations and distribution of sweets by Azhar and his Jaish henchmen, making it abundantly clear where the attack had been planned.

This attack went against the grain of the overall relationship that had seemed headed into positive territory. We hadn’t expected a major breakthrough but no major quarrel either, a sort of ‘unpeace’, as a new government settled down in Pakistan and as India got absorbed deeper into an election campaign.

But this was big, the biggest terror attack since the one in Uri in 2016, the worst during my tenure in Pakistan. We stayed in office late, bracing ourselves for the diplomatic tremors of the explosion. In Pakistan, matters seemed superficially calm. The media reporting was factual, and PM Imran Khan was preoccupied with the visit of the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) whom he was personally driving around Islamabad.

An emergency cabinet meeting was held the next morning in New Delhi. Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale called me minutes after it ended. My orders were to report immediately for consultations in New Delhi—if possible, by that night. The Pakistan high commissioner had been called in for a sharp démarche in South Block, pointing out that the killing of forty personnel had the clear imprint of a group protected by Pakistan. I had instructions not to be available for any démarche by the Pakistani side.

Speaking after the meeting, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley reflected public anger when he said they will ensure that ‘those who have committed and actively supported this heinous act are made to pay a heavy price’. Jaitley added that the MEA would launch ‘all possible diplomatic steps that have to be taken to ensure complete isolation of Pakistan’.1 Home Minister Rajnath Singh reached Srinagar and PM Modi declared the ‘sacrifices of our brave security personnel shall not go in vain’.2 The condemnation had been accompanied by immediate steps to halt trade. India withdrew the most favoured nation trading partner status given to Pakistan in 1996.

Amidst the flurry of activity at the high commission the day after, we tried to assess why a terror outfit would have carried out such an attack, or the ISI allowed such a bloody blow in Kashmir. There could have been several motives. The ISI could have made the not unfamiliar assumption that the valley was smouldering with anger and a terror attack attributed to an indigenous movement could ensure both international reaction and local support for the Kashmiri struggle. An attack could weaken the ruling BJP in the upcoming general elections, assuming that India would have limited resolve to retaliate. Pakistan may have learnt the wrong lessons from Afghanistan—some radical elements were already crowing that one strategic asset, the Taliban, had brought the US to its knees in Afghanistan; similarly, the Jaish might have thought it could wear out and defeat the Indian ‘occupation forces’ in Kashmir. The powers that be in Pakistan may have calculated that as India had committed itself to improving relations with Pakistan through the Kartarpur corridor, it would perhaps be reluctant to retaliate for an act of terrorism. There was also the traditional trope that the India threat towards Pakistan would assure the beleaguered Pakistan Army some extra budgetary support, if India retaliated after the attack. Or perhaps the Pakistan Army might have wanted to embarrass a civilian government (albeit one supported by it) foolish enough to contemplate better relations with India.

On the record, and for public consumption, the discourse within Pakistan was one of denial and injured innocence. Why would Pakistan at this point invite trouble when they had enough trouble with the FATF3 breathing down their backs and a Saudi prince visiting? It was a knee-jerk reaction on India’s part to blame Pakistan. This was the work of a local Kashmiri freedom fighter. The army-leaning media was soon suggesting that India had launched a ‘false-flag operation’ to frame Pakistan, possibly to bring Pakistan into its election narrative, so that a subsequent military exchange would benefit the ruling dispensation.

Even as I asked for my tickets to be booked for New Delhi on 15 February, I received the expected summons from the foreign secretary of Pakistan, Tehmina Janjua, to show up for an ‘important meeting’.

The latest diplomatic game had begun.

I sent a response that I would not be available for a conversation since I was en route for consultations in India; my deputy and acting high commissioner, Gaurav Ahluwalia, was available for any conversation.

This did not go down too well with the foreign office. They knew only too well, from the watchers outside my office, that I was still ensconced in the chancery. I left work immediately. I would pick up a bag from home and reach the airport early, to be firmly not available to my hosts for a démarche. I asked my deputy to do the honours at the foreign office, and jumped on a flight to Dubai.

TERROR DIPLOMACY

Sleepless from overnight flights the next morning, I reached South Block for a series of meetings, trying my best to sidestep media stakeouts. To the amusement of my colleagues, I was thirty minutes late for my first meeting. I had forgotten to switch from Pakistani to Indian time.

In Delhi, after meeting with various agencies, I had revised some of my initial assessments. Pulwama was in all likelihood a small operation gone out of control, where the suicide bomber lucked out in getting an unprotected target in a convoy of vehicles. The general assessment of several security experts was that this was an operation that had become bigger than was originally planned: even Pakistan’s agencies had been caught flat-footed by the Pulwama action—some said, they were internally trying to blame the Jaish for overstepping the brief and not executing it professionally enough. Investigations would confirm a year later that it was a meticulously planned operation of the JeM that had met with unexpected success.

When I got to South Block, walking past a battery of cameras, I joined meetings discussing options. Particularly diplomatic options. The steps taken by the Cabinet Committee on Security had included withdrawal of the most favoured nation treatment, a customs duty of 200 percent on Pakistani goods (that would effectively end imports), and a halt to trade at the Wagah border. But this was just the beginning.

A host of other ideas were mooted, to scale down our engagement with Pakistan. Stop the Samjhauta Express, stop the Lahore bus service, defer the BSF border talks, defer the Kartarpur corridor talks. And then there were the familiar proposals being bandied about in policy debates and by pundits writing in the media. Stop issuing visas. Stop honouring SAARC visas. Cease cross-LoC trade. Disallow travel of Indians to Pakistan. Suspend f lights between the countries. How hard it was to build trust, I thought. And how easy to break it. All the confidence-building measures planned, negotiated, and implemented over years in this difficult relationship, could be slashed off on a yellow notepad in minutes.

South Block was in crisis management mode and I was part of the crisis team, trying to guess Pakistan’s next moves. I was in constant touch with my team in Islamabad that was led by Gaurav Ahluwalia who was reporting continuously on internal developments within Pakistan.

An intense phase of diplomacy began, for sharing India’s outrage with the world. Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale’s day included briefings for envoys of twenty-five countries—including the UN P5—the US, UK, China, Russia, and France—on 15 February, to talk of the role of the Jaish in the attack and on the use of terrorism as an instrument of Pakistan’s state policy. Apart from the P5, Gokhale met diplomats of key countries in Europe and Asia, such as Germany, South Korea, Japan, and Australia. Indian envoys were being asked to repeat these messages in global capitals. Countries from across the globe were condemning the incident and sharing India’s outrage.

Pakistan was soon reacting to this diplomatic offensive. The foreign office had summoned India’s acting high commissioner in Islamabad to reject ‘baseless allegations made by India’. Prime Minister Imran Khan waited a few days before reacting, using the army’s talking points of stout denial of any Pakistani involvement. In an address on 19 February, he claimed: ‘This is Naya Pakistan…. If you have any actionable intelligence that a Pakistani is involved, give it to us. I guarantee you that we will take action…’.

In South Block, we had drafted a comprehensive response, aimed at Pakistan, but also reminding the world that it was ‘a well-known fact that Jaish-e-Mohammad and its leader Masood Azhar are based in Pakistan’. Also, proof had been provided to Pakistan on the Mumbai attacks, but ‘the case has not progressed for the last more than 10 years’. The international community was well acquainted with the fact, India said, ‘that Pakistan is the nerve center of terrorism.’ The MEA statement also called out the insinuation that ‘India’s response to the terrorist attack is determined by the forthcoming General Election. India rejects this false allegation. India’s democracy is a model for the world which Pakistan would never understand.’

As the Saudi crown prince and prime minister MBS travelled from Pakistan to India on 21 February, PM Modi shared India’s anguish with him. He added publicly that punishing terrorists and their supporters was important and that Saudi Arabia and India ‘have shared views about this.’

India decided to prepare a dossier of evidence on how Pakistan and the JeM were complicit in the terrorist attack in Pulwama. UN diplomacy was activated, based on the dossier, through four of the UN Security Council members, i.e., the P5 minus China. France was prepared to propose a UN resolution to corner the JeM and Pakistan. Both the UN and the EU were being approached to designate Azhar a terrorist, already so designated by the US in 2001. Even Pakistan had in the past indicted Azhar when the pressure had become unbearable in the Musharraf years; Azhar had technically been detained for a year in 2002. India was now also advocating Financial Action Task Force (FATF)-like stiff anti-terror financing conditions on Pakistan at the IMF, where Imran Khan’s government was negotiating a critical loan to save its sinking economy.

India suggested to Japan that it might consider postponing the visit by Foreign Minister Qureshi, or if he did show up, highlighting the terrorism issue. Qureshi eventually had to cancel his Tokyo trip. The idea was to work towards calling out Pakistan globally as a terrorist sponsor, rather than just ‘isolating’ it, as was the initial rhetoric. Indian diplomats were suggesting to countries engaging with Pakistan to put the issue of terrorism on top of the agenda. On the Indus Water Treaty, while the familiar instinct was to abrogate it, the decision that was finally taken was that no data would be given to Pakistan beyond the treaty requirements. Forty-eight agreements were now being examined for possible suspension. Proposed confidence-building talks between the BSF and Coast Guard were called off.

Pakistan’s military establishment seemed jittery about the impending Indian action. They decided on some nominal moves against the JeM to fend off the pressure. They were worried Azhar would be picked up or targeted by an Indian or US agency. He had been moved from Bahawalpur to Islamabad, deeper into the protective embrace of the Pak ISI.

I continued my briefings of the CCS and called separately on each of its members, including the PM and the NSA; each seemed keen to hear my assessments at this time, particularly my perspectives on Pakistan’s internal conditions. I did share an assessment with the political leadership that the diplomatic space for manoeuvre was limited and that other options needed to be considered, particularly in the context of the surgical strikes of 2016. Pakistan was bracing itself for such action by India but did not know when and in what shape it would come. The PM asked me when I was scheduled to leave for Islamabad; I told him it would be in a week or so. He listened to me attentively, asked questions, but did not let on what India was contemplating by way of a response to the terror attack.

India’s security analysts had been pointing out that the Jaish had become the preferred ‘sword arm’ of the army, instead of the LeT, in the years following the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The degree of damage that the Pulwama operation had inflicted was unexpected for the Pakistan Army. An assessment I heard was that Bajwa may not have known about the specific operation, but it could have been cleared by the DG ISI.

India’s army chief General Bipin Rawat told me that the retaliatory attack that India was planning would be much bigger than the surgical strikes of 2016 and it was coming soon enough. I decided not to share this information in the other part of South Block, thinking it best that the diplomatic planning went ahead without specific knowledge of ‘kinetic’ operations. Rawat agreed with the assessment that his Pakistani counterpart, Bajwa, was broadly interested in peace with India, but often let the ISI set the broad directions of policy. He felt that the Pakistani corps commanders were not too happy with the Bajwa doctrine, since it seemed to be diluting traditional postures and that affected morale.

In Kashmir, a crackdown had begun on local terrorists. More than eighty ‘overground supporters’ of the Jaish had been arrested. Home Minister Rajnath Singh had travelled to Jammu and Kashmir. The protocols of road movements of security personnel were being looked at very carefully. The investigation of the Pulwama terror case had been handed over to the National Investigation Agency (NIA). Dossiers were under preparation on Adil Dhar and on Kamran (an alias for Abdul Rasheed Ghazi, the Pakistani national believed to be the mastermind behind the Pulwama attack; Ghazi was killed in an army operation on 18 February 2019) and the idea was to share these with the MEA for onward transmission to friendly countries looking for evidence. On the political side, an all-party meeting had been called and had passed a resolution.

India’s diplomatic outreach had intensified. The P4 (P5 minus China) led by France was approaching the UN sanctions committee once again for the listing of Azhar.7 India was in touch with the fifteen members of the ‘terror sanctions committee’ which happened to be composed of the f ifteen UNSC members. Pakistan’s global credibility was falling again.

India was also revisiting the proposed CCIT, the UN’s deadlocked Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism, to see if its diplomacy could move the needle on that ponderous process that remained deadlocked because of its inability to settle on a common definition of terrorism. The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) ordinance was also discussed to give it teeth for sanctions against individuals and particularly their travel and asset freezes.

But neither the bilateral nor global diplomatic measures would be enough. The matter had gone beyond the pale of diplomacy, of words. It was time for action. A cost had to be imposed on the Pakistan establishment for allowing the Pulwama attack. It was increasingly clear that India had rolled out measures that were only a faint expression of its outrage at the death of forty soldiers. Much more needed to be done to give a direct message to the terrorists and to the Pakistan Army. Also, the world was sharing India’s outrage at this fresh act of terrorism and would support India for any legitimate and proportionate response.

The next CCS member I briefed was Finance Minister Arun Jaitley— whose health was slipping, but whose mind remained sharp. In my long chat with the minister I knew well from earlier times, Jaitley asked why Imran Khan the cricketer was unable to deliver better and prevent this madness from continuing. He agreed with me that my presence in Pakistan would be useful in adding persuasion to everything else we were doing for Pakistan to change its behaviour. I called on Home Minister Rajnath Singh right after his visit to Kashmir. He shared his assessment of a security establishment angered by yet another act of terror. We discussed a long term approach to persuade Pakistan to change its behaviour.

The last of the CCS members I caught up with, on 25 February, was EAM Sushma Swaraj. I briefed her on developments within Pakistan and on my conversations with the prime minister, the NSA, and her other CCS colleagues, on the palpable anger in the security establishment. We discussed the long press conference of the ISPR, which revealed the mind of Pakistan’s military.

On 22 February, DG ISPR Ghafoor had given a rambling, somewhat comical press conference, brazenly recrafting history as he went along. He blamed India for imposing wars on Pakistan in 1948, 1965, and 1971; and for capturing territory in 1984. He had skipped any reference to the 1999 Kargil conflict but argued that all terror incidents—Mumbai, Pathankot, Pulwama—had been staged by India to distract attention from Pakistan’s growth. Pakistan, he insisted, was not isolated. He ended on a high note of military bluster: ‘We will never be surprised by you…we will dominate the escalation ladder…don’t mess with Pakistan…we can respond to a full-spectrum threat.’

I also reminded EAM Swaraj of the presence of a high-profile Pakistani citizen in India: this was Ramesh Vankwani, a Hindu member of parliament and rights activist from Pakistan, who was positioning himself as a possible mediator in India–Pakistan affairs. Vankwani had arrived as part of India’s global ‘Kumbh diplomacy’ for the Prayagraj ardh Kumbh9, that was on from mid-January to early March, with some 50 million people converging on the banks of the Ganga for the ‘world’s largest peaceful gathering’. India had invited representatives from some 188 countries, including Pakistan, which had nominated the genial politician from Sindh, who had posed for pictures with PM Modi and EAM Swaraj in the midst of the bilateral tensions. Vankwani was among the guests the PM had addressed at the Kumbh global participation event on 23 February, where Modi spoke of the ‘Kumbh of democracy’ that was about to start—the forthcoming general election in India.

I repeated to the external affairs minister two broad assessments I had shared with the political leadership. The first was that India’s diplomatic options in dealing with a terrorist attack of this nature were limited. The second, that while our diplomatic strategy to expose Pakistan’s connection with this terrorist act had been successful, Pakistan would not be globally ‘isolated’ but must be globally identified as a perpetrator of unacceptable levels of terrorism. She gave me the impression that some tough action was round the corner, after which, I should expect the role of diplomacy to expand. I would need to return to Pakistan to resume conversations at that end.

Meanwhile, Pakistan, under strong global pressure, was showing frenetic activity in Punjab, particulary in Bahawalpur, where the government was pointedly taking over madrasas and facilities of the Jaish.

India’s strong diplomatic offensive was continuing on 25 February, ten days after Pulwama. On the agenda was the designation of Masood Azhar as a terrorist by the UN sanctions committee and in the EU ‘autonomous terror list’. The first to receive the Pulwama dossier was the French ambassador, in recognition of France’s strong support. India was requesting the listing at the UN, based on the evidence in the dossier. The NSA had already spoken to his French counterpart. The EU ambassador was called in for discussions on the procedure for the listing of Azhar as a terrorist and similarly designating select individuals and entities. Members of the FATF were being sensitized, given that the body now had more teeth to put Pakistan on grey and black lists to ensure compliance. I had managed to persuade my colleagues to share this dossier, as an experiment, with Pakistan as well, to test the resolve of ‘Naya Pakistan’ in tackling the snakes in its backyard.

AIR STRIKES

I woke up early in Delhi on 26 February, to social media chatter about bombs being dropped by India in Pakistan. One of my colleagues in Islamabad had picked up a tweet by the DG ISPR at 5.35 a.m. that said that an Indian fighter plane had dropped a bomb after entering Pakistani airspace.

It was going to be a long day.

I followed the action on Twitter, and the speculation on our media channels, before making it to South Block for our morning crisis meeting. The meeting was called off, so I sat with the foreign secretary in his corner room as he prepared for the cabinet meeting at 9.30 a.m.

The public speculation mounted. The cabinet meeting dragged on as the stories on national and international media got wilder. We were finally told that the foreign secretary would make a statement. He read it out to the media at 11.30 a.m, some six hours after the news first broke, giving enough time for multiple fanciful narratives to float into the public realm.

In an intelligence-led operation in the early hours of today, India struck the biggest training camp of JeM in Balakot. In this operation, a very large number of JeM terrorists, trainers, senior commanders and groups of jihadis who were being trained for fidayeen action were eliminated…this non-military pre-emptive action was specifically targeted at the JeM camp…We expect that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment and takes follow up actions to dismantle all JeM and other camps and hold the terrorists accountable for the actions.

Pakistan’s denial came quickly. It ‘strongly rejected’ India’s claim of targeting a terrorist camp even as it vowed to respond at a time and place of its choosing to this ‘uncalled for aggression’. The significance of the operation that morning was not lost on Pakistan. While Pakistan’s army had flatly denied that any surgical strikes had taken place in 2016, the air strikes of 2019 were not deniable. The Pakistan Air Force was embarrassed that it could not even scramble an air defence against the Indian warplanes that had intruded deep into Pakistan’s territory, and struck 50 kilometres from the LoC in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, not far from Abbottabad where the al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was killed by US airborne forces. This was the first time since 1971 that Indian fighter aircraft had crossed over the international border to drop bombs. The panic was rising. At a special meeting of the National Security Committee, PM Imran Khan asked the armed forces and the people of Pakistan to remain ‘prepared for all eventualities’.

Reports later confirmed that twelve French-made Mirages of the Indian Air Force took off from multiple air bases, crossed over into Pakistani air space, and carried out the attacks. At around 3.30 a.m., the aircraft dropped five ‘Spice 2000’ bombs, out of which four penetrated the rooftops of the building in which more than 300 terrorists were housed. The IAF jets returned to their bases unchallenged, spending all of four minutes in Pakistani airspace. Later in the day, I met with the new DGMO in South Block for a pre-scheduled appointment. He was one of the handful of people in the know of the operation at Balakot. He was also the designated point for ‘mil-mil’ army-level coordination and for working the hotline between the two armies established in 2003. He or his deputy, the DMO, a brigadier, would have a chat every Tuesday with their Pakistani counterpart. We discussed the significance of the operation. He pointed out that the coordination between the DGMOs would continue; a call was scheduled later that night, since 26 February happened to be a Tuesday.

The strikes also unleashed frenetic political and diplomatic activity in both countries. An all-party meeting was called by the government to share details of the morning’s operation. EAM Sushma Swaraj called me later that afternoon to ask about the morale of our team in Islamabad.

‘How’s the josh?’

‘High, ma’am!’

This was a nod to the movie Uri: The Surgical Strike, a slick thriller based on the events following the Uri terror attack of 2016. In a comical twist, Swaraj had been under the impression that I was already back in Islamabad. I was, in fact, still in Delhi, but in constant touch with our team in Islamabad. Her office called back to ask me to join her team for an all-party meeting scheduled that evening. The meeting, chaired by Swaraj and attended by the home and finance ministers, was a follow-up to another such meeting that Home Minister Rajnath Singh had chaired on 16 February to brief all political parties on the Pulwama attack.

The EAM told the political party leaders that the morning operation was a pre-emptive move in the context of what had happened in Pulwama on 14 February. On the global diplomatic effort, the EAM revealed that she had been in touch with US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, apart from her counterparts from Afghanistan, Singapore, as also Russia and China, during the week.

The EAM asked me to respond to a question from an Opposition leader on how Pakistan could be expected to react to the air strike. I described the goings-on in Pakistan during the day and the meeting of the nuclear command authority. This was signalling by Pakistan, but the nuclear sabre-rattling was only a distraction. I said it was hard to predict how soon a ‘response’ would come but it would inevitably come, to give the army and the people of Pakistan a notion of a ‘fitting response’, if not of victory.

In Pakistan, the mood was of anger giving way to panic. It was comparable in many ways to the situation after India had exploded the nuclear device in May 1998. To most serious observers, it was a question of when, and not if, Pakistan would retaliate, to give its army and its people a notion of victory—this had been of great importance to Pakistan through various skirmishes and battles with India. The DG ISPR had pointedly mentioned in his press conference that Pakistan would escalate the conflict and ‘surprise’ India. The meeting of Pakistan’s nuclear command authority and the nuclear sabre-rattling was not lost in the din, even though Ghafoor repeated that to even talk of nuclear weapons was ‘insane’. It was the same old attempt to demonstrate that the nuclear threshold was lower than it actually was.

In Islamabad, India received another démarche from Pakistan’s acting foreign secretary, alleging that India had violated Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Pakistan was also asking for ‘actionable intelligence’ from India on the Pulwama attack and on the alleged involvement of Pakistani nationals. No terrorist camps existed, they insisted, at the location that was attacked by the Indian Air Force. No further violation of Pakistan’s territory would be tolerated. The peace process had been jeopardized by India. The Pakistan propaganda machine went a step further to allege that India’s actions were part of electioneering by the current government and Pakistan was being dragged in for electoral gains.

Bilaterally, India reiterated the need to take credible and urgent action against the JeM and asked Pakistan to avoid ceasefire violations in the spirit of the 2003 agreement. India said that the meeting of the nuclear command authority in Pakistan was an act of provocation, not behaviour expected of a country that claimed to be a responsible nuclear power. India asked for additional armed guards for its high commission in Pakistan. Staff was asked to remain in the bubble of the diplomatic conclave.

On the morning of Wednesday, 27 February, I joined a defence–foreign office coordination meeting between the DGMO and the foreign secretary, reviewing the reaction from Pakistan on the border after the Balakot air strikes. It was clear that Pakistan’s ‘precautionary deployment’ posture before the Balakot air strikes had moved by the evening of Tuesday, 26 February, to an aggressive one on the Line of Control. Pakistan was firing along the LoC south of the Pir Panjal range and the Indian side was watching their behaviour in a defensive posture. At around 5 a.m., on Wednesday, 27 February, Pakistan had escalated artillery fire across the border at the Uri sector of the LoC. It was soon obvious that the border f ire was only a diversion.

At around 9.30 a.m., on 27 February, five Pakistani aircraft, of a ‘package’ of twenty-four, crossed over to a depth of around 4 kilometres across the LoC, through the Nowshera and Poonch sectors. They dropped their munitions near military targets (Krishna Ghati, Hamirpur, Gambhir, and at the Narayan ammunition dump). They also tried to mount an incursion into Rajasthan, around Anupgarh, possibly a decoy, but the Indian Air Force scrambled warplanes in pursuit and the Pakistan Air Force did no damage.

Early reports suggested that India had lost an aircraft in the melee and so had Pakistan. India’s official statement finally came around 3.15 p.m., after the Indian Air Force had done a proper stocktaking exercise. It revealed that some twenty-four Pakistani aircraft had come in, were engaged by Indian aircraft, including a MiG-21 bison, which had targeted a Pakistani F-16, but was itself hit in the operation. India was confirming that the Pakistan Air Force had violated the LoC and entered Indian airspace. While Pakistani airspace had been shut since the Balakot air strikes, India shut its airspace for several hours after the air skirmish, but reopened it later in the day, signalling an end to air hostilities.

The fog of war was made denser by multiple ‘expert’ comments and visuals on social media. A host of claims, denials, and allegations flew thick and fast. Eyewitnesses on the ground and Pakistan’s military spokesman initially claimed that two planes had been shot down and three pilots were spotted descending with parachutes. By some accounts, a Pakistani pilot downed in his own territory was fatally wounded by locals mistaking him for an Indian pilot. Pakistan stoutly denied the claim that any US supplied F-16 aircraft were used in the operation, much less downed. Indian officials rejected Pakistani claims of shooting down a Russia-made Su-30MKI. But there was no denying the significance of India’s strategic paradigm shift—of using hard power for pre-emptive or punitive strikes against terrorists sheltered by Pakistan.

ABHINANDAN

Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman flew the MiG-21 bison that was part of the air defence sortie scrambled to intercept Pakistani aircraft on the morning of 27 February. In the ensuing aerial dogfight, his aircraft was struck by a missile and crashed, but Varthaman safely ejected, to descend into a village in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, some 7 kilometres from the LoC. Varthaman was initially captured and assaulted by locals before army soldiers took him into custody. Soon, Varthaman became for the Indian public both a symbol of heroism—having engaged an enemy aircraft—and the human cost of the skirmish. He also became the lightning rod for the diplomatic action of the next few days and its primary focus.

India’s demands for Pakistan were clear. Pakistan had retaliated against India’s pre-emptive counterterrorism action. It had responded by attacking military targets. It had captured an Indian pilot and violated the Geneva Conventions. India would expect the pilot not to come to any harm. Pakistan should exercise restraint and responsibility; any provocation along the LoC would not be tolerated.

India had activated multiple diplomatic channels to deal with the crisis. Pakistan on its part was trying to drag the matter to the UN, as an issue that threatened regional peace and stability. Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale in Delhi had emphasized to the US and UK that any attempt by Pakistan to escalate the situation further or to cause harm to Varthaman would lead to an escalation by India; raising this issue at the UNSC instead of resolving the issue of terror could also lead to an escalated response from India. Other channels were in play to send similar messages to countries with influence over Pakistan, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

The US ambassador to India, Ken Juster, and UK envoy, Dominic Asquith, worked with their counterparts in Islamabad, Paul Jones, and Tom Drew, to impress upon Pakistani interlocutors that India was serious. Frenetic diplomatic action was unfolding in Pakistan. India’s hard messages were being conveyed both in the diplomatic bubble of Islamabad and at general headquarters, Rawalpindi. The diplomats of the P5 in particular had been called in by the foreign office ‘thrice in rapid succession’ after 26 February, most of the time separately. To the diplomats, Pakistan appeared genuinely spooked by the prospects of an escalation in the conflict. At the same time, Pakistani officials, as also ISI officers, were insisting that they had no direct role in the Pulwama attack. It had been claimed by the JeM, which was based in Pakistan, but had no connection with the army or with Bajwa personally.

Pakistan’s public and private talking points included the default position that the Pulwama attacker was a local Kashmiri, the video of the JeM owning responsibility was suspect, the weapons shown in the video were not Pakistani, and that the flag displayed in the video did not belong to the JeM. There was ‘considerable pushback’ by the US, UK, and France to the Pakistani narrative, in their discussions with the DG ISI Asim Munir and Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua. They pointed out to Pakistan that its narrative was weak. One, the JeM had already undeniably claimed responsibility for Pulwama. Two, the Jaish chief Masood Azhar was undeniably in Pakistani territory. Three, the video of the claim may have been edited, but did not suggest the Jaish did not claim the attack. Four, the markings on the weapons did not matter, since any sort of weapons could be bought, even within the arms markets of Pakistan. Five, the flag of Jaish may not be the original one but could have belonged to some splinter group.

The Western diplomats were pointing out in private conversations that the connection between Pakistan and the terror attack was obvious. Pakistan also tried to make the argument that this may have been a ‘false f lag operation’ connected to Indian elections. The British high commissioner and the US ambassador both advised their interlocutors to not even go down that route. This was a familiar denial practised by Pakistan through this century, whether it was for 9/11 or Mumbai or Pathankot or Uri, and was no longer credible.

At 4 p.m. on 27 February, the day after India’s air strikes at Balakot, the US, UK, and French ambassadors were closeted at the US embassy in Islamabad to discuss the crisis. During their consultations, their offices called to say that the foreign office was requesting them to show up for yet another meeting with the Pakistan foreign secretary at 5 p.m. While the conference was in progress, and they were discussing India’s asks, Foreign Secretary Janjua paused the conversation at 5.45 p.m. to read out a message she had just received from the army, saying that nine missiles from India had been pointed towards Pakistan, to be launched any time that day. Also, India’s navy had taken on an aggressive, threatening posture. The foreign secretary requested the envoys to report this intelligence to their capitals and ask India not to escalate the situation. The diplomats promptly reported these developments, leading to a flurry of diplomatic activity in Islamabad, P5 capitals, and in New Delhi that night. One of them recommended to her that Pakistan should convey its concerns directly to India. (A P5 diplomat later reconstructed these events for my benefit.)

Later in the evening, the DG for South Asia, Mohammad Faisal, summoned India’s acting high commissioner, Ahluwalia, for a démarche. After condemning the ‘unprovoked ceasefire violations by the Indian occupation forces along the Line of Control’ a ruffled Faisal said that Pakistan had credible information on nine missiles India had prepared to launch into Pakistani territory. India was asked to desist, since this was an unprecedented act of aggression and an action tantamount to open war. While Pakistan’s media reported the démarche on ceasefire violations by India, the story of the potential missile launch was held back that night but released in a background briefing by ISPR on 4 March, with some embellishments. Several media reports appeared in March, detailing the conversations around the missiles between India and Pakistan and through global interlocutors.

At around midnight I got a call in Delhi from Pakistani high commissioner Sohail Mahmood, now in Islamabad, who said that PM Imran Khan was keen to talk to Prime Minister Modi. I checked upstairs and responded that our prime minister was not available at this hour but in case Imran Khan had any urgent message to convey he could, of course, convey it to me. I got no call back that night.

The US and UK envoys in Delhi got back overnight to India’s foreign secretary to claim that Pakistan was now ready to de-escalate the situation, to act on India’s dossier, and to seriously address the issue of terrorism. Pakistan’s PM would himself make these announcements and the pilot would be returned to India the next day. India’s coercive diplomacy had been effective, India’s expectations of Pakistan and of the world had been clear, backed by a credible resolve to escalate the crisis. Prime Minister Modi would later say in a campaign speech that, ‘Fortunately, Pakistan announced that the pilot would be sent back to India. Else, it would have been qatal ki raat, a night of bloodshed.’

The US secretary of state Mike Pompeo later made a dramatic claim in his memoirs that ‘the Indian minister’ had told him that Pakistan might escalate the conflict into a nuclear one. He wrote he was awakened to speak with his Indian counterpart who ‘believed the Pakistanis had begun to prepare their nuclear weapons for a strike.’ He said the Indian side informed him that New Delhi ‘was contemplating its own escalation.’ After the call, Pompeo and NSA John Bolton contacted the Pakistani side. ‘I reached the actual leader of Pakistan, General [Qamar] Bajwa, with whom I had engaged many times. I told him what the Indians had told me. He said it wasn’t true…he [Bajwa] believed the Indians were preparing their nuclear weapons for deployment. It took us a few hours—and remarkably good work by our teams on the ground in New Delhi and Islamabad—to convince each side that the other was not preparing for nuclear war.’15 But Pompeo seemed to have overstated the case, both of fears of escalation of the conflict and of the US role in defusing it.

In Pakistan, the Indian threat of action was taken seriously. Foreign Minister Qureshi spoke at a closed-door session of parliament to explain Pakistan’s decision to release the Indian pilot. A Pakistani MP later revealed in parliament: ‘In the case of Abhinandan, I remember Shah Mahmood Qureshi was in that meeting which the prime minister [Imran Khan] refused to attend and the chief of army staff joined us—his [Qureshi’s] legs were shaking and there was sweat on his brow.’

Imran Khan’s promised ‘peace speech’ started hesitatingly. The address in Pakistan’s parliament was telecast live in India on the afternoon of 28 February. Khan apparently spoke extempore, as Foreign Secretary Gokhale and I sat in front of a TV in his chamber, making notes. Khan referred to the ‘tragedy of Pulwama’ and said that Pakistan was ready to investigate this incident. He did assure the world that the soil of Pakistan would not be used by terrorists to launch an attack against any other country. This promise checked a box, but it was a familiar refrain that had been sung, also under pressure, by Musharraf in 2002. Khan also said that Pakistan was ready for dialogue. Pakistan, he complained, had received the Pulwama dossier only after India had taken action in Balakot. Instead, India should have given the dossier first and waited for Pakistan to take action before attacking.

Pakistan had shown restraint, Khan insisted. When India’s planes attacked Pakistan at 3.30 a.m., the Pakistan leadership waited to assess the damage and then decided to attack India, which they did successfully, without causing any damage. Khan said he had tried to call Modi on the night of 27 February in the interest of peace, ‘not out of weakness’. Foreign Minister Qureshi had also tried to call his counterpart to discuss the issue. Khan ended with a flourish. Pakistan, he said, did not want to share the fate of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal, who capitulated before the British, but its hero was Tipu Sultan, who defied them till the death. His message to the Indian PM was that India should not force Pakistan into war. Pakistan would then be forced to respond to Indian missiles and the situation could escalate to dangerous levels.

As Imran Khan sat down in parliament, Gokhale and I looked at each other in disappointment. Pakistan’s prime minister had said nothing about the pilot, or about specific action against Jaish terrorists. Before we could start making calls to confer on this speech, we got the breaking news that Khan had said that he would return Abhinandan Varthaman, the IAF pilot, as a peace gesture. Khan had in fact resumed his speech after sitting down when he was prompted to deliver a part of his speech that he had forgotten—that the pilot would be released as a ‘peace gesture’. I later learnt from a source in Islamabad that the army brass had been exasperated that day because Khan had forgotten his lines and spoken extempore on this crucial issue. He had to be nudged by Qureshi into making the key announcement.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Qureshi said publicly that Pakistan was ready to talk about terrorism and was prepared to examine India’s dossier.

He told CNN and BBC that the JeM head Masood Azhar was in Pakistan but very sick. This fact, well known to India and shared with the world, had to be roundly denied by the military spokesman soon after, because of the official Pakistani line that (just as in the case of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden) Pakistan had no clue where the Jaish chief was.

But India was not assuming the situation had been completely defused until Abhinandan Varthaman actually returned home. On 1 March, India’s Cabinet Committee on Security met again, to make public some firm decisions. India’s approach was focused—press for the return of the pilot, continue the pressure on Pakistan on dismantling the terror network, and work on the listing of Masood Azhar as a terrorist by the Security Council before mid-March.

We got working on the modalities of the return of Varthaman the next day. We decided to ask Pakistan not to make a media spectacle of the return of the pilot. We said that he could be returned through the international Red Cross like other pilots before him, most recently Flight Lieutenant Nachiketa, who was downed, as we saw, during the Kargil operations in 1999 and repatriated after eight days in Pakistani custody. Varthaman would need to be returned following prisoner of war protocol. We were willing to send an Indian Air Force aircraft to pick him up but Pakistan refused permission; the optics of an Indian Air Force plane landing in Islamabad after all that had happened over the previous three days, was, of course, not acceptable to Pakistan.

Pakistan agreed to hand over Varthaman at Wagah between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. on 1 March. We activated a team in Islamabad, led by the air attaché, Group Captain Joy Kurien, to go to Wagah to pick up the pilot who, we heard, would be transported from Islamabad to Lahore. For Kurien, who had been stationed in Islamabad for three years and was about to return to India, it was a special joy for his last official task to be one to escort his colleague from Pakistan to India.

India decided to call off the border ceremony at Wagah on that day and said that the prisoner should be returned in compliance with Geneva Conventions. A representative of the Indian Air Force would receive the wing commander according to protocol norms. India issued a statement expressing satisfaction that a worthy son of India was returning.

I was continuously on the phone with colleagues in Islamabad monitoring Varthaman’s release, as was the entire Indian media. We had word that the pilot had been taken to Lahore. I told Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman when she called me that the ISI was possibly making multiple propoganda videos in some Lahore studio starring the Indian pilot, and would release Varthaman before the day was over. But only when they had the perfect take. As it turned out, the pilot was finally produced at Wagah at around 9 p.m. and was handed over to the Indian side.

Our overall approach had been to go by standard global protocols on these matters and to avoid a media circus. But the public narrative had been frenzied on Pulwama, Balakot, and Varthaman. What was missing was a deeper analysis of Indo–Pak relations and India’s shifting security paradigms. Pakistan maintained the line that it had returned the pilot ‘as a goodwill gesture aimed at de-escalating rising tensions with India.’ The IAF simply said it was ‘happy to have Abhinandan back’.

REVIVING DIPLOMACY

The events of February had moved rapidly, with many operational details still blurred; commentators were asking penetrating questions and demanding answers. Why was the government not producing evidence of those killed in the Balakot operation? If India had intelligence inputs about the Balakot terror camps preparing terrorists to be let loose on India for attacks, why did it not have such inputs for Pulwama? A media article18 had suggested that only seven people knew about the Balakot operation— the PM, NSA, the IB and R&AW chiefs, and the three service chiefs: was this true? Did international pressure work and did global powers play middlemen to mediate for the release of the wing commander? In an election season, the questions had to be credibly answered, even if they were not particularly relevant to the big picture.

In internal meetings in South Block, a senior security official pointed out that the objective of the mission was to destroy terrorists, not to photograph them. The army chief pointed out that India had not released details of operations even when forces had crossed the LoC for the surgical strikes. Details could be sensitive, they could at times compromise sources or operations or tactics. Yet, some strategic communication was essential. India’s military and diplomatic strategy had worked in concert to deal with a national crisis; the defence establishment would gradually share what it could in the media.

The diplomacy of the time had necessarily to be more transparent since multiple countries were involved. Multiple global partners had played their roles, and India had seen strong global sympathy for and in alignment with its positions. Several countries had offered to send special envoys over to the subcontinent but this was no longer necessary. Even China, not to be left behind, had suggested that it could send its deputy minister to both countries to seek de-escalation. India had politely declined the offer.

The action now shifted to the UN. India continued making demarches to the fifteen UN Security Council members, including the ten non-permanent members, all of them in the terror sanctions committee. They all held a persuasive Pulwama dossier in their hands. The case was clear. India had only conducted a counterterrorism strike on non-military terrorist targets; Pakistan had escalated this situation twenty-four hours later; Pakistan was now peddling news of ‘credible intelligence’ about India’s escalation even before it had taken place; this was a counter-terrorism issue and not a ‘peace and security’ issue which needed to be debated at the UN; and the listing of Masood Azhar as a terrorist was the issue the Security Council should be focusing on.

Bilaterally with Pakistan, India was underlining expectations of immediate credible and verifiable action to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and to deal with terrorists. India had not closed its channels of communication. The DGMOs hotline was open and so were the high commissions in India and Pakistan. In media briefings, Foreign Secretary Gokhale was also pointing out that Pakistan had issued a notice to airmen, ‘NOTAM’ closing its airspace, while India had quickly opened its airspace to normalize the situation.

With the dust settling on Pulwama, Balakot, and with the return of Varthaman, the political temperature had come down in India. By 5 March, we seemed to be getting into the de-escalation phase. The CCS felt that it would be in India’s best interest to have its high commissioner back in Pakistan, a nod to moving to the next phase of diplomacy. I reached Islamabad via Dubai on 10 March, twenty-two days after I left in the wake of Pulwama. India was willing to give old-fashioned diplomacy another chance.

India had signalled to Pakistan through its acting high commissioner that I would be back in Islamabad that weekend. Pakistan responded by sending its own high commissioner back to Delhi. At that point, Sohail Mahmood was already the front runner to take over as the Pakistani foreign secretary, since Tehmina Janjua was to retire the next month. His interaction with the Pakistani leadership through the Pulwama and Balakot crisis had apparently strengthened his candidature, as also his credentials as a quiet and competent diplomat with the most recent experience in handling the key India relationship.

The media interpreted the coordinated return of the diplomats as evidence of a thaw in diplomatic relations between the two countries. The most serious military exchange between the countries since Kargil had thus run its course in less than a month from a Pakistani proxy attack, to a military response from India, a counter from Pakistan, and an Indian diplomatic move to press Pakistan for credible action against terrorism. This, with India having achieved a strategic and military objective and Pakistan having claimed a notion of victory for its domestic audience.

What this episode, from Pulwama to my return to Islamabad, told me was that the recovery time from an India–Pakistan crisis, triggered by terrorism, could be as short as three weeks as long as escalatory steps were accompanied by a de-escalation impulse on both sides. We had seen the f irst attack by Indian aircraft across the international border since 1971.

We had seen Pakistan’s response. We had seen a move towards normalizing ties even if no peace conference or peace pact had followed this exchange to give the matter closure.

In terms of the ‘escalation dynamics’ of the conflict (as determined by a theoretical conflict escalation ladder favoured by some nuclear experts19), the first rung of the escalation ladder was Pulwama, a terrorist action whether state-sponsored or otherwise. Only as a response to such action did the situation escalate to the next rung of the ladder with India’s air strikes, still a military operation in the sub-conventional space. A response to Pakistan’s action after Balakot by India could have led to a further escalation, experts argued, that could lead the countries over the conventional threshold. While Pakistan tried to speak of false-flag operations, it was trying to create insurance policies: to question global diplomatic acquiescence in India’s response to the first-rung terrorist attack, which, in the case of Balakot, did not invite any international censure.

My mandate in Pakistan in March 2019 was to meet diplomatic and other interlocutors to explain India’s post-Balakot posture and expectations for the future. I was still not to seek meetings with either Khan or Qureshi or Bajwa, to avoid these being mischaracterized as a formally resumed dialogue. But I was free to hold quiet chats with other players.

Hectic diplomacy followed over the next few days. India had signalled the intention to seal the Kartarpur agreement and Pakistan was all set to send its team to India in mid-March for talks. I had been recommending that the conversation take place as an official and technical discussion, away from the spotlight of the capital, at newly renovated facilities at Attari on the border, to signal a desire to do business without indicating any deeper political reconciliation for the moment. This is eventually what we did when the Pakistan team arrived in India for joint secretary-level talks at Attari on 1 April.

More privately, Pakistan was beginning to signal a serious intention to address the core issue of terrorism, rather than repeating its line about the centrality of the Kashmir issue. Both countries had therefore run the course of military actions for the moment, even though the sporadic firing at the LoC continued at its own momentum. India was willing to move towards a phase of diplomatic normality with a focus on a conversation on terrorism. Pakistan seemed willing to play ball.

THE PULWAMA DOSSIER

The Pulwama dossier was a unique document. It enhanced the credibility of India’s claim of Pakistan’s role in the attack. While the full National Investigation Agency (NIA) charge sheet would take eighteen painstaking months to construct and present to the courts20, the early evidence was clear. Forty people had been killed in an explosive attack, the Jaish had claimed responsibility, the Jaish leader and headquarters were in Pakistan. A credible narration of these details with the names of Jaish operatives and the last known locations of terror camps was what India had put in the dossier and even shared with Pakistan. The dossier listed some ninety active JeM members. It also gave coordinates of about twenty JeM camps.

A Western envoy close to Pakistan’s army told me on my return to Islamabad that he was optimistic that India’s actions had triggered a rethink by the Pakistan Army. Bajwa now appeared to have been persuaded that the cost to benefit ratio of deploying proxy terror was no longer in Pakistan’s favour. What was even more encouraging was that the civilian and army leadership were still on the same page. In the past, such friction with India had often strained the civil–military equation. We had, for instance, seen Nawaz Sharif’s stock with the army sink after Kargil and after the surgical strikes in Uri on both occasions, the elected PM had lost his job.

One strong external impulse that was playing on Pakistan’s mind was the FATF and its staying hand, which was compelling the country to change its behaviour on terrorism. Pakistan was added to the Paris-based UN body’s inglorious ‘grey list’, and subjected to ‘increased monitoring’ from June 2018 onwards. It had been struggling to shake off this intense global scrutiny of its state support to militant groups; the post-Pulwama global spotlight was not helping, particularly since FATF conditionalities were f inding their way into the IMF economic rescue package it was negotiating. The Pulwama dossier that India had shared widely was also something of a game changer, since India had so openly shared evidence with Pakistan and the world. Moreover, Pakistan was actually claiming to be acting on it, not, as in the past, dismissing it offhand. Bajwa was telling Western diplomats that the hard action against the ‘Barelvi’ extremist political formation, TLP (Tehreek-e-Labaik, known for its violent street protests against changes to the blasphemy law) showed that if an organization acted against the national interest, then Pakistan would push back. The same would be the case with Jaish. What Pakistan needed was support on the FATF front.

A theory that soon emerged in Islamabad was that some 190 people from ‘proscribed organizations’ that Pakistan claimed to have arrested in March were militants killed in the Balakot action; Pakistan was trying to account for them in some way. The arrests on 7 and 21 March were simply reported with no documentation or videos, and the numbers seemed to match those quoted by an Italian journalist Francesca Marino who filed a story on 8 March claiming that 170 terrorists died in India’s air strikes.

On the Indian side, a colleague from one of the agencies expressed some cynicism to me about sharing details with Pakistan; each time a dossier was passed on to Pakistan, it used it as briefing material for its ISI handlers to explain to the terrorists what not to do in the future. This was spoken only half in jest.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan Army was telling some Western confidants that this was another ‘APS moment’ for the army in dealing with non-state actors, referring to the killing of 145 children in the Army Public School of Peshawar back in 2015 that had traumatized the army. This was an opportunity for Bajwa’s army to reclaim the ‘monopoly of force’ with the state and to disarm the terrorists, even the Kashmir-focused ones like JeM believed to be ‘good’, as distinct from the ‘bad’ Pakistan-targeting TTP. The situation paralleled the ‘good Taliban, bad Taliban’ debate of the early 2000s, a constant gripe of Pakistan’s partners in the global war on terror initiated in 2001.

A key issue was the mainstreaming and disarming of radical groups. The Pakistan Army was engaging with the UK and quoting the Irish example of mainstreaming militants. The UK was explaining that the analogy was not necessarily close, since a disarming and deradicalizing process was essential before mainstreaming could begin. Some Pakistani commentators were pointing to the Saudi model of deradicalization: to arrest the militants, re-train them, ‘explain’ to them that the monopoly on violence lay with the state and then release them into society. But the Pakistan case was different—state structures had created armed militant groups and trained them for ‘jihad’. It was not easy to undo this mess.

On his part, Bajwa was claiming that the push against terror was serious. The army was citing multiple data points: the arrest of 154 Jaish militants, which meant the top leadership of Jaish and also of LeT ‘reincarnates’— Jamat ul dawa (JUD) and Falah-e Insaniyat Foundation (FIF); there was a new ‘top-down’ impetus against some groups, with Khan and Bajwa firmly on the ‘same page’ on this issue. The JUD had been forced to mainstream its ‘ambulance service’, thus separating the charity arm from the militant wing of the organization. The Pakistan Army was now working closely with the Interior Ministry to work on this issue of deradicalization, implying a strong civil–military consensus on the moves.

Bajwa explained to various interlocutors the difficulties of dismantling organizations like JeM. He argued that small and incremental steps needed to be taken. The radicalization had been taking place over the previous thirty years. So deradicalization would take at least a few months. The militant elements could be dismantled, but how did one take over the charitable parts of militant organizations?

Based on my briefings in Delhi, we embarked on multiple conversations in Islamabad with Pakistani influencers and diplomats. Our counter-terror diplomacy was focused. We did some blunt speaking. There were broadly ten messages that we shared with Pakistani and foreign interlocutors.

One, India’s threshold of tolerance of terrorism had come down. India was now determined to take swift, surgical, and resolute action against the terrorists. India had no quarrel with the people of Pakistan and was not even directly targeting Pakistan’s army. Two, India was encouraged by the reiteration by Prime Minister Imran Khan and Foreign Minister Qureshi in Pakistan’s parliament and to CNN and the BBC that the territory of Pakistan would not be used for any act of terrorism against its neighbours. But we wanted to see these promises translated into action. Three, India was willing to work with Pakistan to ensure there was sustained, credible, and verifiable action against terrorism. We would encourage Pakistan’s government and army to take more than cosmetic action against terrorists to win back India’s confidence and that of the world community. Four, we would ask Pakistan to proscribe Jaish, Lashkar, and Hizbul. The leaders should be locked up, disarmed, banned from travel, and their assets frozen. Five, India was willing to discuss modalities for an informal dialogue with Pakistan on terrorism and ways of tackling it. Six, for the army and civilian leadership, for Bajwa and Khan, I was carrying a clear message that we could use this opportunity to move ahead and tackle what for Pakistan were good terrorists. Seven, we were willing to work on the humanitarian front to build trust. We were willing to work on the exchange of prisoners and on the Kartarpur project which had popular support in India, particularly in Punjab. Eight, India was requesting the support of the global community when it came to tackling the menace of terrorism, since it was clear the kind of danger it was putting the world into. Nine, the world community needed to deploy the FATF to do what it was designed to do—counter the financing of terror and demanding that Pakistan commit clearly to timelines to stop funding terrorist outfits. Ten, we deeply appreciated the role of several partners including the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, who had helped defuse the tension.

Armed with this brief, I started a period of intense diplomacy in Islamabad, talking to people close to Imran Khan and Bajwa while continuing conversations with the foreign office. The talks with the MOFA were more on the ‘humanitarian agenda’ because the foreign office followed a party line of stout denial on terrorism. It had failed to create for itself the space to engage on this issue. On 12 March, I met with Foreign Secretary Janjua for a candid chat on the month gone by. I discussed the dossier we had handed over. Since we were back from the brink, I suggested, we needed to continue the diplomacy. Action on the dossier in Pakistan would be a good confidence-building measure for India. The foreign office was not taking any chances. They continued to deny any role in Pulwama by any agency from Pakistan. But the party line had changed. Pakistan was informing us it was taking action against terror under its own National Action Plan (NAP) of 2014, and not due to any Indian pressure. The imminent Indian election had a part to play in focusing the mind of the Pakistani establishment. I was beginning to perceive more attentive engagement because the Pakistan establishment had by now assessed that I was a spokesman of an Indian government that would return to power with a firmer mandate to deal decisively with Pakistan and terrorism.

The coalescing of multiple factors—India’s focused diplomatic effort after the air strikes, the Pulwama dossier, FATF and global pressure— was having a telling effect on Pakistan. In March 2019, an ordinance amended Pakistan’s antiterrorism act to ban the groups that were already proscribed under the UNSC sanctions, i.e., FIF and JUD, both front outfits of the Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Sayeed’s LeT. Pakistan’s National Counter-Terrorism Authority (NACTA) had earlier put seventy organizations on its watchlist. The ordinance banning them had lapsed in October 2018. The JUD had gone to the Lahore High Court in October 2018 and had succeeded in overturning the ban on its activities. The script seemed familiar—this was the usual pre-FATF meeting illusion of activity. But many in Pakistan were insisting that the army was shifting its approach to terrorism.

Some analysts, like Abdul Basit, Pakistan’s former high commissioner to India, were more critical of the new global narrative, arguing that the Pulwama–Balakot episode had shown that the international community was keener to de-escalate the tension between the two countries rather than focus on the ‘root cause’ of Kashmir. Once again, Pakistan’s echo chamber of readily churned out narratives tried to switch off global voices. But, this time around, not even Pakistan’s loyal friends in the OIC were buying the weakly proffered and oft-repeated hypothesis that the root cause of Kashmir triggered the latest violence. All data was reaffirming the reputation that Pakistan’s deep state had earned for the country—of a terror-exporting nation.

The weekly conversations between the DGMOs were continuing. Pakistan had been told in mid-April that if terrorist infiltration stopped, f iring at the border would stop. The Indian Army had reminded Pakistan’s Army about the mutually agreed moratorium on artillery fire and the use of special forces on the border. The only ongoing official conversation between India and Pakistan, apart from the one we were having at the diplomatic level, was the one between the two militaries. The DGMOs were talking regularly and India had made its substantive position clear. When Pakistan claimed that it was taking action on the western border, India’s suggestion was to take similar action against terrorists and militants on its eastern border. India had pointed out that some forty Indian nationals including of the ‘D company’, who were known terrorists, had been given safe sanctuary on Pakistan’s territory.

Somewhere in mid-April, Pakistan summoned Western diplomats to the foreign office again, alleging imminent Indian attacks against it. Curiously, it even put this episode in the public domain.22 The diplomats were assessing that Pakistan was genuinely spooked and jumpy. It perhaps also saw crying wolf as a means of pre-emption, an insurance policy against an Indian punitive attack. In case of an incident, it would have the advantage of suggesting to the West that South Asia was a dangerous flashpoint. The international community was however not even raising these issues with India, dismissing them as alarmist rhetoric and arguing that India was much too busy with its election to be involved with such gambits.

My interlocutor with the ISI was reporting a more receptive attitude for India’s concerns. The message from DG ISI Asim Munir was clear—Pakistan was working on a project to finish militancy, there would be no more terror incidents in Jammu and Kashmir, there would be no cross-border infiltration. But it was hard to act on the Indian asks in the prevailing climate of inflamed Pakistani public opinion. High-profile actions, like arresting Masood Azhar or Hafiz Sayeed, were therefore ruled out.

The ISI had made a clear assessment that the BJP would return to power in India’s elections. Pakistan would be prepared for a dialogue, to participate in the swearing-in of the new prime minister, and to send Imran Khan for a meeting at the SCO summit in June with India’s new prime minister. The ISI was rejecting for the moment India’s demand to hand over Indian fugitives. This was a big ask and not quite feasible for the moment, when even the listing of Masood Azhar as a terrorist was being blocked.

On JeM chief Azhar, while fourteen of the fifteen sanctions committee member countries of the Security Council were on board to have him listed, the Chinese were the holdout, trying to ‘persuade’ Pakistan to give its consent, in effect giving a veto to Pakistan. From 2009, there had been four attempts to put Azhar on the UN counter-terrorism sanctions list, all of which saw blocks by China, citing ‘lack of evidence’. China had again moved to protect Azhar in October 2016 when it blocked India’s appeal but famously asked Pakistan to get its act in order.23 China also blocked the post-Pulwama moves to get Azhar banned in February and March.

Three permanent UNSC members (P3)—the US, UK, and France—were pressing Pakistan to talk to their Chinese friends to unblock the listing. Pakistan was again overplaying its hand and placing an unreasonable condition to acquiesce in the listing—that there should be no further listing of any individual, especially in relationship to Kashmir, at least for the rest of the year. This was a bizarre demand that the Chinese seemed to be relaying unthinkingly; the rest of the P5 members were shaking their heads in disbelief. How could there be political quotas on the listing of terrorists? Pakistan, some in its media were warning, was ‘testing its friends’.

In the midst of this debate, I had a frank chat with the Chinese ambassador Yao Jing, along with his deputy Zhao Lijian, who later went on to become a ‘wolf warrior’ anti-West spokesman of the Chinese foreign ministry. (Zhao incidentally departed from Pakistan on the same day that I left for Delhi, the end of my abbreviated tenure coinciding with his longer one. To my amusement, he told me at the airport lounge that the Pakistan establishment would miss me.) The Chinese ambassador hinted at frustration at Pakistan’s tall asks of guarantees against any further listing of Pakistan’s citizens. China seemed to be playing for time to deal with this issue but seemed also to be pressing Pakistan to relent. China lifted the technical hold only on 1 May, when Masood Azhar was finally listed as a global terrorist by the UNSC’s al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee. Islamabad tried to play this development as a Pakistani decision, but still kept Azhar hidden from public view.

BAJWA’S CT DOCTRINE

Bajwa, due to end his tenure in November, seemed to be caught, in the summer of 2019, between legacy and extension. He was claiming he would leave at the appointed hour when his term ended in November, but this seemed to be some ‘virtue signalling’. Almost all of Pakistan’s army chiefs have indulged in some ‘political management’ in the months leading up to the end of their first terms and Bajwa was no exception. But Bajwa had also set up some long term goals. He seemed prepared to add to his doctrine an element of having stamped out terrorism from Pakistan.

A new kind of Bajwa doctrine was emerging. By early April, Bajwa’s confidants were claiming a distinctly different tone at the GHQ. The word had got around that the army was trying to create ‘political space’ to deal with the Jaish militants, to avoid a blowback by right-wing forces. Bajwa was arguing that he would take action in a series of sequential steps. The f irst action would be on the Indian dossier. It would be followed by wider arrests of both the LeT and the JeM, more madrasas would be taken over, and the authorities would not let the militants regroup.

Bajwa, we learnt, was speaking the same language within the army, with his senior commanders and at limited conferences. Most Western interlocutors were coming away convinced that the army was beginning to change, at least at the top. Bajwa was openly questioning a forty year-old doctrine that he had seen in play from the time he was a young cadet and which now needed to change because it was not working. He was saying clearly that Pakistan’s assets had become liabilities and the time had come to insist that the use of force should be the monopoly of the state. This point was not being conceded publicly, nor by the foreign office, which tended to be behind the curve and balk at the prospect of any public admission of past errors.

The DG ISI appeared to be taking an even harder line on domestic terrorism compared to Bajwa in his conversations with Western diplomats. DG Munir said that a few misdirected men were threatening the reputation of 200 million Pakistanis by their actions. He said that Pakistan was taking serious action against the militants and it was not facing much resistance, even though militant groups were splintering and merging into other groups.

The ‘good terrorists’ were however still getting a free pass. The ISI was taking a harder line on Kashmir and fudging the issue of whether it would use proxy groups to fuel conflict in Kashmir. It would often justify its actions to diplomats by alleging that India was using its own proxy groups within Pakistan.

Nevertheless, it was unquestionable that Pakistan’s action against terrorist groups was gaining momentum. At the very least, Pakistan’s public and diplomatic proclamations were gaining pace as Pakistan took the trouble to brief all diplomats (except India) repeatedly on the action it was taking against militants. While the official line was that all the action was based upon Pakistan’s own National Action Plan (NAP) against terrorism, more private briefings to Western diplomats were quoting the Indian dossier and saying that Pakistan had detained fifty-six of the fifty-seven individuals listed in that document. Two hundred of the ‘most egregious’ madrasas had been taken over. Pakistan would now try the militants in civilian and military courts to lead up to a process of demobilization and the decommissioning of weapons. This was part of the professed doctrine of retaining monopoly of force with the state. While ‘kinetic action’ would be taken against the JeM, the JUD, and and other militant groups with large charitable wings, would be taken over more gently.

To the British, Pakistan was claiming it was following the Northern Ireland model. Both the British and the Americans had argued that Pakistan was dealing with hardcore terrorists and needed a different approach. The counter from Pakistan was that they were not dealing with five or six terrorists but a hundred thousand and needed a more gradual approach to demobilize them. Pakistan’s army was claiming to confidants that its approach to the militants was marked by much ambiguity, learning from the TLP experience. It was meeting with surprisingly little resistance as it rounded up these militants. A few of the Jaish cadres were splintering and joining up with the Tehreek-i-Taliban Afghanistan (TTA) and TTP.

Pakistan had claimed to have eliminated more than 17,600 terrorists. of the militant organizations in counter-terror operations from 2001 till February 2018, and cleared over 46,000 kilometres of land of terrorists, mainly in the badlands of the former FATA, in numbers publicly announced in February 2018, after Trump’s tweet of 1 January 2018.25 From India’s viewpoint, the real problem was the camps in the heart of Pakistan, in Punjab’s Bahawalpur, and in Balakot, which were providing state protection to the India-directed groups like JeM and LeT.

India was also pressing its global partners to insist on direct action against the JeM and LeT and on punishing the guilty for previous acts of terrorism, like Pathankot 2016, Mumbai 2008, Parliament 2001, and the earlier Mumbai 1993 and 1996 blasts. A prominent Pakistani think tanker relayed the message to me from the army that it was important to mainstream and re-educate the militants. You could not quite jail 300,000 people from the LeT in the same way as Pakistan had managed to deal with the smaller number of the TLP.

Global opinion was supporting India’s position. Ashley Tellis, the US security analyst, prepared a comprehensive assessment of the post Pulwama situation to argue that the focus must continue to be on Pakistan’s terrorism, that India should not fall for Pakistan’s ‘nuclear coercion’ and that the new paradigm of India’s response should be ‘ambiguous’. He saw the US role as positive, with Secretary of State Pompeo having recognized India’s right to self-defence and asked Pakistan to focus its attention on countering terrorism.

A Pakistani acquaintance, close to both the army and the civilian regime, assured me that 1,800 JeM members would be arrested as both Imran Khan and the army were determined to act against the JeM. However, unlike the TLP, the JeM carried arms and they were not easy to wish away or to neutralize. When we argued that the Pakistan Army had the capacity to make the bad guys disappear as they did in the FATA region and with the TLP not long ago, we were told that the JeM was different.

Varying characteristics of the various terrorist organizations, and the need to find an appropriate way of dealing with them, was only one aspect of what Bajwa was dealing with. He was also up against a deeper systemic problem. As Christine Fair has argued, the ethos and the strategic culture of the Pakistan Army favoured ‘persistent revisionism’.27 Pakistan’s own narrative was that India was implacably opposed to its existence and the Pakistan Army was thus obsessed with strategic depth despite all its professions otherwise. The temptation was to keep doing ‘jihad under an expanding nuclear umbrella’, to continue to use non-state actors with an attempt not to cross India’s retaliation threshold.

Yet, two significant new trends accelerated forward on Bajwa’s watch, which required Pakistan to rethink older strategies. The first was that the western border of Pakistan was now more troubled, with the Afghan regime confronting the Taliban and the TTP directly attacking Pakistan’s forces. The second was that on the eastern front the ideological fervour of the ‘Kashmir cause’ had been toned down, with a post-Balakot pause in Pakistani support to militants. This implied a new direction to security policy. It did seem that Pakistan’s army would see the balance of advantage  in pressing the pause button on Kashmir-directed militancy.

A former Pakistan high commissioner, active on the Track II circuit, told me that Pakistan was now willing to talk on all issues with India, including terrorism and trade/business. The Pakistan establishment was perhaps trying to change the narrative on identifying discussions on both terrorism and trade as perfidious Indian attempts to take attention away from the core issue of Kashmir. A signal to the Track II circuit would normally imply that Pakistan would test the waters for having a similar conversation through normal official channels as well. The reality on the ground seemed to substantiate the Pakistani claims that they were making a genuine effort to curb militant activity. The infiltration numbers from Pakistan into India were showing only twenty-three cross-border bids in 2019 compared to 300 in 2018, and 400 in 2017.

In the bigger picture, three decades of terrorism had an important impact on bilateral diplomacy—it increased the political risk for India of high-level engagement with Pakistan. India’s instincts were now to factor in the risk that dialogue with Pakistan may result in an immediate significant terrorist attack by Pakistan-based militants; this had happened to Vajpayee’s Lahore initiative with Kargil and to Modi’s with Pathankot. Also, despite its historical concerns about internationalization of disagreements with Pakistan, India was now not averse to taking the terror issue to global fora like the FATF and the UNSC sanctions committee for the listing of Masood Azhar and others. This was part of a policy of ‘measured flexibility’32, to take forward bilateral disputes to specialized global bodies like the International Court of Justice (for the captured Indian citizen Kulbhushan Jadhav) or the World Bank (for the Indus Waters Treaty), or the ICAO (for airspace closure matters) while sticking to the principle of bilateralism to address the Kashmir issue.

This Article is a book Excerpt from “Anger Management” authored by Ajay Bisaria.