Summary According to a senior source in the Pakistan delegation, Nawaz Sharif is the new hawk of New York
NEW YORK: (Dunya News, Wajahat Saeed Khan) - As war drums (hollow percussion instruments really, not really those serious, leather-topped drums you see in the Sanjay Leela Bhansali movies) sound from India, and South Asia’s tough cookie / pin-striped premier / corporate demi-god / Muslim-basher Narendra Modi hangs back in New Delhi to play an angry Napoleon to General Raheel Sharif’s cool customer Wellington in the wake of Uri, Nawaz Sharif has decided to grow some talons, and use them, too.
So, yes, according to a senior source in the Pakistan delegation, Nawaz Sharif – accused of being soft on India / pals with Modi / back channeling with Delhi – is the new hawk of New York, and he’s reminded John Kerry and Theresa May that back-scratching can get rough.
So far, he’s done bilat after bilat (Monday morning starting with Kerry, ending with the Saudi Crown Prince, featuring an interesting little cameo with New Zealand’s John Key in the middle, but more on that later), but really, he’s here for what Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s hard-talking top gun in New York, has coined as “Mission Kashmir”.
Yes, that sounds like a pretty important special ops gig, but if war is the continuation of politics through other means, then diplomacy can have its own offensives, too. This, in New York, is Pakistan’s moment of truth.
The thing is, Pakistan doesn’t have a lot to sell any more, internationally. It’s already tested its nukes, and then had an AQ Khan moment, so non-proliferation is a tough sell, but the world’s only nuclearized Islamic Republic is getting there. That’s why the Foreign Office is arranging John Key’s huddle with Nawaz Sharif: The Nuclear Suppliers Group membership, which India was trying to coat-tail into on Washington’s finest dinner jacket, has become Pakistan’s only diplomatic victory of late.
Evoking a Chinese veto earlier this year, which left Delhi angry, high and dry, Pakistan is on a mission to work with countries – like New Zealand – that it hasn’t in the past so it can lobby them as partners for its own NSG bid. The plan is simple: get enough friends to make a bloc which says ‘give them both membership, or don’t give anything at all’. This is the whole ‘Na Khaidan Gay Tey Na Khaidan Diyan Gay’ ethic, and it’s based on the ‘strategic balance of power’ in South Asia. The logic? India already has superior conventional military capability. Enhanced Indian access to the global nuclear market will upend the strategic balance, the FO insists, and that will be the end of that little thing we call India and Pakistan’s perpetual cold war and the beginning of something new and scary.
Coming back to Mission Kashmir: Nawaz Sharif has been playing an interesting game since last summer, even before he returned from London. He’s declared Burhan Wani, that young hero from the south of the occupied valley, a martyr. He’s promised to pay for Indian-administered Kashmir’s pellet gun victims’ treatment, anywhere, anytime. He’s stood at a victory rally in Muzaffarabad and pumped his fists and said that “Kashmir will become a part of Pakistan.” He’s even let his Independence Day message be dominated by the ‘blood of Kashmiris’, and perhaps also overreached by announcing a 20-something member parliamentary squad to go and sell Kashmir to the planet, on government expense.
But that’s back home, and can be easily attributed to reestablishing his national security credentials, which is always good politics in a country permanently at war, with an uber popular army chief, and where the Panama Leaks still continue to trickle pressure onto the PM and his family.
But here in New York, Sharif has taken his new tough talk on Kashmir to a new level. He’s written to the P5 to intervene. He’s brought that suave Sinophile and new president of Azad Kashmir, Masood Khan, to wingman him on the summit sidelines, and he’s triggered the UN Human Rights Council to offer mediation.
AND, as of yesterday, he’s refused to condemn the Uri incident, cutting off British PM Theresa May when she asked him to do so.
Yes. He did. He cut off his British counterpart when she suggested they play the We’re All Very Sorry Game on Uri.
The Americans were initiated to this new hawkishness, too. According to a senior source, Sharif read the new rule-book to Kerry: that 70 years of doing nothing about Kashmir has led to Uri. That he’s more worried about the 100 odd Kashmiris who have been killed and the thousands injured due to India’s pellet gun fetish as Kashmir’s new summer of Azaadi continues into the fall. And that Washington must live up to its promise to help solve Kashmir. The source said that Sharif “kept bringing Kerry back” to the Kashmir issue.
On the sidelines, there are skeptics. Journos huddling at the Roosevelt - that old Grand Dame of Manhattan which is owned by the Government of Pakistan, where the lifts are as slow as the room service is bad - wondered why nothing was procured from Kerry: not a word about concern for Kashmir. Nothing about the aid cut off. Nothing serious about Afghanistan.
Also, some of us wonder what happened to last year’s “Dossier Diplomacy”, where the UN’s Ban Ki Moon was handed “hard intelligence” about India’s alleged involvement in terror activities in Pakistan, and even claims about an Israel-style apartheid fence were floated at the UN. Have those offensives given anything back to Kashmir, or to Pakistan? Or were they just the beginning of what Maleeha Lodhi insists is the “process of diplomacy”, where long years of lobbying lead to slow turnarounds, and where patience is not just a virtue, but also a weapon.
Even the Prime Minister knows Kashmir is a hard sell. Pakistan’s involvement in the cause since the 1980s hasn’t been just “political, moral and diplomatic”. That’s allowed India to connect the very legitimate cause of occupied Kashmir, a disputed territory, to Pakistan’s bad track record, at home and in the valley, and call it terrorism instead of what it really is at its core: a real, organic independence movement.
But now that Zarb-e-Azb is paying dividends, now that Pakistan is at the beginning of the beginning of finally ending its good-militant-bad-militant schizophrenia, now that CPEC has finally become the first serious international economic project the Islamic Republic has embarked upon, Mission Kashmir is Pakistan’s new faire exister. What about tangible follow-ups? More Kashmir in speeches, more Kashmir in statements, more Kashmir on Twitter and TV, and no talks with India, not anytime soon, without Kashmir on the agenda.
But if Uri doesn’t go away, if there the Indians see a ‘space for war’ because Pakistan’s civ-mil establishments are not on the same page, if Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan are not secured and settled, if Pakistan continues to stand divided on its own internal security and foreign policy, then Delhi will continue to do what it’s very good at: playing down the righteous cause of the Kashmiri people.
That’s the UNGA kickstarter on Day 2 in Gotham. Now, I’ve got to go cover the PM meeting that great overlord of democracy and crusher of coups, Reccip Tayyab Erdogan. And I’m attending the Emmys later today, where I might win some kind of award. Cross your fingers for me.
The story has been filed by Dunya News Chief National Security Correspondent Wajahat S. Khan from New York.
