In a paradox, Musharraf was widely seen, until a year ago, in India and the world, as the only credible agent of Pakistan’s long overdue evolution towards political moderation, social modernisation and regional harmony.

After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, Musharraf emerged as the most valued US ally in the war on terror. After a series of military confrontations with India, Musharraf led Pakistan into a sustained engagement with India since 2004.

That he was unable to deliver decisive results in either curbing the al-Qaeda and the Taliban or clinching the peace process with India did not underline Musharraf’s personal failure, but the contradictions at the very heart of Pak Army’s corporate interests that he represented.

It took nearly seven years for the Bush Administration to acknowledge that Musharraf and the Pakistani Army were playing both sides in the war on terror and confront Islamabad with evidence of the ISI’s role in the continuing destabilisation of Afghanistan.

The Pakistan Army never gave up its ambition to control the developments in Afghanistan. Its focus since 9/11 was on managing, what it perceived as temporary, American and NATO pressures on international terrorism originating from the Pak-Afghan border.

Thanks to the Pakistan Army’s obsessive search for ‘strategic depth’ in Afghanistan, the ‘Great Game’ is now being played out on Pakistan’s own territory.

With India, too, Musharraf and the Army chose to calibrate, rather than abandon, cross-border terrorism as an instrument of policy.

Despite a promising negotiation with India on Jammu and Kashmir, first under NDA’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee and then under the UPA Government, the Pakistan Army and the ISI repeatedly unleashed terror all across India.

... contd.