The other line of control

Despite our obsession with the line of control in Jammu and Kashmir, it is the Durand Line that has shaped Pakistan’s politics over the last three decades and might well define its immediate future.

For decades, New Delhi has had two simple assumptions about Pakistan — that it is immune to democratic transformation and that its hostility towards India is immutable. Put simply, the argument goes, Pakistan is a black-box whose innards are of little relevance to India’s policy.

These assumptions would suggest that Musharraf’s ouster might at best lead to a rearrangement of the pieces within Pakistan rather than a restructuring of its internal power balance, which is historically skewed in favour of the army. That Musharraf could not have been pushed out without support from his successor as army chief, Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, might also confirm the proposition that the military will continue to reign supreme in Pakistan’s politics.

terror outfits in J&K. The civilian government’s attempt to bring the ISI under political control has been clumsy and unsuccessful.

All this, however, does not mean the last word on Pakistan’s civil-military relations has been said. Bringing the armed forces under civilian control, many in Pakistan believe, is one of the principal tasks in the democratic transformation of the nation. For India, which has seen the army and the ISI wrecking the peace process in the last few months, a change in Pakistan’s civil-military relationship holds the key to a sustainable bilateral engagement.

Is reversing Pakistan’s entrenched civil-military equation a credible policy objective for India?

Sceptics would point to the fractiousness of the ruling coalition in Islamabad. The serious differences between the two men who run the country’s politics — the Pakistan People’s Party’s Asif Ali Zardari and the Muslim League’s Nawaz Sharif — are public. They disagree on Musharraf’s personal future, the restoration of judges sacked by the former president, and the commitment to pursue the war on terror. To be sure, the PPP and the League had agreed in the past to limit the ISI’s manipulation of domestic politics and bring the army under civilian control. Both parties, however, have a record of using the ISI for their own short-term ends and aligning with the army to outwit their political opponents.

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