India and Pakistan Engagement: Prospects for Breakthrough or Breakdown?

Summary

• Over the past year, India and Pakistan have been taking tentative steps toward improving their bilateral relations. The foreign ministers of both countries met in early September to review the progress made on the Indo-Pakistani "roadmap to peace," which the two sides agreed on in mid-February. While still deeply divided over the issue of Kashmir and in agreement that the tangible outcomes have been minimal to date, both reaffirmed their commitment to the ongoing process. Despite changes in India's leadership, this process is still lumbering forward.
• This emerging détente is worthy of attention for several reasons. First, South Asia is the only region in the world where two nuclear-armed neighbors are in active conflict; the most recent crisis came during 2001-2002, when close to a million troops faced off for nearly a year along the Indo-Pakistani border. Second, Pakistan is a critical—if imperfect—partner in the global War on Terror. The United States wants to ensure Pakistan's active support in counterterrorism activities along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and within Pakistan. Third, one of the few means that Pakistan has developed to coerce concessions from India has been the use of militants—generations of which Islamabad has nurtured to secure Pakistan's interests in Kashmir and Afghanistan. These so-called mujahideen threaten the security of South Asia and beyond.
• Given the complexities and challenges facing both states, what motivated both to undertake this process? Observers generally agree that both India and Pakistan were confronting several internal political changes during this initial period of rapprochement, and that the commencement of this process reflected both countries' internal political dynamics. For India's part, the past two years of sustained dissonance with Islamabad has strained its ability to continue an internal dialogue with the various groups in Kashmir. Further, the ongoing discord with Islamabad has frustrated India's efforts to improve its economic growth and expand its political influence beyond South Asia. India understands that the resolution of this conflict will be necessary to achieve its ultimate goal of becoming an important global power.
• Regarding Pakistan's motives, some analysts suggested that this initiative would give both Pakistan's armed forces and the militants a much-needed respite from the last two years of persistent confrontation. Although Pakistan has endured its standoff with India, it has also confronted numerous threats along its border with Afghanistan, and its own internal security environment continues to deteriorate. Sectarian violence and organized criminal activity have racked Pakistan's commercial and financial hub, Karachi, for decades with no relief in sight. Domestically, May 2004 was Pakistan's bloodiest month since Pervez Musharraf came to power in 1999.
• Both India and Pakistan were also believed to have undertaken this peace offensive with the United States and other international actors as the main intended audience. The 2001-02 crisis rattled nerves in Washington and beyond as the two nuclear-armed enemies wavered on the brink of war. Following the 1998 nuclear tests and the 1999 Kargil crisis, the confrontation of 2001-02 left the United States and others weary of playing referee in these recurrent conflicts. In addition to both states' incentives for normalization of relations, there is an increasing tendency within U.S. and international circles to press for a resolution of the conflict rather than just its management. More active mediation or facilitation by the United States would be welcomed in Pakistan, which has long sought international intervention in this dispute. India would likely resist such overtures, maintaining that this is a strictly bilateral issue, as enshrined in the 1972 Shimla Accord.
• Although the grounds for optimism are tangible, there are equally compelling reasons to be doubtful about a settlement of the Indo-Pakistani dispute in the near future, the most fundamental of which is the inherent asymmetry of desired objectives with respect to the disposition of Kashmir: India seeks to engage Pakistan to legitimize the territorial status quo by finding some means to formalize the Line of Control (LOC) in Kashmir as the legal international border. Pakistan seeks to engage India to find some means of altering, in various ways, the status quo and publicly rejects the possibility of transforming the LOC into the international border as a viable means of dispute resolution.
• Both countries' internal constraints also do not bode well for a fundamentally new approach to resolving their conflict. On balance, the political and security dynamic in Pakistan is not comforting, suggesting that even if India is able to accommodate Pakistan's demand on process, it is far from obvious that Islamabad would be capable of packaging this and marketing it to its citizens and other stakeholders (the army, for example) as a form of "progress" on Pakistan's core concerns. This factor is a central element in keeping Pakistan engaged in the process and creating a public demand for a just peace. In addition, a resolution of the Kashmir issue means that Pakistan's extensive and formidable militant infrastructure would have to be dismantled.
• India also has a number of domestic compulsions of its own: it is a rich and vibrant—if imperfect—democracy, and reaching consensus on contentious issues such as relations with Pakistan can be perhaps even more of a challenge in its diverse and active polity. Since the Kargil crisis and the ongoing attacks within Indian-administered Kashmir and within India proper, many Indians have grown weary of Pakistan's tactics. Hard-liners feel that they should not have to reward Pakistan for ceasing activities that Islamabad should not have started in the first place. The results of India's April-May 2004 general elections have also added an additional layer of uncertainty to this analysis: the electorate dismissed the Bharitya Janata Party (BJP)—the party that spearheaded the recent peace overture. Although the new Congress Party government affirmed its commitment to the peace process, it is far from certain that it has the domestic clout to continue the engagement.
• If history is any guide, the likelihood that this process will break down is high, and the probability of a meaningful breakthrough is quite slim. USIP roundtable participants agreed that the outcome of this round of engagement ultimately will turn on the understanding held by New Delhi and by Islamabad on the core issues of the engagement and the concomitant progress made on each. Many participants felt that while breakthrough is certainly not likely, neither is a breakdown of the kind witnessed after the 1999 Lahore Declaration, whose resulting engagement suffered many onslaughts, the ultimate of which was the Kargil offensive in the spring of 1999. In light of these considerations, the roundtable participants generally concurred that stalemate is the most likely outcome of the current engagement process.

About the Report

While much depends upon the nascent peace process between India and Pakistan, there are many reasons to believe that the prospects for a breakdown are greater than those for a breakthrough. To assess such prospects, the United States Institute of Peace convened a roundtable of South Asia experts. This Special Report, written by program officer Christine Fair of the Institute's Research and Studies Program, draws upon the roundtable discussions, as well as interviews with other regional analysts—particularly Shahid Javed Burki, Stephen Cohen, Husain Haqqani, Dennis Kux, Polly Nayak, Terasita Schaffer, Ashley Tellis, and Marvin Weinbaum.

This Special Report considers means by which the India-Pakistan peace process can be sustained in at least a minimally positive way. In particular, the report explores the utility of the United States in ensuring the momentum of this opening; it also considers the role for other key players in the area, such as Russia and China.

The views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect views of the United States Institute of Peace, which does not advocate specific policy positions.