https://thediplomat.com/2018/06/is-ther ... relations/
Is There Hope for Resurrecting India-Pakistan Relations?
There may be hope yet for India and Pakistan.
By K. S. Venkatachalam
June 01, 2018
The book Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the illusion of Peace, co-authored by two former intelligence chiefs — A.S. Dulat of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Asad Durrani of Pakistan’s Inter- Services Intelligence (ISI) — is unique in many ways. Prior to its publication, it was nigh unthinkable that the former heads of these two intelligence agencies would come together and share their experiences in a book on the difficult and volatile India-Pakistan relationship and the need to end the conflict.
Response to the book has been generally muted but in Pakistan, the military summoned Durrani for violating the military code by revealing certain uncomfortable truths. However, what has been published in the book is in the public domain and the general has not revealed any new facts that could put his country in a bad light. The spymasters covered many issues, including Kashmir; the involvement of Hafiz Saeed, the chief of Jamat-ud-Dawah, in the 2008 Mumbai attack; and the vexing issue of Kulbhushan Yadav, who was allegedly kidnapped from Iran and brought to Pakistan, where he was charged with espionage and plotting a terror attack. Kulbhushan was tried by a military court and has been handed a death penalty.
The disclosures about the Mumbai attack, four days of carnage which took the lives of 160 people, including foreigners, were nothing new. India has produced evidence of the complicity of Jamat-ud-Dawah, a front organization of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba, in meticulously planning and carrying out the attack with the help of Pakistan’s ISI. It is also a well-documented fact that the ISI and the army have been waging an asymmetric war with India by supporting terrorist organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad to wage proxy war against India.
Recently, in a damning admission in an interview given to a prominent newspaper, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif tacitly admitted to Pakistan’s role in the Mumbai attack, although he did not name the terrorist organizations involved. He admitted that India had provided clinching evidence on Lashkar-e-Taiba and other terror outfits responsible for carrying out the attack. He also said that both Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China had raised the issue with him. In a veiled reference, he blamed the army for the Mumbai attack. However, those statements only raise the question of why Sharif did not submit the dossier on Hafiz to the court, which finally had to let him off because of lack of evidence.
Durrani brought forth an interesting fact in the book. According to him, the cost of prosecuting Mumbai terror attack mastermind and banned Jamat-ud-Dawah head Hafiz Saeed was too great. “If you prosecute Saeed, the first reaction will be: it’s on India’s behalf, you’re hounding him, he’s innocent, etc. The political cost is big, now,” he said. Durrani’s comment that Sharif had the “acumen of a camel” on international relations is questionable. It was Sharif who reciprocated the gestures of former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, which led to the famous Lahore Declaration in 1999, where both countries agreed to settle all disputes on contentious issues, including Kashmir, through dialogue. Similarly, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made an impromptu visit to Lahore, it was once again Sharif who expressed his readiness for peace dialogue with India. Durrani has likened Modi to a fox, smart and cunning.
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Gautam
then again, if the standard we are comparing with is Shireen Mazari, all bets are off 
