Dear KLNM,
Sorry for the hiatus, but I haven't forgotten your post.
I don't see how it follows that this is good for India's interests. For India, it doesn't matter whether whisky-swilling koi-hai TFTA ashraf pakis are hating on India or it is their unwashed ajlaf TTP frenemies.
With respect Johann, (a) stuff like this Indus Project is some sort of self-aggrandizing quixotic BS by well-meaning ashraf snobs (unkind of me perhaps to refer to a "liberal" activist like Aitzaz Ahsan in this way, but in my experience, you just have to scratch a well-spoken paki a little bit to expose the ashraf snob inside) to invent a heritage to reconcile and make whole their own self-image. Woe be unto India if it is fool enough to set any store by "Indus Saga"-ish things for bringing Pakis to their senses and into the human fold.
And you are contradicting yourself: On the one hand, TTP is an existential threat to the Paki elite, but on the other hand, India is supposed to pin its hopes on some BS that a fringe of that same mortally threatened elite has dreamed up, which is "likely" to fructify in "a decade or so?"
and (b) By the way, even if this Indus nonsense wins out in some fantasy universe and there is somehow some sort of reconciliation with India, the overwhelming odds are that it will still be structured as a hierarchy with ashraf pakis (now reinvented as "children of Mother Indus") on top, leeching on India's productivity and hard work, while constantly bloviating to us about what is wrong with us. How's that for extrapolating from present trends, eh?
Face it, for India, Pakistan is intractable; the best approximation that I can think of, for an answer to Pakistan is to invent some sort of super-max prison for that country and confine it there for all eternity.
What I am advocating here is that Indians don't waste further time and energy in indulging our personal need to not see ourselves as haters, and focus our minds instead on the task of working out and debating ways to destroy Pakistan. Which is why I demanded that whatever information or knowledge provided be tied to what I might term the shivving of Pakistan. True you obliged, and I appreciate that, but as I said above, the effort to make the connection shows that the connection is rather weak and tentative, more of a projection of wishful thinking than anything real.
So, let me put it to you again: given the information you have provided, and given the mission of BRF, what should India be doing at this time to make progress on destroying Pakistan?
We don't have to agree with each other of course, but its important to start from the basics.
India isn't in conflict with the vast majority of the Muslim world. Even in South Asia, it does OK with the Maldives, and even its problems with Bangladesh are nothing like the problems with Pakistan. So my own view is that the conflict between India and Pakistan is not a conflict over religion or Islam per se, but over the use of religion as part of a particular political ideology.
The group of people in Pakistan that is the most committed to this ideology are not the illiterate, but the literate. In the pre-partition era the anchor was the educated Muslims of Muslim minority provinces - lawyers, government servants, the intelligentsia and college students. In the post-partition era it was the army and to a lesser extent the bureaucracy. Part of their ideological fervour was the knowlege that vast numbers of people had chosen Pakistan out of circumstance, not conviction - opportunistic landlords who supported the movement to avoid land reform, huge numbers of undecided people forced to leave India by escalating cycles of violence, and Marxists and pro-Congress or just anti-AIML Islamists who happened to live in Punjab and NWFP when Partition happened. The Pakistani state's problem for the first few decades was that it was an ideological state with not enough ideologically committed people. Zia tried to fix that by Islamising the state , but its escalated the latent conflict over what Pakistan is for and whom it represents.
What I've seen first hand is an elite that is increasingly frightened by whats going in at home with the rise of revolutionary minded jihadis. Younge people from the ruling classes with no memories of partition or war with India seem especially likely to question of the ideology of Pakistan, and the ideology of perpetual conflict. The power of the national security state which nurses this ideology has been sharply challenged (right now in the Geo vs. ISI fight) over and over again as the non-military elite attempts to wrest control of policy away from the army. In order to win power from the military they have to make the case that there can be peace with India. It is the military that needs perpetual conflict with India in order to justify its control. Its been a long slow battle, but now that the Americans are no longer backing the military following their experiences in Afghanistan and with OBL, the civilians are getting the upper hand. That also means moving away from an ideological definition of nationhood (the core problem with Pakistan) to a territorial one, and that is the kind of shift in narrative that is actually emerging. They're willing to trade being a country of manifest Islamic destiny in which they might be overthrown to ruling over a normal one.
In short I think the Pakistani ruling classes in a couple of decades will be eating out of India's hands, depending on Indian support to defeat the jihadi threat both to their rule and to all of Pakistan's neighbours. Historically speaking the ruling class of the area have been opportunists rather than ideologues, chosing whatever option allowed them to preserve power and privilege, and mending fences with India is going to be essential to avoiding revolution. In the long run having them do the hard work is probably the cheapest option for India, much as the Raj depended on the Afghan kings to keep their population in line in exchange for subsidies which in turned strengthened the elite against the population. It was cheaper than consant warfare, and raiding or trying to rule the place yourself. Once the royal family lost those subsidies, it was toppled in just over a generation, and its been a bloody nightmare for everyone since.
Now this a view I've only gradually come to. This is not a standard view in the West, but rather one that I've gained from time on the ground talking to people on both sides of the border. A senior retired Indian foreign service officer once described it to me this way - even if you loathe your belligerent idiot of a neighbour, you don't want to see his house on fire because its just as dangerous as him throwing matches at you. You'd much rather lend him a hose for a price. I've also seen the enormous amount of cynicism at every level of Pakistani society. There's a lot fewer committed ideologues there than you would think, and the cozy circumstances that allowed the educated classes to believe what they did are being pulled out from under them.
But I disagree with you in what you seem to be saying above--obviously there are multiple POVs, but are you claiming that there is no such thing as an Indian POV or a BRF POV? And an American POV? Really? That seems rather, well, fantastic. And I can't imagine an Indian-type BRFite taking such a view.
POVs might be from India or America, or BRF....and some might be trending at one time or another, but there's no single or fixed POV from any place. I think that's hardly controversial to say that. Unless you're talking state policy, and even behind that there's an array of often sharply disagreeing assessments. The only real difference is swimming with or against received wisdom.
