With a seventh of India’s population, Pakistan does not loom large for Indians. Its unpredictable politics evokes amusement in a country with a relatively stable political system. Pakistan’s troubles in its northwest are welcomed insofar as they stop it from making trouble for India. It is, however, possible to take the view that Pakistan has been an extremely successful enemy and has set India back by decades. A more informed and intelligent interest in that country could be beneficial for India.

Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq went to St Stephen’s in Delhi and got a third-class degree in 1944. He was 5 feet 5 inches if he drew himself up to full height. With that height and those results, and coming as he did from a mofussil Punjabi-speaking family from Jullunder, he would have found it difficult to get a job. But the War was on, the British were short of soldiers, so he was taken into the cavalry (that is, armoured corps) in 1944 and sent to the Eastern Front. By that time, the Japanese were in retreat; so he followed them down Burma, Malaya and Java. After Partition, he went to Pakistan as a colonel. His superiors did not think much of him. Promotions came very slowly; it was 1969 before he became brigadier. Bhutto thought that this mediocre refugee officer would not have the guts or the support to rebel, so he superseded seven others and made Zia army chief in 1976. A year later, Zia unseated and imprisoned Bhutto and declared martial law; in 1979, he hanged Bhutto.

That was the time when the Cold War was heating up on Pakistan’s western border. The Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1978. He had been an ally of the Americans, so the mullahs who dethroned him were strongly anti-American. The Afghan army overthrew King Daoud in 1978 and set up a Soviet-type republic. Its opponents approached the United States of America for aid. Zia offered his services, and Pakistan became an intermediary between the US and its Afghan clients.

Zia turned the opportunity into a business proposition. He persuaded the Saudis that the Afghan war gave them a chance to fight a holy war and propagate their Wahhabi brand of Sunni Islam. The Saudis joined the Americans in financing the enterprise. They set up a number of military training schools in Pakistan disguised as religious schools — madarsas to use a cliché. By branding the Afghan war as a holy war, Zia attracted young men from the Middle East to join the unemployed young Afghan refugees in the fight. Zia got the Americans to provide the arms. And he placed ISI in charge; it received money from the Americans, paid it out to the organizations that ran madarsas, and made sure they trained terrorists and delivered them for Afghan duty. Till then, ISI had been pretty moribund; in 1979, it suddenly became a big enterprise. It financed and controlled subsidiary non-government organizations, of which 24 were counted in 2002. And unlike the rest of the army, it no longer depended on allocations from the State. It had its own private income from the CIA and the Saudis, and did not have to submit accounts as long as it delivered results.

Its closest clients were Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam and Jamat-e-Islami. Lashkar-e-Toiba, incidentally, was set up by Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, who was born in Simla; if India had not been partitioned, he might have become a bureaucrat or manager in India. He went to fight in Afghanistan in the 1980s, where he met Abdullah Azzam, who had taught Islamic jurisprudence in Jordan University in Amman. Together, they set up Markaz Dawal al-Irshad, with a sprawling campus near Lahore; it has a university, a farm, and a clothing factory amongst others. Soon after the Soviet forces left Afghanistan in 1989, ISI got Saeed to set up LeT with the purpose of doing to Kashmir what had been done to Afghanistan. LeT made its debut with an attack on an Indian army barracks in Poonch on February 5, 1993, which killed many Indian soldiers.

The Sikh militancy in the 1980s and the Kashmir militancy in the 1990s were both creations of the ISI. The ISI even got some Canadian Sikhs to finance the Sikh militancy. It petered out because ISI did not get enough Sikh young men to achieve volume. That was not a problem with Kashmir militancy because the supply of Islamic militants out of Pashtuns, Arabs and other Middle-Easterners was enormous.

Thus, ISI employed the same model of barely deniable aggression in Afghanistan and Kashmir. It succeeded in Afghanistan, and has not yet in Kashmir. Why?

The reasons are not entirely clear, but four factors seem to have played a role. First, the logistics; the Russians’ supply lines were much longer than the Indians’. Second, the Russians never managed to create a large, disciplined, competent Afghan army to tackle ISI’s terrorists; India throughout had a force of 300,000 or more soldiers in Kashmir, and could have put in more if needed. ISI could not match India in manpower. Third, the risks for ISI’s agents in fighting in Kashmir were too high. The number of people killed in Kashmir varies from 30,000 to 80,000. The real figure can be known only to the Indian government, and it prefers to hide and underplay the casualties. But even if we take the lower figure, the militancy in Kashmir was very serious; and whatever figures may be put on the number of Kashmiris and Indian soldiers killed and injured, the number of imported militants killed ran into tens of thousands. ISI tried to reduce the risks its terrorists faced. In both Afghanistan and Kashmir, ISI organized short tours of duty for its terrorists — 3-6 months, followed by return to Pakistan and a good life. But the shorter the tours of duty, the greater the traffic of militants across the border, where the Indian army found it easier to kill them. And finally, ISI could not sequester its terrorists and confine them to Afghanistan and Kashmir. They spread out across vast tracts of Pakistan, and made them ungovernable.

This is why Musharraf, the most intelligent enemy India faced, became a peacenik. He tried to rescue a Kashmir settlement out of the wreckage the ISI had created. He implicitly told Vajpayee that he would withdraw the terrorists if Vajpayee agreed to an Indo-Pak condominium over Kashmir valley. He might have succeeded, but at the last minute he broke off negotiations and ran away from Agra. Why, only he can tell, and he is too good a liar to tell. My own guess is that he had to choose between being overthrown by a coup in Pakistan and continuing hostility towards India.

Soon the opportunity passed, 9/11 happened, and the Americans forced Musharraf’s western flank by throwing out the Taliban. And in 2004, Manmohan Singh came and made India an American ally. 26/11 showed what a difference that made. There is absolutely nothing India can do in retaliation against Pakistan’s covert attacks. But the Americans can, because Pakistan is bankrupt and they keep it afloat. Long may it so stay, for India is safe only as long as it is.