India-Pakistan Relations

Tensions between India and Pakistan came down a notch last week when leaders of the two countries expressed their commitment to “cooperate with each other on the Mumbai attack investigation as well as on counter-terrorism in general” during a telephonic conversation with President George W Bush. 

This week, however, the acrimonious verbal exchanges resumed with Indian Home Minister, Chidambaram implicating the Pakistani State in the Mumbai terror attacks of November 26. In his imminent trip to the US he hopes to share ‘incontrovertible’ evidence to convince American government officials to exert pressure on the Pakistani government to extradite citizens India suspects of terrorist activity.

The Pakistani government has maintained that it has no extradition treaty with India and it would be politically suicidal for a civilian government to transfer its citizens to Indian custody. 

While many have endorsed the government’s reaction to Indian demands for extradition, intellectuals and analysts across Pakistan have called on their government to be more proactive in combating terrorism and have grown increasingly critical of the government’s denials regarding the threat within.

For instance, the Foreign Office’s spokesperson’s recent remarks claiming that no terrorist infrastructure existed on Pakistani soil prompted a leading editorial to assert that while the “statement may have been made for domestic consumption, (the government) should remember that most Pakistanis – and certainly the rest of the world looking and scrutinizing our every move—are not fools”. 

Meanwhile, the government has decided to establish a National Center for Counter-Terrorism in Pakistan. The idea is to have an umbrella organization, which would coordinate the anti-terror activities of the Federal Investigative Agency, the Intelligence Bureau and the ISI. The FIA and the IB, unlike the ISI, function under the Interior Ministry. The fact that the NCCT will be led by a former FIA official has led some to suspect that this is a way for the civilian government to “indirectly bring all intelligence function under the tutelage of the Interior Ministry”. Given that previous attempts by the Gilani/Zardari government to subordinate the ISI have failed, it remains to be seen how amenable Pakistan’s top intelligence agency will be to this new move. 

At this time the NCCT will only counter threats posed by the Taliban, but it is hoped that it will soon expand its jurisdiction to include all groups in Pakistan engaged in terrorist violence.