New Delhi's endgame?

Pakistanis claim India is now back to its old tricks. Indian consulates scattered in Afghanistan, two near the Pakistani-Afghan border, all hastily set up within a year of the fall of the Taliban regime at the end of 2001, fan the flames of Pakistani suspicion. “Why does India need a consulate in Kandahar?” demands Farouk, referring to the capital of Afghanistan’s south, where Canadian troops are fighting a resurgent Taliban. That region borders Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, where a violent separatist movement has been raging for years, supported, Pakistanis claim, by India. “We’ve found Baluch separatists with Indian-made arms; we’ve traced their funding back to a black hole situated at the Indian consulate,” Farouk adds.

Some analysts see a broader, international agenda to break Pakistan into smaller, more manageable statelets. Michel Chossudovsky, a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization, suggests that strategic and economic agendas guide the CIA in its Pakistan policy. In a December 2007 article, he pointed out that as recently as 2005, a report published jointly by the U.S. National Intelligence Council and the CIA predicted the dissolution of Pakistan by 2015. “The U.S. course consists in fomenting social, ethnic and factional divisions and political fragmentation,” he writes, “including the territorial breakup of Pakistan.”

In Baluchistan, the issue is largely political and economic: the region’s massive gas and oil reserves are of strategic interest to the U.S. and India. A gas pipeline slated to be built from Iran to India, two countries that already enjoy close ties, would run through Baluchistan. The Baluch separatist movement, which is also active in Iran, offers an ideal proxy for both the U.S. and India to ensure their interests are met, Chossudovsky argues. “In the current geopolitical context,” he says, “the separatist movement is in the process of being hijacked by foreign powers.”

But some experts doubt that the RAW’s ultimate goal is Pakistan’s disintegration. “I can understand the anxiety of some Pakistanis that their country might fragment into a handful of states,” says Pike, the globalsecurity.org founder. “But the consequences would be like herding kittens.” Instead, RAW’s ultimate goal, Pike argues, is to keep Pakistan weak.

Questions remain as to whether the RAW, on its own, is really capable of carrying out any serious covert operations. The department within the organization dedicated to subversive activities was shut down in 1997, which reportedly ended direct covert operations inside Pakistan, although not necessarily intelligence-gathering. Even those activities, however, have come under scrutiny in recent years. In 2007, weeks before Musharraf declared a state of emergency, the RAW’s chief, Ashok Chaturvedi, advised the Indian prime minister that Pakistan was stable and not in any way on the brink of martial law. He was spectacularly wrong.

But since the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, which India blames on militants based in Pakistan and supported by the ISI, pressure has been mounting on Indian intelligence to step up covert activities inside Pakistan. Troubled by the failure of the county’s security services to predict the attack, B. Raman, a former RAW insider, wrote recently on his blog: “At this critical time in the nation’s history, RAW has no covert action specialists at the top of its pyramid. Get a suitable officer from the Intelligence Bureau or the Army. If necessary, make him the head of the organization.” Going one step further, another former RAW insider, Vikram Sood, wrote in a January 2009 article in India’s Businessworld magazine that covert war is India’s best defence against terrorism emanating from Pakistan. “Covert action can be of various kinds,” he pointed out. “One is the paramilitary option, which is what the Pakistanis have been using against us. The second is the psychological war option, which is a very potent and unseen force.”

Part of that strategy may be keeping the idea of fragmentation alive, if not directly working toward it. Like the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, it involves not only the seedy underworld of intelligence and counter-intelligence, but also agents provocoteurs and media propaganda. Playing on the psychology of the people, creating a threat that may or may not be real, is essential to winning this kind of war. During the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, it was the “Red” menace. In Pakistan the enemy is saffron.

And after 60 years of facing this enemy, Pakistanis don’t need much encouragement. As militant attacks spread into the country’s heartland, average people are wracked with doubts and questions. Who could have done it, they ask of violent attacks on targets that appear to have no relation to a militant Islamic agenda. Faced with the bombing of a mosque during Friday prayers, or the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team, they fall back on that most trusted of adversaries: India. How it will all end? Looking back on history, Basit, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman, gives a chilling answer: “How did the U.S.-Soviet Cold War end?” he asks. “One country collapsed.”