Kayani calls for talks with India

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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Seems like army is backing PPP/Zardari’s effort to normalize relationship with India.

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan

SKARDU: Chief of the Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani on Wednesday called for the peaceful resolution of the Himalayan glacier dispute with arch-rival India, and suggested Pakistan should spend less on defence and more on development.

“Peaceful coexistence between the two neighbours is very important so that everybody can concentrate on the well-being of the people,” he told reporters.

The army chief was speaking at Skardu airport after visiting the remote Gayari army base in disputed Kashmir, which was hit by a massive avalanche on April 7.

Rescuers are still searching for nearly 140 people buried by the mass of snow and rock at the camp, which lies around 4,000 metres above sea level.

Pakistan and India invest significant resources in maintaining a military presence on the Siachen Glacier – dubbed “the world’s highest battleground” – and the tragedy has sparked lively debate about the human and financial cost of defending an uninhabitable patch of snow and rock.

The army chief noted that India began the conflict when its troops occupied the uninhabited Siachen Glacier in 1984. Gen Kayani said soldiers would do their duty come what may, but defending borders should not be the country’s sole priority.

“We in the army understand very well that there should be a very good balance between defence and development. You cannot be spending on defence alone and forgetting about development,” he said. “Ultimately the security of a country is not only that you secure boundaries and borders but it is when people that live in the country feel happy, their needs are being met. Only in that case will a country be truly safe.”

He said national security should be a comprehensive concept. “And therefore we would like to spend less on defence, definitely,” he added.

“Any country should do the same – more focus should be on the welfare of the people.” Gen Kayani said the decades of enmity between India and Pakistan should be resolved through negotiation and stressed the urgency of halting the damage to the environment caused by troop deployment on the Siachen Glacier.

“Ultimately it’s going to affect the River Indus adversely and we understand water is important and water management is very important,” he said.

Gen Kayani did not set a timeframe for the talks, and his remarks were in line with Pakistan’s general position that talks are needed to resolve all its disputes with its much larger neighbour.

Pakistan and India have fought three major wars since they both achieved independence from the British empire in 1947, two of them over Kashmir.

Relations have warmed over the last year, especially regarding trade. But there has been little progress on other areas of disagreement.

Gen Kayani’s remarks came a day after the main opposition party PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif called on the Pakistani government to take the initiative for resolving the Siachen issue with India.

Speaking to the media, Nawaz Sharif said on Tuesday that Pakistan and India were spending billions of rupees on defence, which could be diverted for the prosperity of people. He urged Islamabad and New Delhi to resolve the Siachen dispute through a dialogue. agencies

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Re: Kayani calls for talks with India

gud ,something must be done to end this all in order to safe lives of our soilders..

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nice move :cobra:

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hope its not just lip service! fingers crossed!

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Army always needs some one to scare the people. it seems now US has taken the place of India. :slight_smile:

The US is the new India | DAWN.COM

**IF there were a Sigmund Freud of international relations, he’d probably ask, ‘What does Pakistan want?’
**
**The trajectories of Pakistan’s two critical relationships — with India and the US — in recent months suggest that we like to keep things complicated, very complicated.
**
**For just as we start to approach the relationship with India more rationally, the US becomes the new India and we plunge that relationship into yet more incoherence and uncertainty.
**
It’s the same set of principals here, so why are they producing such different outcomes?

The army still dominates the national security and foreign policy domains but there is also the political government, the Foreign Office and a loose-knit group of security and foreign-policy experts who help shape policy.

What’s causing them to collectively choose such different paths, where the decades-old Enemy No 1 gets deepening trade and investment ties while a damaging clash over red lines with the US — on drones, for example — leaves everyone wondering where a vital trade and security relationship is headed?

There’s no Freud to help out here, so guesswork will have to suffice.

Start with India. The security establishment hasn’t suddenly unlearned all that it believed to be true about Indian policymakers and warriors for decades.

But the series of crises that rocked the army leadership last year created a small window of opportunity here. Uncertain and unsure, the army was more amenable to being convinced to do things it may have been reluctant to green-light before.

There have been similar moments in the past, but nobody to take advantage of them. This time, there was a tenacious and committed commerce secretary and a political government eager to improve ties with India.

So they pushed hard and it started to yield results. Notice how virtually every other subject in the ‘full-spectrum dialogue’ has meandered along without much progress. Trade and investment got a bigger, more concerted push and hence the breakthroughs.

It helped that the army’s own security prism was changing. Realising that Pakistan had fallen significantly behind India in economic terms and that strategic competition with India will be more and more expensive in the years and decades ahead, the army is also more amenable to new ideas.

Perhaps key to it all is that India is a well-understood problem. It’s such an old adversary, the contours of disagreement and avenues for conflict so well understood, that Pakistan can be confident there are few surprises in store. If India tries anything funny, Pakistan can quickly respond, the thinking would be.

Contrast this with the relationship with the US, where there’s so much more room for uncertainty and doubt.

Take the drones. The Americans themselves are figuring out the potential of the rapidly evolving technology. The first strike in 2004 already seems like another era. By 2008, the system’s capacity was up to nearly a dozen strikes a month and didn’t have to rely as much on Pakistani intelligence input.

An acceptance here behind the scenes of the inevitability of some strikes combined with frequent public denunciation of the strikes is an approach borne out of fear and uncertainty. What if a strike every other day became the norm? The Americans could then press to expand the area of operation. To date, an overwhelming majority of the strikes have occurred in the Waziristan agencies.

From there, they could expand to include the other tribal agencies more regularly, then to the settled districts adjoining the tribal areas and before you know it, the outskirts of Quetta or the sprawling shantytowns of Karachi could be targeted.

So opposing the inevitable — intermittent drone strikes in Fata — could help prevent the unknown — the raining down of missiles all over Pakistani territory.

And because drones are politically unpopular, there’s no one in the other policy camps to try and placate the army’s fears and convince them to try a different tack, as has happened on trade with India.

Another example: the future of Afghanistan. There are increasing signs that the Pakistan Army understands that it can’t dominate Afghanistan via Pakhtun proxies and keep that country isolated from the outside world like it did in the 1990s.

A nominal centre with the present configuration of power in the regions more or less adhered to and semi-guaranteed by outside powers, that makes the most sense for Afghanistan.

But the security establishment here believes that the main work needs to be done in Afghanistan first. Without a workable framework for a post-war future in Afghanistan, it doesn’t make sense for Pakistan to put its cards on the table or to make any concessions at this point.

Unlike the relationship with India, the relationship with the US is characterised by too many unknowns and too much uncertainty about what will happen even two or three years down the road.

Uncertainty causes the security establishment here to go into a defensive position and treat with great suspicion anything that could blow up in their face. The India problem is well understood. Nobody can claim for sure what Afghanistan will look like several years from now.

The army may not be thrilled about trade with India but has assessed that it will not undermine Pakistan’s position on ‘core issues’ and that it could be beneficial for our sluggish economy. So the push by the civilian apparatus, bureaucratic and political, is yielding results.

With the US, while everyone in policymaking circles agrees that the relationship cannot be allowed to break down, the army is filled with uncertainty about how to proceed; there are too many variables in play at the moment; and the civilians neither have the resolve nor the understanding to push for potentially game-changing options.

So that’s the difference. What Pakistan wants is to feel like it knows what it’s agreeing to.

The writer is a member of staff.

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I think it was a lip service .. coz to move the army back from siachen , the entire intelligence agencies, government and army should be on one ground .. and then they must diplomatically talk to India to back out too .. but the real fact is :

1- Our Army, Intelligence and government arent on the same page regards Siachen
2- India will never back out of this !

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if PPP can manage to start a sustainable and un-interruptable peace process with India then it will be its govts biggest achievement ever. they will be able to do something no other govt could do.

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At last Army is coming to its senses. Zardari is the best thing happen to Pakistan ever.
Long may the destruction of status quo continue :k:

another 5 years for Zardari :smiley: .. i wanna say ameen but my tongue is not going well with demaagh :smiley:

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Thing is, even opposition seems to be on the same page, that is bring army back to its senses, so unless some PHARLO happens and another army backed govt comes in power… we can see the end of military rule in next 5 to 10 years

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or IK’s recent statement :smiley:

‘Wardi mein agar koi farishta bhi aa jayee, hum usey support nahin karein gey’

May there never ever be another military takeover in Pakistan :k:

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as long as there is Jageer dars, Ulema and similar kind of people in politics, Military have many supporters for them…

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Agreed there is no immediate threat of military rule but I would not bet against it say 10+/- years down the line. That can never be ruled out in Pakistan

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article 6 would have to be implemented to the letter have a chance at avoiding military rule in the future.

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military rule is like a cancer for any society ...

I think its a good initiative and lets just hope and pray they stick to this! If Pakistan withdraws the troops, India should also reciprocate.
I also read, India lauded this statement, lets see if both of these countries agree on demilitarising Siachen! ...