Meanwhile, in India, former army chief, V.P. Malik, told a meeting that even if the Pakistan government and the people of the country favoured peace with India, the Pakistani army did not. Soon after the talks between P. Chidambaram and Rehman Malik ended, the Pakistan army chief, Ashfaq Kayani, went to Kabul to persuade President Hamid Karzai to reach out to the Haqqani brothers, among other terrorist groups, for a settlement in Afghanistan.

As if to confirm the anti-Indian slant of the Pakistani army, which is evident from the advocacy of the Haqqani brothers' case by Kayani, the Dawn said editorially that the “army's prioritization approach in the fight against militancy means that the India-centric groups are much lower down the ladder in terms of priority”. The newspaper's pessimism was evident from its belief Pakistan was unlikely to do anything about a speedier trial of the 26/11 accused “simply because India demands it” since the army was “wary of the Indian activities in Afghanistan” along with the “growing military threat” from India on Pakistan's eastern border.

It is clear, therefore, that notwithstanding the personal praise heaped on Chidambaram by Rehman Malik, and all the promise of cooperation between the intelligence agencies of the two countries, peace between the two neighbours will continue to be elusive because of one reason - the Pakistan army is not in its favour.

Had Pakistan been a genuine democracy, the army's reservations about a détente with India could have been ignored. But as the U.S. Vice President, Joe Biden, has said, Pakistan is not a “completely functional democracy”. The reason why it is not is the army's success in carving out a space for itself which is free of civilian control. It is this flaw in the democratic set-up which prompted America to pass the Kerry-Lugar bill to link U.S. aid to the army's subordination to civilian authority. But it is an open secret that this provision is a non-starter in Pakistan.

It will also increasingly be of lesser relevance because the army is sure that the situation is turning in its favour. For it, the moment of achieving its goal of inflicting serious damage on India is not far away. Once the Americans withdraw from Afghanistan and the terrorist outfits have a freer run of the country, the scene will be more or less what it was when the Taliban was in control of Afghanistan. That will be the time when the army will be able to throw its full complement of the India-centric terrorist organizations - the Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Haqqani brothers, et al - against India.

It isn't only the Islamization of the army and the ISI since Zia-ul-Haq's time which is the driving force behind army's obsessive antipathy towards India. No less potent is its belief that peace with India will mean, in effect, India's final triumph in the battle for supremacy in the subcontinent. The first step which India took to establish itself as the numero uno in South Asia was in 1971, when it cut Pakistan in half. The latter's hope was that it would be able to take revenge for this humiliation (when 90,000 Pakistani soldiers became Indian PoWs) by wresting Kashmir away from India. Virtually all of Pakistan's overt and covert efforts have been towards achieving this objective. But it hasn't succeeded so far.

Even if the Pakistani people and their civilian leaders have reconciled themselves to the inability to seize Kashmir, the army hasn't. The Kargil incursion was its last direct effort. But, then, the scene was queered by America's arrival in Afghanistan after 9/11 in 2001. Nearly a decade later, the tide is turning again, in the army's view, with America's departure when it can again use Afghanistan as a place of strategic retreat in the event of a war with India.

The Pakistan army is also scared of a settlement with India because it will lose its pre-eminent place in the country. At the moment, it can use the bogey of a “growing military threat” from India, as the Dawn editorial said, to keep its hands on the levers of power. But peace will pave the way for its marginalization in Pakistan society. What will be worse in its view is that stable conditions in the subcontinent will accelerate India's rise to be a major regional power. Besides, India's soft cultural power will also exert enormous influence on Pakistani society.

While Bangladesh has decided to live in peace with India, especially after Sheikh Hasina's ascent to power, the Pakistan army is still holding out although Pakistani civil society is seemingly ready to bury the past. It is now up to the latter to rein in the rogue elements in Pakistan. (IPA Service)