After George Bush went out of his way to befriend India by signing the nuclear deal despite the objections of the forward-looking New York Times and the still surviving cold war hawks in America, who saw no reason why India should be favoured when it hadn't signed the NPT, British Prime Minister David Cameron has found his way into Indian hearts by endorsing New Delhi's stand on the Pakistan-based terror outfits.

Not surprisingly, the Labour party's David Milliband immediately went on the offensive to berate Cameron for angering Pakistan. Milliband had earlier raised the familiar Kashmir bogey of the West during a visit to India, thereby virtually permanently souring his own personal links with India. Like Richard Holbrooke, the American envoy for the PakAf region, Milliband, too, has joined the list of those who are persona non grata in New Delhi for seeing Kashmir through the Pakistani lens.

After the Milliband experience, Cameron had been warned not to mention Kashmir during his visit. But what the identity of views between him and the Indian establishment suggests is that the awareness of Pakistan's duplicitous role in tackling terrorism is growing in Western capitals. There are still a few like Milliband and the Democrats in Washington who turn a blind eye to Pakistan's transgressions in this respect if only to be better able to put pressure on it in private.

But what they are seemingly unable to comprehend - largely because of their ignorance of the historical background of India-Pakistan relations - is that Islamabad will not be easily dissuaded from playing its double game because it takes a long view of its role in the region. For Islamabad - or, rather, Rawalpindi, for it is the Pakistan army which is the driving force of this duplicity - the India-Pakistan scene is a continuation of the Hindu-Muslim relations of centuries ago.

Having ruled India for several hundred years before the British, it is not easy for the fundamentalist Muslim establishment in Pakistan to accept its final ouster from the part of the subcontinent which is now India, and which Jinnah wanted to be known as Hindustan, thereby erasing the word, India, from world maps. Having been unable to prevail either through the border conflicts of 1947-48, 1965, 1971 and 1999 (in Kargil) or the proxy war in Kashmir from 1989 onwards, Pakistan has now adopted terrorism as its final weapon.

After it facilitated the establishment of the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan, it presumed that half of its battle against India was already won, for it tended to use the region, as also Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) to launch terrorist attacks on India. What Pakistan hadn't foreseen, however, was that the terrorists would develop an agenda of their own and attack America and the West as well. What was more, some of them would turn even against the hand that fed them, viz. Pakistan, so that they could establish their Shariat-based medieval rule in the entire region.

However, although Rawalpindi's anti-India plans misfired to the extent that Pakistan itself became a target of terrorists, the Pakistan army may not be too unhappy since this turn of events enables it to confuse the West by claiming that Pakistan is also a victim of terrorism. Besides, by launching a military offensive against only the anti-Pakistan group of fundamentalists in the north-west, the army can also extract millions of dollars of arms from America. At the same time, it can secretly foster the anti-Indian group of terrorists, of which the Lashkar-e-Toiba is probably the most dangerous.

What the WikiLeaks have done is to expose this clandestine link. What is worth noting, however, is that America was not unaware of this connection. Hence, President Obama's observation that the WikiLeaks have revealed nothing new. Even earlier, the French academic Bernard-Henri Levy had written about the “dreaded ISI” in his book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl ? and its links with terrorists - something which David Headley also mentioned after his capture by the Americans.

What is mystifying, however, is the continuing American efforts to gloss over this connection and even justifying it by referring to the historical links dating back to the time when the ISI, the CIA and the terrorists worked together against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It is only the occasional US reference to the need for Pakistan to do “more” against terrorism which suggests that the supposed “strategic shift” in Islamabad's anti-terror outlook hasn't been enough to satisfy the Americans. India cannot but be grateful, therefore, to David Cameron for being the first major Western leader to publicly acknowledge Pakistan's Machiavellian role. (IPA Service)