We are required to develop a visible doorway strategy

Salman Haidar, Former Foreign Secretary, The Statesman, Asia News Network, Calcutta

For several months now, the bulk of the Indian army has been deployed in forward positions on the Indo-Pakistani border. According to reports, close on a million men are so positioned. Similarly, something like 600,000 Pakistani soldiers have been sent forward. This vast body of men is ready for action at a moment's notice. The obvious risks and dangers of this situation have faded somewhat in public attention, overshadowed by other events: In India the happenings in Gujarat; in Pakistan the widely derided referendum of General Pervez Musharraf.

Now with summer's heat building up, and with the parliamentary debate in India and the ersatz referendum in Pakistan both out of the way, the discomfort of our situation on the border may once more receive the attention it merits.

India's troops were sent forward with a purpose. The Dec. 12 attack on Parliament gave the country a huge shock and a reply was required of us. Our readiness to defend ourselves demanded to be demonstrated. The forward movement was thus a warning to Pakistan and also a signal to the international community. It brought results. The world was alerted to the seriousness of the situation, and Pakistan, the source of the trouble, was pushed and pressured into promising to put an end to it. A chastened Pakistan even seemed ready to look at India's rather peremptory demand for the extradition of 20 identified criminals to whom it had given refuge.

But matters took a different turn as the shock wore off. Infiltration across the border may have been reduced -- there are differing accounts -- but there is no sign of any of the wanted persons being picked up and sent back. Matters have drifted back to where they had been, and we are left with a continued confrontation, though at an escalated level.

Today the question is asked, even by sympathetic observers, whether we had any exit strategy when we first raised the stakes. India's demands for an end to terrorism were justified, and even the brusque escalation in which we engaged was defensible. But the outcome was bound to be uncertain, for Indo-Pakistani relations never run smoothly. So, when matters got bogged down, as they were always likely to do, did we have any plan for moving on without yielding the initiative? Events would suggest that we did not.

To be fair, it is easier to get into a forward situation than to get out. We only have to see how Pakistan set about it in Kargil. It seized the opportunity to move across the line, making exceptional military gains and proving virtually impossible to dislodge from the high ground it captured. The general staff in Rawalpindi was doubtless highly gratified to begin with.

But it failed to see far enough ahead and had no effective answer when India mobilized and the international community came down heavily against its military adventurism. It was ultimately compelled to make an ignominious retreat under unconcealed U.S. pressure, not having provided itself with any acceptable means of getting out when the going got tough.

There is no reason to believe that anything similar will trouble Indian policy makers. We are not comparably out on a limb. Moreover, international reaction is significantly different: There is no sign of our being pushed into doing something we may prefer to avoid. American policy seems detached from the region, barely focused on Indo-Pakistani issues.

Only a few months ago, Afghanistan was at the center of American external concerns, but that has passed. The crisis in the Middle East has supplanted South Asia. True, American spokespersons call for the resumption of dialogue in South Asia, but there is nothing minatory in it. It amounts to little more than the routine requests we have heard so often before.

There are also reports that India has actively shared its assessment of the current situation with America and others, the implication being that what we are doing appears reasonable to our interlocutors. Such international restraint, even unconcern, can encourage us to stay put where we are, even perhaps to turn up the pressure.

There are those within the country who feel we must continue to be tough, to justify our presence on the border and to manufacture reasons for staying there indefinitely. Fanciful war scenarios envisage armed conflict at levels below the nuclear threshold, in support of the military option that our advance to the frontiers conjured up. But these amount to rationalizations after the event.

The fact seems to be that we remain where we are because we havent thought hard enough about other ways of achieving our goals. Nor have we envisaged a process to move away from where we are today to a position of greater security.

This drift in policy can be dangerous. We need alertness and flexibility to work our way out of what will increasingly become an uncomfortable position for us. Nor should we believe that any military option exists. The need is for a way out of the present impasse, to develop the exit strategy that seems conspicuously missing today.

This can only mean a willingness to re-engage with our neighbor in some appropriate fashion, and to pursue by other means the demands and goals that we seek to achieve. While doing so, let us not forget that the suspension of all ties hits hardest at a voiceless segment of our own people who are presently deprived of any contact with their kith and kin on the other side.