Book Review: Ex-RAW & ISI Chiefs Urge India-Pakistan ‘War’ to End

The book, instead of revealing the dark art, wants to end the India-Pakistan warfare both men spent decades waging.

His body covered with a wolf’s pelt, a weasel’s hide on his head, and armed with a bow, the weapon of cowards and assassins, the Trojan spy Dolon crawled forward on all fours, seeking to infiltrate the ship of the great warrior Agamemnon. There, the Achaeans were holding counsel to decide whether to keep fighting or slink away. He was intercepted – perhaps unsurprisingly, given his bizarre attire – by two spies headed the other way, Diomedes and Odysseus. Promised his life, the wolf-man spy revealed all his own side’s plans.

Every spy’s life makes for a great story – but happy endings are hard to come by. In return for his service, Homer’s Illiad tells us, Diomedes and Odysseus cut off Dolon’s head.

Former Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) chief Amarjit Dulat and former Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate head Asad Durrani’s Spy Chronicles, a series of dialogues mediated by Aditya Sinha, breaks the centuries-old narrative meme of writing involving espionage. Instead of revelations about their dark arts, we have a plea to end the grim India-Pakistan warfare both men spent decades waging.

Their case is a simple one: “We know the price”.

The book – oddly, for work that demonstrates that the authors are doves in spies’ clothing – has provoked something of a furore. Durrani has been served notice by his erstwhile masters, the Pakistan Army, to explain his position. Yet, sadly, their telling of the story glides over tough issues; their recommendations, thus, sound suspiciously like placebos, rather than real prescriptions for peace.

Too busy to read? Listen to it instead.

Kashmir, both spy chiefs assert, ought be the fulcrum of the peace process. “The best thing that can happen and seems possible is to make Kashmir the bridge,” Durrani says. He suggests, as did Pakistan’s former military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, that there could be solutions short of secession.

Dulat concurs: “Kashmir should be the bridge, it’s the right starting point”. “If you move forward on Kashmir,” he claims, “then you are automatically moving forward on terrorism.” [p.106].

This is, at best, an extravagant claim. The Indian Mujahideen was born, with ISI patronage, even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and General Pervez Musharraf’s now-famous secret dialogue on Kashmir was well underway. The horrors of 26/11 came in the wake of multiple meetings of the Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism set up in 2007 by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and General Musharraf.

Even though Dulat goes on to assert intelligence cooperation would “contain [violence] or stop it”, this hasn’t been the case, either. Dialogue between the National Security Advisors did nothing to prevent Pathankot or an escalation in Kashmir; earlier meetings between spy chiefs AK Verma and Asad Durrani signally failed to de-escalate the crisis in Punjab.

Indeed, while Durrani holds out General Zia-ul-Haq and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi as models of India-Pakistan engagement, 1987 – the year of the dictator’s famous cricket-match visit to New Delhi – saw civilian fatalities in the ISI-backed Khalistan insurgency almost double to 910, up from 520 the previous year.

The case could be made that General Musharraf’s commitment to peace was a consequence of India’s military coercion in 2001-2002, which convinced him that military crisis would have hideous economic costs for Pakistan – not dialogue or engagement.

Large parts of the book are given over to lamenting lost opportunities to deal with actors in Kashmir – but have no plausible account to offer on the reasons for the failure.

There is no analysis of why both India and Pakistan failed to properly assess the storm looming in Kashmir in 1987-88; the reasons for the secessionists’ failure to deliver on their promises of dialogue with Prime Minister Singh; what drove the violent new youth Islamism which exploded in 2008.

Both spies claim earlier efforts to bring peace, under Prime Ministers Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, fell apart because of bureaucratic spoilers and political pressure. Durrani blames bureaucratic “nit-pickers”;  Dulat laments Manmohan Singh spent too much time looking over his shoulder at the opposition. This may or may not be true, but it dodges the real questions.

Indeed, Durrani’s comments demonstrate the dogged refusal to acknowledge reality which has characterised Pakistan’s military discourse on India.

He refuses to acknowledge the well-documented Pakistani role in events of 26/11, or its continued sponsorship of jihad in Afghanistan; the kidnapping of foreign hostages in Kashmir he blandly asserts, was a “false flag operation”.

Experts – Christine Fair’s Fighting to the End, Aqil Shah’s Army and Democracy, Husain Haqqani’s Reimagining Pakistan – have argued the real problem is the Pakistan Army’s self-image: as the praetorian guard of an ideological state, with conflict against India as its raison d’etre.

In the final analysis, Spy Chronicles illustrates the problem, not the solution: national security elites who lack the self-critical historical sensibility needed to assess where things went wrong, and the rigour to conceive of genuinely new ways forward.

The book will appeal to many liberals among national security analysts and commentators in New Delhi, who have tired of the often-aimless, sometimes-reckless Pakistan and Kashmir policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval. Four years into their tenures, violence in Kashmir has escalated steadily, notwithstanding efforts to coerce Pakistan through shop-worn strategies like escalation on the Line of Control and retaliatory offensive covert operations.

But the truth is, years of engagement also failed: efforts to bring about a rapprochement with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen collapsed; engagement failed to bring Kashmir’s secessionist leadership to the table; and dialogue with Pakistan did nothing to avert the hideous street violence of  2008 and 2010.

The comfort the The Spy Chronicles gives us – evoking, as it does, the tone of retired uncle-jis bonding over Black Label at the India International Centre’s bar – is to demonstrate that, even in ugly times, a civil India-Pakistan conversation is possible. In avoiding bitterness and contention, though, it ultimately does no service to the cause it seeks to support.

(The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace, co-authored by A.S. Dulat, Aditya Sinha, Asad Durrani, and published by Harper Collins, is now available on Amazon.in.)

(The writer is a senior journalist and author. He can be reached at @praveenswami. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them).