Rethink India-Pak ties in new global milieu

The inability to extract geopolitical rent upends many of the older assumptions that underwrote Islamabad's overall foreign and security policy

- TCA Raghavan

The hijacking of a train in Baluchistan appeared to mark a new stage in Pakistan's internal security evolution. Clearly, there are objective factors that have energised a long-festering insurgency in that province into mounting such major and coordinated operations. Both in Baluchistan and in the tribal tracts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, there has been a decided uptick in terrorist militancy and related incidents. In aggregate terms, this uptick means that terrorist incidents are at a decade-long high. This provides an additional context to an extraordinary incident such as the hijacking of an entire train with hundreds of passengers and being resolved only after tens of fatalities.

Some accounts imply a qualitatively new situation may be dawning in Pakistan and some kind of invisible tipping point has been crossed. Yet, however serious the deterioration in Pakistan's internal security over the past 15-18 months, the fact remains that Pakistan's internal security situation was far worse in the pre-2015 period. The current situation is, in fact, somewhat anomalous. While in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas in Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the security situation has evidently eroded, in the rest of the country the situation is unlike the loss of public morale following the numerous terrorist attacks in major cities in the pre-2015 period. The fact Pakistan was able to host a major international tournament such as the Champions Trophy, in however truncated a form, after a gap of a quarter of a century marks this change.