http://www.firstpost.com/politics/the-utter-pointlessnes-of-talking-to-pak-civilian-leaders-17360.htmlTo “jaw-jaw” may be better than to “war-war”, as Churchill famously said. Yet, the current round of Defence Secretary-level talks between India and Pakistan strikes one as a particularly pointless charade at a particularly inappropriate moment.
The talks will centre around the avowed aim of demilitarising the Siachen Glacier, and it’s possible that over today and tomorrow, there will be a lot of informed chatter about the meaningless minutiae of the discussions — about “grid reference point of NJK-9842” and so on.
But for all the spin put on these talks, the unvarnished fact is that the very authority of Pakistan’s civilian leadership to negotiate anything that relates to the country’s military matters is today in grave doubt.
After the bitter harvest of May, when Pakistan’s duplicitous double-game in the war on terror was exposed several times over — from the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden to the ongoing terror trial in Chicago — its armed services and intelligence are cruisin’ for a bruisin’. Its intelligence chief openly rants about having Indian “targets” in his sights, and there is a considerable restiveness within the Army.