April 16, 2006 ☼ Foreign Affairs
This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
Jam Muhammad Yousaf, the chief minister of Balochistan province was first off the mark. Then Gen Musharraf himself got into the action. And now, Mushahid Hussain (one time Nawaz Sharif loyalist and now described as Musharraf’s ‘right-hand-man’) has repeated and amplified the statements made by his current principal. Indian intelligence, they all allege, is training Baloch insurgents from its missions on Afghan soil.
The only difference between the Musharraf-Mushahid version and the Jam of Lasbela version is the location of those ferrari (or “farari”) camps. While it is all very well for the chief minister of Balochistan to allege that RAW had set-up training camps in Balochistan itself, it would be complicated for Gen Musharraf to allege, and therefore acknowledge, that Indian agents had carried such things off under his very nose. Laying the blame at the door of India’s consulates in neighbouring Aghanistan comes in handy. For in Pakistan’s contemporary narrative those consulates are already being used to cultivate anti-Pakistan sentiment in Afghanistan. Attributing the Balochistan business to them makes that narrative more compelling. No doubt, this is the story that Afghanistan’s president is greeted with when he visits Pakistan with lists of terrorists and their addresses.
It must hurt being on the receiving end of ‘plausible deniability’. One way to ease it is to officially take it up with India, not under ‘interference in internal affairs’, but given its gravity, as ‘cross-border terrorism’.
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