India has to battle terrorism on its own. Adversaries will be hostile and friends won’t help.

Brahma Chellaney, The Hindustan Times

The Mamallapuram summit between India and China cannot obscure the fact that the power behind Pakistan is China. Nor can the summit hype cloak the strengthening axis between a muscular communist power and a terrorism-exporting Islamist neighbour, with both the revanchist partners staking claims to different Indian territories.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said that “the time has come to fight a decisive battle against terrorism and against all those who promote terrorism”. However, there appears little prospect of such a concerted and decisive international fight. States bankrolling or rearing terrorists continue to go scot-free.

Nothing illustrates this reality better than Pakistan, which has systematically weaponised terrorism without incurring tangible international costs. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is unlikely to move Pakistan from its “grey” to “black” list, even though Islamabad has admittedly failed to meet most FATF parameters against terrorist financing.

Action is unlikely for several reasons. A Chinese national has become the FATF president. Decisions are based on consensus. Pakistan’s principal patron, China, will seek — along with Turkey, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia — to block any move to blacklist Pakistan. At the recent annual United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) session, China, Malaysia, Pakistan and Turkey emerged as an anti-India quad.

The key impediment to Pakistan’s blacklisting, however, is India’s own strategic partner, the United States. The battle against international terrorism cannot be won unless the nexus between terrorist groups and Pakistan’s military is severed. A good place to start would have been to make the International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout for Pakistan contingent on concrete counter-terrorism action. However, US President Donald Trump’s attempt to finalise a Pakistan-backed Faustian bargain with the Afghan Taliban allowed that leverage to slip away. Pakistan secured the bailout without any action.

The US is against FATF blacklisting because such action would upend the IMF-supported programme in Pakistan. Pakistani terrorism impinges directly on Indian security but not on US homeland security. US willingness to put up with Pakistan’s sub-regionally confined use of terrorism as an instrument of State policy parallels Washington’s acceptance of Pakistan’s sub-regionally confined nuclear arsenal, including ignoring covert Chinese nuclear and missile transfers, and tolerating Pakistan’s nuclear warmongering.

Trump himself has underscored the limits of Indo-US counter-terrorism cooperation. On two consecutive days at the UNGA, Trump referred to Iranian terrorism when asked specifically about Pakistan’s emergence as the global hub of terrorism. Instead, Trump drew a perverse equivalence between terrorism-transmitting Pakistan and its victim India. According to the White House, Trump privately “encouraged Prime Minister Modi to improve relations with Pakistan”.

Modi rightly warned against the politicisation of international counter-terrorism mechanisms. The US-led war on terror has failed largely because it has become a tool of geopolitics. The US, for example, recently imposed terrorism-related sanctions on Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and allied individuals. But it has never slapped such sanctions on the leading terrorism-exporting force — Pakistan’s military — or on any of its generals or intelligence officers.

The bottom line for India is that no friend, including the US, will assist it to end Pakistan’s terrorism. This is India’s battle to fight and win. Seeking US assistance only reinforces Washington’s claim to be a stakeholder in the India-Pakistan relationship.

Imran Khan’s public declaration of a jihad against India and his threat of nuclear Armageddon only highlight India’s challenge in countering a militant neighbour that not only employs nuclear terror to shield its export of terrorism but also misuses a religion to lend sanctity to its actions. Debt-ridden and dysfunctional Pakistan cannot afford an overt war with India that it cannot win. Yet, without India imposing sufficient costs on it, Pakistan will not stop nurturing terrorists as a force multiplier in its low-intensity asymmetric war, whose ultimate goal supposedly is Ghazwa-e-Hind, or the holy conquest of India.

The Indian Air Force chief, Rakesh Bhadauria, has said that Balakot exemplified a new political resolve to “punish perpetrators of terrorism”, underscoring “a major shift in the government’s way of handling terrorist attacks”. However, Balakot, like the earlier surgical strike, has done little to change Pakistan’s behaviour. The reason is that these strikes targeted only the enemy’s non-uniformed soldiers — the easily-sacrificed terrorist proxies. Deterrence will work if India implements a multipronged strategy to impose calibrated but gradually escalating costs on Pakistan’s military masters.

The Wuhan summit was followed by a stepped-up Chinese military build-up along the Himalayas, including live-fire combat drills, and an enlargement of China’s strategic footprint in Pakistan. As its colonial outpost, Pakistan has become the springboard for China’s regional ambitions. Mamallapuram cannot change this reality.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist.