India and Pakistan need dialogue and trade, not nuclear brinkmanship

The Indian government says that its airstrikes in Pakistan and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir were against terrorist bases, and in retaliation for last month’s murders of Hindu and Christian tourists on Indian-administered territory.

That massacre was so horrible that a forceful response is an appropriate and understandable consequence.

The shooting of the 25 tourists and their Muslim tour guide, who tried to seize a gun from one of their assailants, was an act of religious hatred by Islamist terrorists. Responsibility was originally claimed by The Resistance Front, believed to be an offshoot of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, a proscribed terrorist organisation dedicated not just to claiming Kashmir for Pakistan but to reimposing Muslim rule over the whole of the Indian subcontinent.

The Resistance Front retracted its claim four days later, but the Indian government says it has evidence that Pakistan was involved in the attack.

Rishi Sunak, the former British prime minister, supported the Indian response. “No nation should have to accept terrorist attacks being launched against it from land controlled by another country,” he said on Wednesday. “India is justified in striking terrorist infrastructure. There can be no impunity for terrorists.”

This seems entirely plausible, even if in practice airstrikes may prove ineffective and inconclusive. Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, also took India’s side in the House of Commons, making the point that Pakistan was the country that had sheltered Osama bin Laden, from whom groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba take inspiration.

The government, on the other hand, seeks rightly to maintain a neutral position.

Anything that risks the outbreak of an all-out war between two nuclear-armed states should have to pass a higher than normal threshold for justification. But in any case, there are better ways of protecting India from the threat of terrorism.

Ultimately, dialogue is more likely to end the violence. That means dialogue between the governments of India and Pakistan, but at some point it might also involve talking to organisations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba as well.

Jonathan Powell, Britain’s national security adviser who was one of the architects of the Northern Ireland peace settlement, once wrote a book called Talking to Terrorists, in which he argued that if you are going to end up talking to people initially regarded as beyond the bounds of decency, you might as well talk to them from the start.

We can understand if neither the Indian nor the Pakistani government wants to take advice on such matters from the former colonial power, but some of the features of the Kashmir dispute are similar to those of Northern Ireland.

The trade deal signed between India and the UK this week is a cause for great hope, and shows that Mr Modi takes a pragmatic view of relations between the two nations.

Indeed, there is a wider message in the trade agreement, which is that trade and dialogue go together. One of the casualties of tensions between India and Pakistan is that trade is officially blocked between the two countries, and is therefore reputed to be conducted mostly via Dubai.

The international community should seek to restore trading relations between the two countries and offer to facilitate dialogue. At a time when the world seems to be in the grip of nationalists, protectionists and isolationists, Britain must use what influence it has to press in the opposite direction.