For Indian Mercedes, Asim Munir’s dumper truck in mirror is closer than it appears

From Munir’s point of view, a few bumps here and there is par for the course. He isn’t going to drive his dumper truck to its doom. He wants to use it as a weapon.

Illustration: Shruti Naithani | ThePrint

Are you also tired, bored and irritated of hearing more about Pakistan? I would urge you to be patient. What Pakistan has brought upon us is much more diabolical than irritation, beginning with that 16 April Asim Munir speech laying out his version of the ideology of Pakistan.

He took the same idea forward, and a couple of pegs higher, with his more infamous speech that leaked from his audience in Tampa, Florida. He’s trying to get under India’s skin. To toss him aside in boredom or fatigue, however, would be strategic complacency, and perilously so.

Munir isn’t a nobody or a mere individual. He personifies the mindset of an institution, Pakistan’s army. In fact, the more you dislike him, the more you should watch his words and moves. His biggest weakness is that unlike the military dictators who came before him, he is fatally addicted to tall talk and gives his mind away.

Before him, Field Marshal Mohammed Ayub Khan, Generals Yahya Khan, Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf all professed peace and dialogue with India until they pulled out the dagger. Munir has started out by making his intentions clear. What exactly does he mean with his imagery of Pakistan as a dumper truck ramming into India, the shining Mercedes zooming on a highway?

It’s been immediately translated in India as a rant from the self-pitying Pakistani equivalent of the human bomb with a low opinion of his own country and envy of India. The latter is true. The former isn’t.

The former has been misunderstood in India mostly because we are so contemptuous of Munir. Early on I had also erred in seeing this as the usual ‘hum toh doobenge sanam tum ko bhi le doobenge’ (I will drown sweetheart, but I will take you down with me) mindset so common in the Subcontinent, especially given its history of blood feuds. I found greater clarity in how Pakistan’s upstart interior minister, cricket czar and Munir Sancho Panza Mohsin Naqvi described another conversation involving the same metaphor.

He said he took the Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel Al-Jubair who stopped over in Islamabad on his way back from India to meet Munir. When he told Munir India intended to strike harder, he was told that Pakistan’s response would be like a dumper truck hitting a Mercedes. At a Lahore seminar, Naqvi recounted this with much delight. Both his manner and words indicate that Munir and his cohort see this as a statement of strength, not self-deprecation. Remember his exhortation to Pakistan to become a hard state in that 16 April speech. In his imagination, that’s the dumper truck.

The gap between the two nations has grown and is widening at a pace that alarms Munir. He cannot fill it by speeding Pakistan’s growth soon enough. Not even if all of those trillions in minerals are found in his lifetime in power. What he can do meanwhile is to slow the Indian Merc down. If the idea is to distract and slow down India, muddle its strategic environment, he has already given us more than a few things to think about.

It does sound simplistic when we put it like this, but the first big dent in the Mercedes is the wrecked India-US relationship, repeatedly described by the top leaders of the two nations over the last 25 years as the most defining relationship of the 21st Century.

Much as we blame Donald Trump or his sidekicks, the trouble was planted by Pakistan (Munir). He seized upon Trump’s hunger for credit and self-aggrandisement. He was quick to deliver the Nobel recommendation and an open invitation to crypto investments, partnership, Bitcoin mining (with 2,000 MW of power allocated), and stakes in oil and critical minerals prospecting. The crypto-critical minerals group, headed by Zach, the son of Trump Special Envoy and key aide Steve Witkoff, was being feted in Pakistan within four days of Pahalgam. All this obviously had been planned much earlier.

Since the breakdown in its ‘special’ relationship with the US in 2011 (post-Abbottabad), the Pakistani establishment has fretted over the rise in India’s stature in Washington. Munir figured early enough that he needed to create new strains on this India-US bonding.

That he handed over to the FBI Mohammad Sharifullah, a terrorist known to have plotted the Abbey Gate bombing in Kabul that killed 13 US marines on 26 August, 2021, precisely on the eve of Trump’s inaugural address to the US Congress shows sharp thinking. Give the devil his due. This was an ice-beaker. Pakistan was the only country mentioned with gratitude in Trump’s address.

The Munir team was sharp enough to also identify crypto as an opportunity, while the Indian monetary and political establishment abhors any challenge to fiat currency. Pakistan also found a young compatriot known as a whiz kid in crypto circles and embedded in the Trump family’s crypto enterprise.

This is not to say India could have (or should have) made its relationship with this Trump administration so transactionally corrupt. Nor can anybody see the Pakistanis delivering on any of their promises to Trump. The Chinese have squatting rights over their minerals. But Munir was early to spot Trump’s weaknesses and deliver on them. India’s rule-bound system would never be able to do so. Even a terrorist won’t be handed over so summarily without a pretence of due process.

India, after all, is a fast moving, shiny and self-respecting Mercedes. From Munir’s point of view, a few bumps here and there is par for the course for his dumper truck. He isn’t going to drive it to its doom. He wants to use it as a blunt ‘hard state’ weapon.

He has already created much dissonance for us by damaging our most significant strategic relationship, forced us to go closer to his ‘iron brother’ China, and has us committed to a military response the next time there is a major terror attack. There are four things we must keep in mind:

● He’s definitely not deterred after Op Sindoor, despite his wrecked airbases. He adds the shift in Washington to the credit side and sees his balance sheet in the black. However twisted his thinking, he’s on a high. How high, you can see from his getting himself awarded his country’s second highest gallantry award (Maha Vir Chakra equivalent). In any army a chief getting such an award will be a joke. But, Munir thinks he deserves it as much as Trump thinks he’s owed a Nobel. That’s about as much intellect as you’ve come to expect from a Pakistani military dictator.

● He can choose the timing and method of his next provocation. His choice of the dumper truck metaphor means he thinks he’s got nothing to lose, and India lots.

● He’s understood how central Pakistan has become to Indian domestic politics now. Remember the Pakistani DG-ISPR repeatedly swearing affection and sympathy for Indian minorities, especially the Sikhs. His establishment is running a very sophisticated and subtle propaganda operation directed at the Sikhs, even building a revisionist history of Partition where both Muslims and Sikhs were victims, and Hindus the perpetrator.

● The two-decade belief that we had left Pakistan so far behind we didn’t have to think about it needs to be suspended. It is back in our lives. Going ahead, the challenge is diplomatic, economic and domestic, not just military. We must move with the elan, pace and suppleness of a Mercedes. If the dumper truck persists, we must build the wherewithal to deal with it.

It is for all of these reasons that we cannot afford to be complacent, bored or irritated over Pakistan. Our vigilance and wisdom will impact the fate of our generations.