 I think we can begin. Good afternoon. My name is Mohid Yusuf. I direct the South Asia program here at USIP. Thank you all for joining us. This is actually a special topic very close to my heart myself because for the past seems like 50 years, but really three or four years I've been trying to do a book on this very subject which is India Pakistan crisis and US role and the conclusion I've drawn is I need to leave DC to finish it. So today thankfully it's not me who's going to be speaking about this, but we've got a very illustrious panel who've both worked on this issue, but in case of one of our speakers was actually a US crisis manager in the last major India Pakistan crisis in 2008 which was Mumbai. Of course all of us know India Pakistan are the only pair of nuclear rivals who are technically second-aged nuclear powers developing countries with now a lot of nuclear weapons and have a very crisis-prone relationship. Since 1998, depending on how you count, three major ones and at least three semi-major ones. But Kargil in 1999, just a year after their test, they went to war, essentially a limited war. Neither side acknowledges that it was, but it was. Then in 2001, 2002, for 10 months, both militaries, a million people on the India Pakistan border, eyeball to eyeball, thankfully did not get into a confrontation. And then perhaps the most spectacular of the three in terms of the trigger events was the Mumbai crisis of 2008, which again thankfully did not escalate as many expected after the attacks. The pattern here is fairly similar. Apart from Kargil, which was an incursion by Pakistani forces, since then every crisis or near crisis has been triggered by a terrorist attack, mostly by people hopping over from Pakistan and acting in India. The Indian side reacts by blaming the Pakistani state, the Pakistani state pledges innocence, and then the conversation goes nowhere at the end of the day. Thankfully the crises have not escalated to the point where we have a serious nuclear dimension, but for instance, Mumbai even seven, eight years down the line, the cases are still pending and it's an open chapter. It also means that every subsequent crisis potentially could be more dangerous than the previous one because one or both sides have been unsatisfied with how the previous one ended. The other commonality in all these crises and that's the subject for today's panel is the U.S. role. And it's beyond doubt the U.S. has played a fairly serious and proactive role in each of the crises, definitely Kargil 2001, 2002 and Mumbai, but there is still a debate on just how important, how decisive the U.S. role was. And more importantly, whether the U.S. role in previous crises is a predictor for what the U.S. may or may not be able to do next time. And for people like us who study this closely, there's a lot of concern and worry that the U.S. may not be able to pull off what it did last time. There's also an open question whether India and Pakistan would want the U.S. to show up next time and give them the space to deal with this issue. Finally, I think there's also the other issue, which is the elephant in the room. Everybody focuses energies during the crisis. There is press coverage. Everybody talks about it. Things are going to get out of control. And then the day the crisis de-escalates, the game is over and then we wait happily for the next crisis and then start the whole process again. So where is the dispute resolution part of that and whether the U.S. or others have any role in this? I would just say that this town has been obsessed with ISIS for some time now, the Daesh factor in Middle East. But this sort of event also, I think, serves as a reminder that come a crisis moment that is probably nothing more important in the U.S. portfolio as the unipolar sort of leader of the unipolar world, then dealing with a crisis between two nuclear powers and one-fifth of humanity depending on that. So in that vein, we've got a panel today, again, as I said, who looked at this issue very closely in Ted's case, who worked one of the major crises, and we would like to hear from them on all these issues. Let me very quickly and briefly introduce them, and then we'll go in the order of Dan, Ted, and then Polly as we agreed. Dan is a senior research professor at Johns Hopkins SICE, also the academic director for the SICE Global Policy Program. For the past eight years before last year, he was at CFR and a senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia, and produced the book No Exit from Pakistan, America's Tortured Relationship with Islamabad. If you haven't read it, it's a must read. Polly is an independent consultant, spent a long time in the U.S. government from 1995 to 2001 was the U.S. intelligence community senior expert and manager on South Asia, and this is the time when Pakistan and India went nuclear, had the Kargil conflict. The Taliban took over Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden's 9-11 episodes, so she's no stranger to crises, that's for sure. More importantly, she's also done two seminal studies along with Michael Crepon at the Stimson Center on the 2001-2002 and the Mumbai crisis. Looking at the U.S. side of it and how the U.S. managed the crisis. And finally, Edward goes by Ted Ted Wittenstein is the director of international relations and leadership programs at Yale University. Also the executive director of Yale's Johnson Center for Study for American Diplomacy, teaches at Yale, and he was the special assistant to the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Ambassador Negroponte during the Mumbai crisis of 2008, and as he just told me, was essentially the staff liaison for this crisis. So I bet there were a few sleepless nights in addition to a spoiled Thanksgiving weekend because this crisis was triggered on Thanksgiving day if I'm not wrong. So with that, Dan, over to you. Great, thanks, Moid. This is a great opportunity to join a great panel, and I see a lot of familiar faces in the room. I'm very happy to be here. Moid has helpfully given me, given all of us, I think, four questions. I'm going to march through the questions as best as I can, glossing over some of them and focusing a little bit more on others. The first of these questions had to do with the difference between U.S. ability to do crisis management and U.S. ability to think about dispute resolution in South Asia. And here, I'm very happy to see in the front row, Ambassador Howie Schaefer, somebody who knows a great deal about the challenges of dispute resolution, particularly with respect to Kashmir, his book, The Limits of Influence, is something that guides my own thought about how difficult it has been historically for the United States to impose, perhaps impose or bring in its will into the longstanding dispute between India and Pakistan and all of the frustrations that we've faced along the way. Now, so this is a long history of difficult diplomacy. And in my view, this continues to be the case. I do not expect the United States to be able to play a particularly helpful role in the broader dispute resolution aspect of the India-Pakistan relationship. And that I would chalk up to three reasons that I think have been true for a long time and which persist. The first, bluntly, India and Pakistan are inclined to play the United States, or I think any other mediator should that mediator try to involve itself. So going from a bilateral India-Pakistan relationship to a trilateral, say, US-India-Pakistan relationship actually distracts the two principal parties from their own dispute in unhelpful ways. Secondly, I believe that both India and Pakistan will always care more about their dispute than the United States will. And beyond that, that the United States has a number of other concerns with respect to India and Pakistan that it will always want to focus on more than the India-Pakistan dispute, except in the moment of crisis, as Moid points out. The third point would be that I think that at this stage in India-Pakistan history, the solution, the mathematical equation solution to their disagreement is not as much in question as maybe it once was. I think that most of us in this room could probably sketch out something along the lines of a soft-border solution, something near to what, say, President Musharraf was negotiating when he was in power, and that this is basically the intellectual resolution of a long-standing dispute. So the solution is not the question, but preparing the publics and creating the political space for that solution to actually take shape on the ground. That's the challenge. And that's not an American challenge. That's an Indian challenge, and a Pakistani challenge. There's not much we can do about it. All right, so that's my thoughts on dispute resolution. Second question was, what's changed since Mumbai? And I would note four things here. First, since Mumbai, and I think at the time of Mumbai, the US tilt, you might say, toward India has, if anything, become more pronounced. And it has persisted into the era of Narendra Modi being in office. And Modi himself has, despite the fact, or at the same time as Modi himself, is, I think, seen as a more hawkish, less owlish character than his predecessor, Prime Minister Singh. And so all of those things have, I think, changed the dynamics slightly, perhaps more than slightly, in the region. Second point, during that same period, US frustration with Pakistan has grown. And I think there's no doubt about that. And particularly after the raid on the bin Laden compound and all of the aftermath surrounding that, perhaps things are marginally better now than they were in 2010, 2011, 2012, between the United States and Pakistan. But by and large, the relationship is worse than it was even at the time of Mumbai. Third, although Pakistan has taken, I would say, significant and harsh steps against domestic insurgents, principally the TTP, there is, to my eye, no discernible change on anti-Indian groups, this Pakistani state relationship to those groups. Now, I am told by various Pakistani officials that there is a change, but I said there's no discernible change. That is, from the outside, it's very hard to tell that the Pakistani state is taking serious actions against these groups. All of this makes India, I think, even less patient than it was at the time of Mumbai. And it also reduces, because Pakistan hasn't taken more steps against groups like La Shkari Taiba or Jaisi Muhammad, because Pakistan hasn't taken those steps, I think it reduces the US credibility as a guarantor that Pakistan might take these steps in the future. That is, if there is another crisis and if the United States approaches India and says, we can get the Pakistanis to crack down on these groups, there is even less reason for the Pakistanis to believe it this time than they might have believed it in 2008 or they might have believed it in 2001, 2002. Last of the four points here. I would say the other big change is the China factor. China is more active in Pakistan now than it was even in 2008. And that appears to be growing as we speak. And I believe that China's enhanced ambition as a regional diplomatic partner may make it even more likely to play more of a leadership role the next time that there is a crisis. Not necessarily even just a leadership role behind the scenes, but may actually push it out in front. Now this is something that Chinese have been by and large reluctant to do on all fronts. But what we're seeing in Afghanistan, what we're seeing with respect to China's relationship with Pakistan is something new. It's unprecedented and perhaps the next time there's a crisis, we would see the Chinese jump to the fore. Okay, next question. Indian and Pakistani options. Now I'm not sure about Indian and Pakistani options so I'm gonna change the question a little bit. And say that as far as I can tell, India and Pakistan are aligned at the moment in their tactical interest in diplomacy. But neither one has a serious expectation of any sort of breakthrough agreement with the other. So the timing is interesting because you have probably a two year stretch ahead of us. I mean, nobody can predict, but maybe a two year stretch of relatively solid leadership on both sides. That is, we don't expect elections too soon. We don't expect either side to necessarily be disrupted politically. And during that time, I think we can, all things equal, anticipate that tactical diplomacy is in the cards. This is because for India, I believe it's quite useful for India to maintain a position of a moral high ground to show that it's open to peace, both to the United States and to the rest of the international community to its own people. And I think that a tactical diplomatic overture with Pakistan is something that can always be turned off. So there's limited cost to India. And as we've seen just over the recent months, we can see India calibrating that in response to this most recent attack. On the Pakistani side, I would say there's also a tactical interest in talks with India. And this is principally related to the fact that Pakistan is deployed heavily in its fight against TTP on its Western front. And so at the moment, there is no doubt that Pakistan would prefer to avoid a hot war with India. At the same time, there is no doubt in my mind that Pakistani and senior Indian leaders see no reason to trust the other as a true partner for peace. There is no structural change. There is no sense. As far as I can tell in conversations that there's any reduction in hostility or skepticism or concern about what the other side is actually plotting against them. All right, last question. Policy recommendations for the United States. First one, I've got three big ones. The first one would be stick with dehyphenation. I'm sure all of you are familiar with this notion that the United States should dehyphenate the India-Pakistan relationship. That is, pursue strong relationships with both countries independently and not be held hostage by their mutual hostility. I mentioned earlier a somewhat greater tilt of the United States toward India. I think this is going to continue for a variety of reasons, but I don't think that it necessarily negates the possibility of a close US relationship with Pakistan or at least an attempt to get back to a closer one. Now, I think it's important in the context of a crisis management for the United States to not be perceived, certainly by Pakistan or by India, as being firmly in the other's camp. And this is true as not just, we're not going to be strictly neutral, but there should be a desire to retain some ability or leverage with both sides. And as currently, as the US Congress debates things like the F-16 deal with the Pakistanis, which we're seeing firmly in the context of AFPAC and our direct bilateral relationship with Pakistan, we may also want to see it as a part of our desire to maintain leverage with the Pakistanis in other contexts, including the Indian one. Now, I'm not convinced that's the best argument for selling F-16s, but I do think that in our relationship with Pakistan, we need to be thinking about points of leverage, points of influence, not just in the Afghan context. Second policy recommendation, following directly from my observation that China has a greater role in the region, the United States needs to factor China into all of its calculations for regional diplomacy and the United States should increasingly factor India, Pakistan and South Asia into its broader diplomacy with China. That is when we have a strategic and economic dialogue talks with the Chinese, India and Pakistan and South Asia ought to be brought into that more significantly. And I think that it's important in part because there is a concern in my mind that the India-Pakistan conflict could increasingly become a point of tension or friction between the United States and China. And both Washington and Beijing have a desire to avoid that, to mitigate that and to work possibly, I think, through the creation of a standing trilateral organization or even quadrilateral organization, that is US, China, India, possibly also Pakistan. An organization like that would help, if it were around, to allow us to deal with crisis management in the moment. All right, last point. I'm gonna leave this mainly to Polly because as Muid mentioned, she has written with Michael two excellent books on crisis management. But there is a kind of a standard playbook for American diplomats of how to deal with crises in South Asia. And at the very least, they should read Polly and Michael's work. They should have them come brief them. But whatever they do, when a new generation of US policymakers comes in, particularly with the next administration here in Washington, they need to review this history because their counterparts on the opposite side will know this history, perhaps will have lived this history themselves, be very familiar with it, and the US side will be at a serious disadvantage if they're not equally familiar with it. And I'll leave it there. Thanks. Thanks, sir. Thank you for those comments. And it's great to be here, to descend from the Ivory Tower at Yale University to be back in Washington DC, particularly for this important subject. And I don't have the deep farm policy area expertise in this region of the world that Daniel has or the intensive study of all of these crises that Polly has brought to the table, as well as Ambassador Schaefer. But I have the sort of perspective of a younger person and a staff level at the State Department in Mumbai in 2008, working with Don Camp and others who I see in the audience, and then having some time to have since reflected on that, been back teaching and working on the Yale campus since around 2009 or so. I did not get fired because of the Mumbai crisis, although it was a transitional point. And again, we sort of find ourselves, again, with the recent Air Force Base attacks, the recent bombing of the Indian consulate in Masri Sharif, again, sort of right before an election in a similar circumstance. And I think it's worth thinking about the parallels to 2008, but as well as the parallels that maybe go back further than that that I'm sure Polly can elaborate on. It strikes me that sort of each flare-up that the United States confronts in India-Pakistan relations follows a very eerily similar playbook. It does sort of march to the beat of the same drum. I don't think that I, at the time, was sort of thinking about previous crises, reading, having the time to sort of have that intellectual capital in mind, working with Ambassador John Negropani and others. But even then, you still see a similar playbook follow-out, which to me suggests that there really is an opportunity to sort of step back and think about, could there be another way to do this again? And in some ways, I think we've been sort of hamstrung by our own success in sort of pushing things back to the status quo without being able to sort of strategically think about what the next step could be to maybe take this relationship in a different direction. The playbook, I would say, goes kind of like this, I'm sure Polly will correct me. There's an act of terrorism, there's an attack of some kind in Kashmir or India proper. There's a bellicose accusation from India get leveled against Pakistan. Maybe there's some form of complicity by elements of the Pakistani state, it's not entirely clear. Everyone goes on high alert, everyone kind of rushes to try to understand what's going on, and then folks like me have their Thanksgiving ruined in 2008, for which my family has never entirely forgiven me for, but progress on all sort of issues grind to a halt. You're in a kind of fog of war moment where you're trying to understand what exactly is happening. The American side will rush to sort of put out a statement of sorrow to make a call for justice, to make an appeal for calm, and then of course all the past accusations come up, the historical animosities reemerge, the desire for vengeance percolates, and everyone sort of wants to try to make something of this situation in a way that on the whole probably would not end up in the great place. And so everyone sort of drops everything. U.S. officials actively engage all their counterparts, they start to flock to the region in droves, they stress the importance of cooperation of shared interests, and countering violent extremism. Pressure is exerted on Pakistan to take serious demonstrable efforts to crack down on militants, to end this task that support, at least task support for militant groups, and the same is done with the messaging on India. This is a time for India to really emerge to its great power status on the world stage. This is a time to sort of try to think about how to put this issue with Pakistan on the back burner as you look towards your true challenges to the East with China instead of the North. Maybe there's a special envoy or someone senior deputized to make these discussions happen depending on how strong the crisis intensifies. Whether it's 1990 where you saw Bob Gates and Richard Haas play this role, whether it was Richard Armitage and Secretary Powell in the aftermath of 9-11, or whether it was the John Nagar Panis and Condi Rice's of the world in 2008. Somehow cooler heads seem to prevail. You see Pakistan take what looks at least to be some measures. Maybe they're serious, maybe they're not, but they're certainly, they're substantive enough that it can sort of push everyone back to give space to take a break. And maybe these measures will only last for a year or one to five years in the case of Mumbai where you now finally see about five years later, you see one of the masterminds, Mr. Lakhi, now released out on bail. But at the moment it looks like a success. And so I think here in sort of lies the challenge where you can pull back from the brink and everyone takes a sigh of relief. And the question is whether this really is a victory. Whether U.S. diplomacy has in fact saved the day. Should we be patting ourselves on the back for those sorts of efforts? Was it luck, was it skill? Would Pakistan and India have arrived at a similar scenario anyway, even without the United States scrambling? And that's also worth thinking about in the current environment for sure. And the question is I think this challenge between crisis management and dispute resolution. When the dust settles, every crisis has been kind of managed so you can take a sigh of relief, you can go back and take a look at what your other policy priorities were. But the question is whether on the dispute resolution front has an opportunity been missed or has it not been sort of fully explored? And you saw this in Mumbai in particular, I think from my perspective, at the end of the Bush administration, really the full transition in play already at that point in 2008, where new teams coming on board, eager to re-look at the situation, there's always a break and a lull where you wanna reassess and recalibrate. And that becomes a challenge and it'll become a challenge I suspect now in thinking about this latest Air Force incident and the attack on the Indian consulate in Afghanistan. What are the priorities of the Obama administration's foreign policy team at the moment and what's achievable in just the last year or so? And I think it's gonna be hard to sort of say that a sort of full effort to sort of reevaluate US-Pakistan or US-India or US-Pakistan-India relations is really something that's feasible. So this strikes me as a crisis that has always been, had terrible opportunities in timing. And I always wonder, at least in the Mumbai attacks, had something like that occurred earlier or had something like that occurred during a time when President Musharraf was still empowering and sort of fully in command of the military and the ISI and where he was at least at a period prior to some of his very foolish domestic moves where it really led him to lose power. But he had moved to a point where the India-Pakistan crisis was as close to being resolved on Kashmir as it's ever been. And the question is sort of how did that happen? And was that an opportunity that was somehow missed or squandered between the crises, between the so-called Twin Peaks crisis and the Mumbai crisis? And so if that was a period where it looked like some activity was happening that actually was very positive, could that be a period that should have been focused on again between 2008 and now? And could we now, and then even if you look to now towards the next crisis, five years from now, the question is sort of will that again be a period where we're really thinking about the dispute resolution or not? I would say during Mumbai, the Bush administration strategy had three parts to it. The first was to persuade India not to employ any military options. And this was a not an easy task. And again, the challenge becomes sort of separating the public rhetoric from the private action. And everyone has a rush to make a strong statement, to wanna do something serious, to show that you are treating this threat with the severity that it deserves. But privately, there was a great deal of high level communication in our government to try to assure the Indians that the maximum pressure would be exerted against Pakistan to try to stave off some sort of Indian action. I don't think the Indians were of the mind in 2008 that they truly wanted any sort of military confrontation which would have had a disastrous effect, but the public pressure was high and the time for miscalculation was also high. There was a lot of information that was in the press that was or wasn't clear about Indian intentions, things about Indian troop movements can also be discerned and interpreted in a variety of different ways, depending on what the actual intentions truly are. And even this was an incident that was prone to pranksters as Secretary Rice writes about in her book. And as Don Camp will remember, this sort of hoax call from Foreign Minister Mukherjee during this crisis was not Foreign Minister Mukherjee, but too many people thought that it actually might have been. And again, it was a scenario where there wasn't a possibility for grave miscalculation or other people with nefarious intentions to really alter the course of what was happening. Part two was to compel the Pakistanis to arrest the perpetrators and to launch a sort of broader crackdown against LET. And here it was very much tied to number two. And I think this was a sort of assurance given to the Indians at the time by the United States that they would in fact take a very serious stance against Pakistan, push them as hard as we could at that time to really think about could LET be sort of treated on the same strategic plane as Al Qaeda or as the Taliban, at least the Taliban that the Pakistanis were serious about fighting in the Fatah region. And here I think there was some movement on Pakistan, a recognition that at least something had to be done. And again, we can sort of talk about whether that was truly a strategic shift or kind of more of a tactical calculation to buy time on their part as a result of what happened. But Pakistan did take actions against LET at that time. There were raids against camps. There were closing downs of offices. Mr. Lakhvi himself was put in jail. Certain people were put under house arrest. There was action pursued at the United Nations to make LET really on par with Al Qaeda in terms of the global effort to crack down on their finances and other activities. And again, at the moment, this sort of seemed like a huge success. And the question is, you know, was it truly a success now with the benefit of hindsight? And again, the question is whether it's sort of really was a strategic shift on the part of Pakistan or whether it was a sort of a tactical area effort to again just sort of get back to the status quo. It was a sort of way out for Pakistan to sort of bring themselves back to kind of where the situation was prior to the Mumbai attacks. And again, the relationship here in Pakistan between civil military relations is just so fundamental to trying to understand the government and the sort of process of Pakistani national security decision-making. I think one of the challenges that, at least from my perspective, folks struggled with at that time was this was sort of very soon after the Musharraf transition in Pakistan. And so it was very hard to sort of understand the relationship between Zidari and Qayani and how some, you know, who the levers of pressure were. And even though this sort of was changing in Pakistan in 2008, there was still a very strong security connection between the United States and Pakistan and military intelligence ties. And so this was a sort of lever that people like Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, and others were really able to exert pressure on. And so that sort of military to military relationship did prove very persuasive, for least from my perspective, in changing the thinking of Pakistan to sort of understand that some actions needed to be taken against LAT. And again, I think similar to what Daniel was just saying, there are questions now about whether that military to military tie would be effective at all in the current environment, following the bin Laden raid, following the fallout in relations that you have seen. Although there has been recovery in that area, I would say in the last two years, again, there's a challenge of whether or not that sort of level of influence on Pakistan or an assurance to India that that could happen, that the US could try to really try hard on this, whether that could really be given credibly at this juncture in a sort of similar scenario. And I guess I would say part three of the strategy was to sort of facilitate a cross-border law enforcement investigation and to sort of try to frame the actual attacks in Mumbai as an opportunity for some form of collaboration on trying to figure out what happened and to sort of open lines of communication between the security services, not with Pakistan and India talking to each other, but with the United States sort of being a sort of central repository for information and investigation of the attack that both India and Pakistan could share with the United States. This was something that John Negarpane, I think was sort of naturally inclined to, given his previous position as Director of National Intelligence, this idea that sort of intelligence or law enforcement exchange could sort of try to get the Mumbai attack into the box of a kind of traditional form of investigating a crime or thinking about this as an act of terrorism, but one that should be investigated. And could there be a way that the Indians and the Pakistanis could focus on it from that perspective in a way to maybe tone down the rhetoric and to encourage at least a slightly a little bit more space to maneuver? This had modest success from the purpose of the actual law enforcement investigation, but I do think it had some success in terms of getting people focused on the sort of technical aspects of trying to figure out what happened. Demonstrate India's putting effort into demonstrating proof in this case of the training of these operatives on Pakistani soil, of debriefing the captives, sharing those debriefings with both sides. Did it actually help sort of bring anyone to justice? Not necessarily, I don't think, but it did, I think, have this effect of still making it a law enforcement investigation, something that was sort of handled by career professionals instead of politicians. And I think it did give some space for maneuvering on the political front as a result. Again, in the current climate, I'm not sure that a law enforcement investigation or something like that after an attack would even be a conceivable option to think about. And so I think not only have our relations with Pakistan on that front declined, but I also think that our relations with India, the sort of Indian willingness for the United States to pursue this with Pakistan, and to that be enough, I worry that that had been challenged in the current environment. So when you think of this question of lessons learned, I'm on one hand, I think it was a success to sort of not have the Mumbai crisis rise to the level that it potentially could have. I do think there are questions about whether or not the U.S. role was sort of truly determinative in the crisis. Again, that's a proposition that I would prefer not to test, so I would not like to sort of remove the U.S. role from the next crisis and sort of see if that can be solved on its own. And I tend to think that sort of active U.S. involvement, messaging on both sides is important in the next iteration of whatever the crisis will be, but I think the longer-term challenge of can the underlying dispute be addressed will remain a question. And again, there's always a sort of tendency after the crisis is solved to sort of move on to the next thing that was already your priority. And no one is saying that the dispute resolution on Kashmir would be easy by any means. And I'm not truly optimistic for anything near-term, but this would seemingly need to be an area, I think, that requires continued engagement and consultation and thinking about the right way to proceed and really analyzing what it was that brought India and Pakistan so close to a deal before Musharraf's time tenure in Pakistan ended. Why did that actually happen? Could that have been nurtured further? Could those situations or underlying conditions be developed again after the next crisis would seem to me to be an area of inquiry? And I would really welcome everyone's thoughts. So thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Ted. Thank you. My colleagues on the panel, including Moeid, have already touched on a lot of very important aspects of this issue. So what I'm going to try to do is fill in around the edges and make some slightly different points from the same basic stories. So let me first just say that I don't think, in spite of the fact that we've all talked about Kashmir at more times than I can even enumerate, that Kashmir is now the sticking point between India and Pakistan. I think its resolution is symbolically potentially valuable, but that's about the limit of it. I think the bad feeling between India and Pakistan could is neither necessarily resolved by addressing the specifics of the Kashmir issue, nor sufficiently addressed by doing so. So I do think that that's a point perhaps worth making. The second thing is I wanted to add to what my colleagues have said, something that I think is quite important, which is that even in the 0102 crisis and certainly in the 08 crisis, a very important part of US approach was to get other countries on board and to bring them into the discussion and into coordinated diplomacy. And in fact, in both of those crises, the players were not just our US traditional US allies, but also countries that are not traditional US allies. And I would specifically mention China in both of those. In 0102, the Chinese accepted to become a part of a plan to have flying diplomats and officials from various countries going in and out of the two capitals and also raising these issues with representatives of those governments in other locales. So this was really tightly coordinated. The theory in 0102 explicitly was that as long as you had these flying representatives coming in and out, there would not be a war. No, that's a questionable assumption going forward. But the idea was that another would want to be responsible for impairing the safety of these officials and that as long as they had this kind of global attention riveted on them and directed to them, they would not want to be seen as the bad guys. So that would be exercise a certain amount of restraint. And I think that was probably true in the 0102 conflict. But I do want to mention the importance of China in 0102, perhaps a little less so in 08 for a variety of reasons, but still involved and I think going forward. And it's worth mentioning in regard to both 0102 and 08 that the Chinese took the view, and it seems to me to have been extremely helpful, in dealing with Pakistan that if Pakistan was going to have attacks mounted from its soil without arguing about complicity or sponsorship or even going any further, then Pakistan should expect China, which itself has issues with Islamist militancy on its soil to take a very hard line view and to vote in UN Security Council and elsewhere for the banning of various groups that are associated with Pakistan at least geographically. So I think the Chinese and private have been quite firm on these issues for their own reasons. And however much Pakistan may benefit from that relationship on this issue, there hasn't been a whole lot of daylight between the US and its allies and China. So I actually foresee continued collaboration on that, should there be another crisis? But I get ahead of myself. Let me just say a few words about the forms of US crisis management that were adopted and what their prospects are in the future. I mentioned that the shuttle diplomacy in a sense was playing for time, but playing for time can be an important form of negotiation because it in, especially if one assumes as the US did in 0102 that the window for a cold start type Indian operation in response to the attack on parliament was quite limited that once Pakistan had deployed its military forces along the international border in response to India's deployment, that window of military advantage would be close. So those were two very important assumptions and they were related. In the first crisis, the only real players from the US side who were coordinating and guiding this whole effort were two senior State Department officials, General Powell and Richard Armitage. And part of the reason why that was the case and why they had the lead with very little competition was the timing of the 0102 attack, which was right after the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. So the entire US senior policy establishment was completely preoccupied with what was happening in neighboring Afghanistan. And in a sense, that's a much broader and more general issue, which is in any given crisis who manages it will depend in part on what else is going on. There's only so much bandwidth as it's been described at the top levels of any government and that US government is no exception. The common wisdom is that at the presidential level, there's only room in the inbox for two and a half crises. And once you get beyond that, you're not primarily dealing with the presidential inbox. You have to delegate the management of a crisis to some other places. And that's precisely what I think both these two lead diplomats would say, that the reason why they were there, why they were in the lead was in part because they could be spared because Operation Enduring Freedom was heavily a military operation at that point. The military was tied down, intelligence was tied down with what was happening in Afghanistan because US troops were going in. But it's also worth mentioning since I think we are all critical of the idea of crisis management as an episodic kind of intervention that in 0102 and even more perhaps in 08, the diplomacy was that the shuttle diplomacy was built on existing ties. So in fact, that was a prerequisite for having any effect. Individuals had to have a pre-existing ties. You can't show up in somebody's office with a message as a complete newbie. And one of the advantages of our recycling, not only diplomats, but also senior officials over time from one government to another, is that there is some familiarity. There's something in the interpersonal side to build on. Now, some of the similarities between the 0102 crisis and 08 were because it was effectively the same government. We were dealing in both cases with the Bush administration. And so there was in fact a learning curve. The same people were involved or at least had been in the front row. And so we had a learning curve. I've always been more skeptical that a learning curve could take place from one administration to another. And I remain skeptical of that. But I would say, I think that the transition because this issue occurred right before a presidential transition between the Bush administration in the handling of this set to in 0809 and the first Obama administration was exceptional. In fact, I think it may have been, it may have set a record in the degree of consultation back and forth, the helpfulness of the outgoing administration and the receptivity of the incoming administration. Very unusual on both counts. A lot of, to be very candid, a lot of outgoing administrations, especially if there's a change of parties are not terribly inclined to give a hand. And a lot of incoming administrations say, you guys have nothing to tell us. We're the new game in town and we'll do it our way, thank you anyway. But in fact, that didn't happen and there was a very smooth transition. So that's an exemplary aspect of this crisis management. I think regarding, I do agree again that episodic crisis management could be problematic. But I would point out that the strategic dialogues have attempted to build a framework for U.S. relations with both India and Pakistan and that that is meant to be, I believe, a springboard for managing whatever comes up that might affect either one of those countries where the U.S. might play a role. I wanted to mention some differences between the two crises. One of them has to do with technology. The 08 crisis was the first one in which a lot of the initial information about what had happened in Mumbai came from social media. Now that can be a plus or a minus and it was both. There was misinformation and good information but that's where a lot of the information came from. Quite revolutionary fashion. In a similarity to 0102 was that in both cases U.S. attention was focused on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and in the case of Mumbai, again this attack as in Delhi and 0102 really shook people because they were paying absolutely no attention to this possibility. And that goes again to the issue of bandwidth and how many things you can focus on. Another aspect in 08 was a concern that before the analysis of the forensic evidence that pointed clearly to Lashkar-e-Taiba operating from Pakistani soil in the 08 attack in Mumbai that the, I'm actually gonna let that thought go, midstream. What happened in Dhaka was that Bangladesh became very concerned before that forensic information was analyzed that the attack could have originated or had some connection with Bangladesh and they, as a result, their eagerness to help in resolving terrorism issues with India went up. It went up first tactically because they were concerned that they might turn out to have had some kind of tie to the attack in Mumbai and then more strategically as they realized it could happen in the future. So 0102 could be tied to Pakistan but what if a future attack were tied to groups in Bangladesh? On the technology side, the digital connectivity within the US and between the US government in Washington and the US embassies and other parts of the US mission. In India and in Pakistan made for a totally different style of decision making during the 08 crisis. One we could certainly count on seeing in the future and that was where the involvement and the inputs real time from people in the field who were talking to different interlocutors and had different pieces of knowledge was very effective. So you could actually have ambassadors taking part. You could have ambassadors bringing other people to the video teleconference real time and this changed the dynamic and will in the future, I think, if assuming that that approach is welcome to the next administrations. The technology certainly exists. There are common elements like the formation of task forces all over the government but there was one another extraordinary development that I think will probably hold true in the future. It'd be replicated and that was a crisis management cell that was based at the Department of Defense and that brought in on a daily basis, the relevant players from State Department of Defense, Intelligence, et cetera, across the globe to bring information and observations from all parts of the US government so that they were shared real time equally with everyone from diplomats to military at S.H.A.S. Now, one thing that didn't change between the first and the second crisis that I think requires perhaps a slightly different approach is there was no plan B, there was no backup plan because people, as it's been described to me, jumped on their bikes and pedaled like mad and didn't have another plan. And that brings me to yet another question which is what if the next crisis bears no resemblance to this one? My colleagues have raised a number of possibilities including the possibility that the US role might not be so welcome but let me raise a couple of others. One is the US might decide not to play this role. That seems improbable in the face of it but I would point out that after the 01-02 crisis, the return to diplomatic talks between India and Pakistan was initiated without US intervention. In fact, the parties themselves decided it was time to do this. And that could happen again. In fact, the US might want to encourage it because one of the points raised by my colleagues here is that the US in a sense has been a bit of a direct object. And the question is, is that actually helpful when both sides are playing to the US? Is that actually a good way to go about pushing them to assume more responsibility for their own relationship? They are after all both mature countries with a great deal of capability and experienced diplomats. If the US is sitting at the table talking to them, if the US in fact is a player, there are several suggestions Americans might make privately at least. One is how about direct military to military ties, you guys, since you seem to get into it? How about using all the confidence-building measures that you have in place and not leaving them in case they might be needed at some future time? How about not breaking off talks from either side when the going gets tough? That's just when you need to be in dialogue. It's very hard sometimes to persuade people not to delink when the going is tough and when they're angry. But it seems as though it might have some potential. On the US side, contingency planning. There is a lot of contingency planning in various parts of the US government, but there are two things I would point out. One is if the contingency planning doesn't involve the people who actually will have to make decisions in the heat of the moment, then a lot of it is wasted unless you can do brain transfers because contingency planning involves thinking about how you would actually go about realistically with the limitations of competing issues of the realities of what you can and cannot do or what the US doesn't, doesn't want to do in particular circumstances. And really, nobody except the principals can do that. As to what type of crisis is involved, I would make a clear distinction between forecasting and contingency planning. You don't actually have to have a clue what a real contingency might look like, but what you do have to do is assume that whatever has happened in the past is not going to happen in the future. If it's the same crisis again, we already have, as some people have called it and still call it, a playbook. So there's a grab bag of things that the US has done in the past can do in the future, has done elsewhere that we can draw on. But what we need to be thinking about is a situation in which perhaps there's not a terrorist attack. Maybe there's some other sort of provocation. After all, ultimately it's the perception of malice that really has led to most of the problems between any pair of countries you can think of that are not getting along. So apart from having a more explicit plan B, perhaps, a lot of the key elements have already been covered. I would just end perhaps with what Secretary Rice said when Michael Crippon and I interviewed her by phone. And that is, no matter how sound the bilateral relationship, you have to show up. It's still about personal diplomacy. It's about a sense that you will be listened to and heard whether or not the US and other countries agree with you is another matter. I'll stop here. And we can pick up anything else in Q and A. Thank you. Thanks, Polly, and thanks to Dan and Ted as well. Let me open it up. And for questions, let me first recognize though Dr. Stephen Cohen, who has done a book on Title IV crises and a peace process, if I'm not wrong, looking at exactly this issue of India-Pakistan crises and then the peace process that got so close, but not. So, Steve, why don't we start with you? And then I'll ask Ambassador Tehsi Sheffer if she would want to add something in there. Let me just make a few points, especially building on something Polly said. First of all, there's no such thing as an agreed upon definition of crisis. It's a very subjective term. So crisis management, two subjective terms, glued together. In 1987, during the brass tax crisis, which I saw very close up, the US government didn't think there was a crisis. And that tricked the American intelligence community into ignoring the next crisis, which the Indians in Pakistan didn't think was a crisis. We took it too seriously. They didn't take it seriously enough, or whatever. So there was a highly subjective judgment. And I think this is something we ought to worry about. As Polly said, you don't know what the next crisis is going to look like. In 87, it was the Indians who actually wanted to have a crisis, and there were other times too. And in both cases, in both countries, there have been military adventurers, usually on their own, which would go over the line and create a mini-crisis. Sometimes we don't know about it. So I think that's important to understand that the notion of crisis is not a developed notion. USID ought to look at this. Yes, and you deal with crisis all the time. What is a crisis? There's no such thing. There's no greed upon definition of crisis other than a state of alignment. Well, we were aligned, but the South Asians were. Secondly, I think that I agree with Steve Cole that we can't just allow Kashmir to be up to the South Asians themselves. It will affect all of us if there's another big Kashmir, whether it's Kashmir or not Kashmir. Kashmir is both the cause and the consequence of Indian-Pakistan conflict. So I would not dismiss this as something we can stand by and watch happen as bystander. And of course, Ambassador Tezi Sheffer, if we could get that and then we'll open it up. But let me just remind everybody that we've talked about O-102 and Mumbai just two months ago. We were very close to something else. An attack in India on an air base in Pathan Court, which could or could not have become a crisis, didn't. And we have no real answer, why not? And so I think that's a very valid point, Ambassador. Thank you very much, Moid. I'm actually gonna give the mic to Howie when I finish because we have written as a package deal, actually two books that are relevant to this. One, The U.S. Negotiates with Pakistan, which was published by USIP. And the other, which will be out in three weeks time called India at the Global High Table, which covers essentially the same negotiating themes, but with a more complicated story. There's so much that you have said that is valuable and that I would like to in some cases argue with but much more often sort of expand, but I won't. I wanted to pick up a little bit on Ted's comments on Mumbai. A couple of things didn't really come out that much during your account because you had limited time. First, of the three elements of the Bush administration's strategy that you outlined, I think the one that had the greatest impact on the political relations between the US and the regional countries was the third. And that was a test for the United States, which we came through, I would say, with mixed results. Law enforcement? Law enforcement, yes. We did succeed in facilitating law enforcement on the other hand, the Indians were very upset that we weren't willing to hand over headly. Both sides in the Mumbai crisis, in the Kargil crisis of 1998, in 2002, in 1990, on each of these occasions, both India and Pakistan welcomed a climb down. The crisis in which the risk of Indian military action was strongest was of course, Mumbai. In that case, I think the reason they didn't was heavily because they had bad military options. So, moving to the critical distinction that several of you raised between crisis management and dispute settlement, I think in order to make that rather large leap, the countries in the region have to be persuaded that they actually need dispute settlement. To do it themselves or to have somebody else do it, but that they need an it. And I'm not persuaded that that's the case. You also need strong governments in both places. Neither of which is in the gift of the United States. So in the early stages, I think the role for the United States in so far as there is one is a much more sort of discursive and separate, well for the US government I should say, is a much more discursive and separate one, talking about what's the logic of this situation continuing as far as the eye can see, without trying to turn that into a peace process. My final point is what Ted described so beautifully was the US government going into activist mode. The scurrying around the frenetic phone calls, those task forces in the ops center, then nobody getting any sleep, been there. The activism I think drives both the Indians and the Pakistanis slightly nuts. And one of the many things that we need to manage, and by the way I completely agree with Dan's points on history. We found that in both the books we did. But what we also need to manage is our, now we're gonna wait in and fix everything. Posture, we gotta at least find a better way to express that. That's it, quickly, and then we'll move on. Thank you and thank you very much for the nice comments about my book on Kashmir. Now somewhat dated, I mentioned that it's dating because in that book I recommended that the US play some role in the piece. Could you hold the mic for a second? The US play some role in the piece process. That it develops some ideas which you can bounce off either side, it would not sit down at the table with them. Of course, that's the last thing they would want in any event. But it would be somewhat involved. And Obama himself, when he was running for president for the first time in 2008, recommended that here was a situation in Kashmir in which the US could play a helpful role in bringing this problem to solution. You'll notice that his time went on in his administration. This initial enthusiasm dropped off and in fact it was noted when he last visited Delhi, he didn't mention Kashmir at all. And I think you can say it's off the agenda. Now, the opportunity for a US role in the overall settlement of Kashmir or the general list of problems that India and Pakistan face depend very much as Taze has said on the strength of the governments in Islamabad and New Delhi and their willingness to do something towards bringing about a settlement. I think a big reason that progress was made in 2007 when Musharraf was still at the height of his power was that he did have this strength and he weakness, it seems to me, was on the other side at that time. Then he ran into political difficulties at home and no longer could bargain from that position of strength. So right now I have to agree I do not see much possibility of progress either with the United States' assistance or without it on either side. I don't see, and this would of course affect the way the two countries dealt with a crisis management issue, I don't see any significant lobby for peace in India for a settlement with Pakistan in India. Indeed, over-enthusiasm for a settlement with Pakistan could be politically dangerous for an Indian politician. You don't find any idea of the kind of risk taking which would be necessary and which would of course also play a role in the way conflict management situations were affected. I'll stop there. Thank you, thanks Ambassador. As I saw the hands, Dana right here and we'll come to all of you, hopefully. Thanks very much Moeid, thanks for organizing this panel. I wonder if I could ask perhaps Dan but others mentioned China in this context. I think that's very important to look at. I mean here's a country that is obviously exerting its diplomacy a lot more. Most people look at the South China Sea side but let's focus on our particular region we're looking at here. What do you see sort of China's interests not only in the diplomatic side but frankly in the economic and business, the industrial promotion side there and their ability frankly to write checks that they really can cash. And the second thing is no one and to me maybe I've answered my own question. Nobody talked about Sark. Nobody talked about the Sark Summit. Nobody talked about that it's in September, it's in Islamabad. The two big prime ministers said they're gonna meet. No discussion of that. Is the answer to my question, it doesn't matter? And let's also not forget that not only is China and the US observers but other places like Japan and other countries are going to be presumably in Islamabad. Could you folks help explain kind of those connections? We're gonna collect two or three questions and then we'll go back. So David, I saw you and I'll try and come too. Question that takes a little bit different tack. And you've been talking very much from the historical perspective and seeing the US view of the US role as something that almost seems unchanging. But I would suggest that there's a reasonable probability, I just read this article in the Atlantic that everybody should be reading, that the US may not be playing the kind of role that has played in the past, that a withdrawn United States, a US that is standing on the sidelines might be what India and Pakistan face. And the question is, does that make a difference? Should India and Pakistan be preparing for a crisis where the US doesn't step in and play the role that you all have described at playing in the past? Thanks, David. One of the challenges is we'll only find out when it happens, that's the danger. Yes. I come from an area that has been touched upon here. I feel very much at home in the tribal area of Pakistan, between Pakistan and Afghanistan. And I have family on both sides of the border. So for me, my work has been mostly concentrated on the Northern and Western border of Pakistan. One of the greatest problems I have had is we use acronyms and we talk about policies that don't quite resonate with people on the ground, whether in the US or in Pakistan or in India or Afghanistan. And I will never forget the words of an Afghan general who once said that his biggest problem is that even though you sit in these huge big meetings and you have these huge big things that go on for days and days and days, in actual fact, he's shouting against the wind. He said, I cannot pick up a telephone and call a counterpart in America and say, Bill, Bob, Steve, John, whoever you are, let's for goodness sake try and solve and resolve something at a lower level. So people like myself tried to actually bring together businesswomen with businesswomen because I gave up on the men. And I brought, you know, female doctors and got them to meet with, you know, medical communities. Why aren't we trying to do something at that very community oriented level which can then help to facilitate something at the higher levels? Thank you. So, Pauli, would you want to start with any? Sure. I'd be happy to just start addressing those. First, to Tazie's and Howie's comments about strong governments and each cap required and each capital in order to move forward with any kind of resolution. I think that is absolutely true. But consider the possibility, because I am contingency planning minded, that one or both of those governments is strong but not of a mind to go to settlement. We might, strength is not always a plus. It depends on whether it's disposed or not to negotiate some kind of more pleasant end to things than we've had so far. So while I agree with that, I also think that that's not a sufficient definition. The SARC summit. I think of all the venues for, it's as good a venue as any for a bilateral summit on the side. But frankly, those can occur on the side of any meeting anywhere. And I think you did put your finger on the fact that SARC itself isn't the most promising place for such a meeting. That in fact, unless India and Pakistan resolve their differences over trade and actually move forward in a big way, SARC is somewhat confined to resolving non-issues in the economic integration of South Asia, because the two of the major players are not players. So we'll have to move on. OK. So the question that David raised about should India and Pakistan be preparing for a no US role situation. I did raise earlier the possibility that the US, for any number of reasons, would stand down, including the empowerment of the parties themselves and removing Washington as a target of diplomacy and other maneuvering on both sides. I think it's possible that that might not be a destructive move on the part of the US. But I do think that you're right that should the US decide not to operate according to its past practices, it would be very wise for the two parties to have prepared. So you get no disagreement from me very briefly regarding trying to resolve things on the ground. I believe our aid program is one of the official US efforts at improving life for real people where they are. How effective it is, I'll leave to other people to judge, but it's not really the focus of our discussion today. Let me just pick up a couple of things. The last bit about US leadership. I think that I'm not inclined to believe that the next American president is going to absent the United States from an India-Pakistan crisis, but I'm willing to play the game and imagine that. And there are two things that jump to mind immediately in terms of where the gaps are likely to be. The first is on basic communications and intelligence sharing. So in the heat of the crisis, can the two sides talk to each other effectively? And do they see a similar picture of reality? And without an American ability to play middleman in a somewhat confidence-building way, and without some of the kinds of imagery and other things to provide confidence to the two sides, I can see things getting out of hand more rapidly. So that's a significant gap. And while the two sides have invested in the diplomacy of confidence-building measures, I don't think that they've actually invested in the practice of them in a way that fills that gap. The other point would be on this generally, I think that the US role in these crises makes Indian military action less likely. I think that that's maybe the principal benefit that we can serve. We can provide India with some way to stay its hand in a politically acceptable manner for a domestic audience. Without that, I think we've got a significant gap. And then just on the China role, China plays two sides of this. Clearly, the Chinese have an economic interest in stability and not seeing a war between India and Pakistan. And clearly, also, in recent conflicts, China has weighed in, I think, usefully as a restraining force. And so that's the principal storyline. At the same time, China, in its relationship with Pakistan, has always seen Pakistan as a useful tool with respect to India. And I don't think that's entirely changed either. So this is a carefully calibrated effort by the Chinese to have it both ways. And like all carefully calibrated efforts, it may not work so well. Yeah, just to chime in maybe on the China question, because I think that that is really another key element of this. And it's one that I do think needs to be really part of the US-China discussions. So with the strategic and economic dialogue, the future of Pakistan, the relationship between India, United States, China, these are issues that really do need to be engaged on with the Chinese at a high level to really get a better sense of their thinking of how they are approaching this issue. My recollections on Mumbai with respect to China is, again, not really wanting to talk too much to the United States about what their thinking was, but sort of assuring the United States that they too would, in their own system and in their own way of doing things, convey to Pakistan that they hoped that cooler heads would prevail. There was not a lot of close interaction from my perspective in terms of US-China relations on how that crisis was unfolding. But it does, I think, raise some important questions about a future crisis and just related to the question about the absence of a US role. I mean, does that mean that there would be another country that would need to insert itself or another body of some kind? Because my sense of the confidence-building measures between both sides is that in the real heat of the moment, there really is not that form of trust at the moment between India and Pakistan that could enable real credible information-sharing exchange and that's what troubles me about sort of a hands-off role where we're another un-crisis-tentful. Thanks. Polly Tufender? Yeah, I wanted to just add a couple of thoughts. One is that information sharing and transparency are not necessarily conducive to better relations between the potentially warring parties. And I would point out that in the case of the Mumbai attacks, the US chose a sort of forensic approach to calming Indian anger and recommended that first they figure out, forensically, who did it and confirm all of that. Unfortunately for Pakistan, the outcome of the evidence examination, which was shared with Pakistan to a great extent, didn't vindicate Pakistan. And what came out was that the attacks had been launched from Pakistani soil. So there's a case where transparency didn't actually improve the disposition of both sides to move forward. And as we know, I think most people in this room know, Pakistan did not move forward with the judicial conclusion of going after the people who were fingered by the forensic evidence. So I think that's very important to realize it's a two-edged sword. Transparency is not always helpful to coming to some kind of a resolution. There's an issue that has stuck exactly where it was in 2009 since then. The second thing I want to raise very briefly is that the China, India, Pakistan, and US dialogue is proceeding on the track one and a half, track two level in a number of ways. And so in many ways, I believe we're already well on our way to achieving that. I have to apologize. I have a habit of not being able to keep things on time. And I've missed the deadline all over again. We are on time. Can I ask for the panel's indulgence for one more round of questions? Because we haven't really been fair to our audience. Short and crisp, and as many hands as I see. Sir, we'll start with you. I've seen your hand, sir. So I think the big question I have about the issue is what type of, how India will find its way to become a great power, and if it will. Because one of the way India asserts power is to keep the status quo in Kashmir. At the same time, that marginalized India from being involved, for example, in the concert that's coming to try to resolve Afghanistan. So the assertion of power on the status quo in Kashmir also undermined its ability to be more broadly influenced in the region. Jack? One of the importance of the past for the future we've talked about here a lot, and one of those pieces of information on the past is how close truly did anything come under Musharraf in the 2007 or so time frame. Because there's certainly a lot of evidence, including from retired senior Pakistanis, who would say, no, no, Musharraf was way out on a limb. He was on his own, and there was no preparation. So I'd be interested in the panel's comments on that. The general money there. Hi, Craig Karp. The panel has mentioned a lot about the importance of personalities, and so I would like to know your views on the relationship between Prime Minister Sharif and Prime Minister Modi and their respective freedom of action. OK. Richard? Thank you. Richard Lee Smith from the British Embassy. I think there's a school of thought out there that any future crisis would develop very a lot quicker than those in the past. Would you agree with that, and what does that mean for potential US intervention? Final question at the back, if you can get a quick one. Sorry? Thank you. Jay Kinsara with the Hindu American Foundation. Thank you, Polly, for mentioning Bangladesh. Specifically, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh is now hearing testimony to remove Islam as the state religion in order to stem the growth of the groups that would perpetrate these types of attacks. Is this the type of conversation the US should be encouraging in Pakistan as well in order to stem this type of activity in the region? Thank you. So I would request the panel to pick their favorite questions. Otherwise, we'll be here for a while. Ted, can we start with you and end with Polly? Sure. I like that question about India and thinking about what its global role should be. And in the context of the Mumbai crisis, I think there was a high level push on Prime Minister Singh to think about what India's future should be and is there a way to not have Pakistan or Pakistan crises be something that could suck them down from a larger set of concerns or global aspirations on the world stage. And the question is whether that can truly be a realm of continued focus and discussion with the United States. I think Prime Minister Modi could very well also sort of buy into this idea that to sort of truly think about strategically its relationship with the United States, think about the challenge of China that the Pakistan challenge is one that needs to not necessarily be commanding. And I guess the real challenge is sort of how to get there. But I think that's an important message to keep raising. OK, let me just pick up a couple of these. Jack, your question about the seriousness of the Mishara period peace process or back channel. Look, I think for the people who were involved in it, they were extraordinarily serious. All of the people that I've met who had anything personally to do with it thought it was for real. It was the people on the outside of it who didn't think it was so serious. And the problem overall is that ultimately the people on the outside became the people on the inside and it was ended. And there is a broader lesson here, which I think I alluded to in passing earlier, which is that the principal challenge now is preparing a wider public politically for an outcome. And that we haven't seen a lot of progress on. Second question I'd point to just very briefly on personalities. To my mind, let's start with the fact that the critical personalities here are not Nawaz Sharif, but Raheel Sharif. And I suppose Narendra Modi. And while I can't comment on their personalities per se, the chances of the army chief and maybe his successor of having a fundamentally different outlook on India I think are low. And that points to the strangeness of the Mashara period. If that was for real, then that means that he came to a pretty starkly different conclusion about the direction, the trajectory of his country and its relationship with India. And I don't hear that right now. So maybe I'm just missing it, but I don't hear it. Last really quickly, Richard, your question about the rapidity of crises led me to remember that I recently submitted a response to a paper on the proliferation of drone technologies in the South Asian context. And this gets to something, at least indirectly, that Polly was pointing to, which is different technologies. But these are military technologies. And when we're thinking about the potential for future conflict between the two, I have reasons to think that we are going to see a droned border. I think India has every reason to do that heavily. The problem of cross-border infiltration is one that drones are well suited to address in many ways. And I think that that then plays into a Pakistani calculation. And the potential for armed drones to hit the wrong things and to escalate rapidly, to me, is a kind of a new and potentially important thing to think about, not today, but in terms of future escalatory spirals in the South Asian context. Polly? Well, let me start with the last point just because I so agree that the window will be much smaller, whether we're talking drones or other military advances, if you want to call it that, or steps backward in the diplomatic sense. I would point out on the more optimistic side that communications technologies also enable face-to-face meetings without the delays of air travel. So I think there's at least some hope that we might be able to engage people without the physical bodies showing up in each other's capitals in a timely fashion. But I totally concur. It's one of my worries about the future. I'm not going to touch the question of Islam as an official religion. I think that's not a US issue. I think that's a domestic issue. So I'm not going to really address that other than to say it's not about US diplomacy or policy. I agree that the Kashmir, a solution for Kashmir was appeared real for a brief time. But I would point out that as with track two, very often the solutions appear more feasible to former officials, or not yet senior officials than to those who are actually in the saddle. And I think that that's the limitation of both track two and lower level discussions. They tend to sometimes result in nothing when the people are actually on active duty. And on the question about personalities and latitude, I completely agree that the prime minister, Sharif, doesn't have the latitude to make a deal. It would certainly require military concurrence. And I would come back to the point regarding Kashmir that not all the military is always on the same page either. So one of the things that we tend to do is we tend to aggregate people into one player. And just as the US is not one player, so the Pakistani military is not one player. Thank you. It remains for me to apologize again because I've messed this up big time. The topic is too interesting, and it's very difficult to find a panel who's so knowledgeable about this. So I apologize, but I think it's definitely worth it. Let me just conclude by making two provocative points, and then we'll thank the panel. One, everything you read. And as I said in the beginning, I'm doing a book on this. Every single thing you read, the conventional wisdom is communication is crucial. India, Pakistan need to talk. They need to talk. And I keep reminding people, they were talking in Mumbai. They actually talked from the moment the attack took place. And it was the direct communication that brought the hooks called to the front. Otherwise, there would be no hooks called because there was no. So I'm not saying don't communicate, but I think it's much more, it's a challenge. How do you do this in a crisis moment? And second, I'll just say without elaborating on this, there's another conventional wisdom that they've got to take the populations along. So Musharraf's plan wouldn't have worked because they were outsiders who weren't. And India and Pakistan, more than any other countries that I at least have studied, are masters of basically just pretending that the population is with them when they want and saying that they're against them when they don't want to do something. So I think it's not as big an issue as we make it out to be. Probably it's more important for us, but quite frankly, they basically just maneuver in a way that the population seems to be standing behind them, whatever they decide to do. So with that, please join me in thanking the panel and thank you again for joining us.