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Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Doomed to fail

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The march of folly: Obama’s four-word Afpak strategy

In its first foreign-policy test, the new Indian government will have to contend with pressing U.S. proposals that India assist Obama’s politically expedient “Afpak” strategy, which actually threatens to bring Indian security under added pressure

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, May 20, 2009

Now that the national election is over, Indian diplomacy will face demands to aid US President Barack Obama’s strategy on Afghanistan-Pakistan (“Afpak”). To win greater Pakistani military cooperation on the Afghan frontier, Obama is seeking New Delhi’s assistance on at least two fronts — border-troop reductions and a resumption of “peace” talks with Islamabad.

 

India can assist to the extent that its own interests are safe. India has no offensively-configured troop formations along the Pakistan border, and any cut in border deployments must not provide the Pakistani military an opening to infiltrate more armed terrorists into India. New Delhi has no quarrel with Pakistan’s fledgling civilian government, but a renewed bilateral dialogue can be meaningful only if Islamabad goes beyond cosmetic measures against its military-nurtured, India-directed Punjabi terror groups, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad.

 

The Obama team also had sought an easing of Pakistani concerns that India is seeking to encircle Pakistan through its role in Afghanistan. But Obama’s special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, has rubbished Pakistani claims of Indian intelligence operations there, saying that contrary to the alleged presence of “hundreds” of Indian operatives in Kandahar, his inquiry revealed that the Indian consulate there has merely “six or eight people”. India has a major stake in the future of Afghanistan and will stay an important player there. This is exemplified by the constructive role it is currently playing to help rebuild that landlocked country through a $1.2 billion aid programme.

 

The real issue is Obama’s Afpak approach. For a president elected on the slogan of change, his Afpak strategy hardly represents consequential change. In fact, Obama doesn’t have one integrated, comprehensive strategy but distinctly separate plans on Pakistan and Afghanistan.

 

Take his Pakistan strategy. It can be summed up in just four words: More of the same. Actually, it is more of what hasn’t worked in the past. Unsuccessful US policies have helped generate a terrifying mess in Pakistan, which today resembles a Molotov cocktail waiting for a match.

 

Yet Obama is seeking to copy that failed approach on a much-bigger scale, as illustrated by his plan to make Pakistan the largest recipient of US aid in the world without setting clear benchmarks for judging progress. In fact, his administration currently is seeking to dissuade Congress from imposing any rigid benchmark on the unparalleled aid for Pakistan.

 

Throwing more money at Islamabad, pampering the wielder of real power — the military — and undercutting Pakistan’s civilian leaders are examples of why Obama is offering more of the same in US policy. To persuade the Pakistani military establishment against providing terrorist succour and sanctuary along the Afghan border (but not the India frontier), Washington willingly is paying billions of dollars in ransom money, with no assurance that such payouts will make any difference.

 

What’s the Obama strategy on Afghanistan? Again, it can be summed up in four words: Surge, bribe and run. Obama actually has lifted this strategy lock, stock and barrel from his predecessor, but from a different theatre (Iraq), and without giving George W. Bush any credit.

 

Obama has set out to replicate in Afghanistan his predecessor’s experiment in Iraq. As happened in Iraq from early 2007, Obama intends to employ a military surge more as a show of force to pursue largely political objectives, especially to explore truces and alliances with tribal chieftains and insurgent leaders. Just as many Sunni tribal leaders were bought off in Iraq, the Obama plan is to cut deals with the Taliban leaders and field commanders.

 

For such deal-making to be successful, Obama intends to squeeze the Taliban first, including by putting 21,000 more American troops on the battlefield and taking yet another page from Bush’s Iraq experiment to establish US-funded local civil militias in every Afghan district. The first such militia unit, compromising 240 Afghans, was armed and deployed in Wardak province last month after receiving just three weeks of training.

 

In a country already teaming with militiamen, more militias are being set up. But just as the existing Afghan militias took to terrorism after being armed during the Ronald Reagan presidency to fight Soviet forces, the new militias will begin terrorizing local populations before long. Yet such is the rush to establish new militias that in an unusual decision to remove a wartime commander, the Obama administration last week fired the top American general in Afghanistan, David McKiernan, because he was overly cautious in creating such militias.

 

It is unlikely that the dubious Iraq experiment can work in Afghanistan, whose mountainous terrain, myriad tribes, militants operating from across national frontiers, patterns of shifting tribal and ethnic loyalties, low level of literacy, lack of natural resources, special status as the global hub of poppy trade and a history of internecine civil conflict set it apart from any other Muslim country. Also, unlike the internally confined Iraq conflict, the Afpak belt already is the springboard of international terrorism.

Still, Obama’s Afghanistan plan borrows so heavily from Bush’s Iraq ideas that the military general who implemented the surge-and-bribe experiment in Iraq has been pressed into service to replicate that in Afghanistan. David Petraeus, the former commander of American forces in Iraq who now heads the US Central Command, is the inspiration and leading light of the “surge, then negotiate” plan for Afghanistan. “Obama for Change” also has retained Bush’s defence secretary and rendition policy, revived Guantánamo military tribunals, flip-flopped on releasing detainee-abuse photos, and set the same year as his predecessor — 2011 — for a military exit from Iraq.

The blunt truth is that Obama doesn’t want the Afpak problem to burn his presidency the way Iraq consumed Bush’s. As a result, his aides are panning the internationally agreed goal of institution-building in Afghanistan as nation-building — a business in which the US shouldn’t get into.

Before he comes up for re-election, Obama wants to earn acclaim for ending his predecessor’s two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That objective is necessitating both a redefinition of “success” and the taking of shortcuts, as exemplified by his Afghan militia-building plan.

To compound matters, Obama has made the mistake — however inadvertently — of undercutting the legitimacy of the Afpak elected leaders. No sooner had he assumed office than his aides began calling Afghan President Hamid Karzai corrupt, incompetent and a millstone for US policy. Such talk died down when the Obama team realized there was no credible substitute to Karzai, now set to be re-elected. More surprising was Obama’s act, at the news conference marking his 100th day in office, in excoriating President Asif Ali Zardari’s government as “very fragile,” ineffectual and unable “to gain the support and loyalty” of the Pakistani people. Undermining civilian leaders is no recipe for success of a cut-and-run strategy.

Obama’s strategy essentially fails to recognize the structural character of the Afpak problem and attempts to deal with only the symptoms. Today, counterinsurgency (or “COIN” in US military jargon) has replaced institution-building and the “war on terror” in American policy. Accordingly, the Afpak strategy aims not to defeat terrorism, but to regionally contain terrorism — an approach that is set to bring Indian security under greater pressure.

While Obama cannot be faulted for wanting to exit Afghanistan, why did he have to advertise his intent? He publicly declared, “There’s got to be an exit strategy”. Now, the Taliban and their sponsors, the Pakistani military, just need to wait out the Americans to reclaim Afghanistan.

Rather than merely respond to US demands, strategic-partner India needs to be up-front on Obama’s unworkable Afpak strategy. That strategy is doomed to fail, with serious security consequences for India and the rest of the free world.

(c) Asian Age, 2009.

How not to fight international terrorism

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A Cursed Partnership

 

U.S. and India are miles apart on counterterrorism

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, May 15, 2009

 

As the situation in Pakistan has worsened, U.S. intelligence officials have made a beeline to India in recent months, including the National Intelligence, CIA and FBI chiefs. But even as these visits suggest America is seeking a stronger counterterrorism partnership with India, U.S. policy moves have run counter to Indian interests. How far apart the two countries are in the fight against terror can be gauged from eight facets.

 

First, U.S. policy keeps up the pretence that the real terrorist threat springs from Al Qaeda, even though the published U.S. intelligence assessment admits Al Qaeda has been weakened to the extent that its remnants are holed up in mountain caves and thus are in no position to seriously endanger U.S. homeland security. While there may be no proof to back the Pakistani president’s intelligence-derived opinion that Al Qaida chief Osama bin Laden is dead, the fact is there is no trace of him for years now. It, however, politically suits U.S. policy to retain Al Qaeda as the monster plotter and international bugbear.

 

Second, Washington draws a specious distinction between Al Qaeda and the Taliban to treat the former as inveterate foes of America and the latter as made up of many “reconciliables”. Another deceptive distinction is to tie the Taliban with Islamist ideology, rather than directly with terrorism. President Barack Obama repeatedly has labelled the Taliban militia as obscurantist rather than terrorist — a tag he reserves exclusively for Al Qaida.

 

Third, U.S. policy has split the Taliban into the Afghan and Pakistani parts. The U.S. is going after the Pakistani Taliban, led by Baitullah Mehsud, while it encourages the Pakistani intelligence to continue to shelter the entire top Afghan Taliban leadership in Baluchistan province. Mullah Muhammad Omar and other members of the Taliban’s inner shura (council) have been ensconced for years in the Quetta area. Yet, U.S. drones have targeted militants in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), but not the Afghan Taliban leadership operating with impunity from Baluchistan. U.S. ground-commando raids also have spared the Taliban’s command-and-control network in Baluchistan.

 

While employing the Saudi, Afghan and Pakistani intelligence for back-channel negotiations with the Afghan Taliban shura over a political deal, the Obama administration is dramatizing the Pakistani Taliban threat at a time when it is pushing Congress to fast-track approval of record-level $10.5 billion aid to Pakistan without imposing any rigid condition.

 

Fourth, U.S. attempts to draw distinctions between good and bad terrorists extend even to the private Afghan armies. For example, America treats Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami as good terrorists and has offered a deal to Hekmatyar, even as U.S. forces target another Afghan private army led by Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son.

 

Fifth, Washington continues to pretend that terrorist safe havens exist only along Pakistan’s western frontier. To this day, no senior U.S. official has admitted that terrorist sanctuaries and training camps are present along Pakistan’s border with India. Farcically, Obama’s special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, has claimed terrorists operating out of Pakistan’s western belt are carrying out attacks like in Mumbai. The 10 terrorists who attacked Mumbai last November came not from the tribal belt but from Pakistan’s heartland.

 

Sixth, U.S. policy refuses to deal with Islamabad’s infrastructure of terror against India. Washington has neither acknowledged Pakistan’s role in staging terrorist strikes in India nor sought to bring the Pakistan-based planners of the Mumbai attacks to justice. The detailed, inter-agency “Afpak” strategy paper makes not even a passing mention of Pakistan’s terror war against India. It pretends Pakistani terrorism emanates from non-state actors and if the state or some state component is involved, it is only in providing militant sanctuaries along the western front. Surely, this squinted portrayal is not due to ignorance.

 

India is being targeted by military-backed Punjabi terror groups, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, that are of little interest to U.S. policy. Instead, Washington intends to goad New Delhi post-election to reduce border troop deployments — a step that would help Pakistan to infiltrate more armed terrorists into India.

 

Seventh, the more brazen the Pakistani-scripted terror attacks in India have become, the more America has plied Islamabad with funds and weapons. At least $12.3 billion in U.S. aid was disbursed to Pakistan in the period from the December 2001 Parliament attack to the most-recent Mumbai strikes. Pakistan now is being made the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world, permitting it to reap an ever-growing terrorist dividend. The fact that America has helped amass $23.6 billion in international aid for Pakistan in the past six months (not counting the Chinese assistance) shows it will not allow its long-established pawn to become a failed state. But when Pakistan is most vulnerable to external pressure, Washington refuses to exercise leverage to snap its ties to terror.

 

Eighth, the U.S. has exerted undue pressure on victim India. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has disclosed the reason why New Delhi did not take the mildest diplomatic action against Pakistan after Mumbai: “We worked very hard, as did the prior administration, to prevent India from reacting”. She indeed wants India to suffer more Mumbais silently, saying America has “a lot of work to do with the Indian government, to make sure they continue to exercise the kind of restraint they showed after Mumbai…”

 

Doing deals with militants and paying growing amounts of ransom money to Pakistan are no way to fight terror.

 

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.

 

(c) The Times of India, 2009.

Insider threat to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal

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Military insiders threaten Pakistan’s nuclear assets

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

Without naming the United States as his source, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said recently: "We have been assured that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are in safe hands as of now. And I have no reason to disbelieve the assurance."

To his acute embarrassment, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, soon thereafter, said the "unthinkable" could happen in Pakistan: Islamists could get "the keys to the nuclear arsenal." Which raises the question: Does America have a contingency plan to avert an Islamist takeover of Pakistan’s "crown jewels" and, if so, can it work?

Pakistan’s nuclear-stockpile security is handled by the Strategic Plans Division, which has under its command a special unit of about 1,000 troops. But as Clinton acknowledged, the Pakistani nukes are "widely dispersed," with storage sites extending beyond the Punjab heartland to Sind and Baluchistan provinces.

The U.S. appears to have few good options to pre-emptively seize the nuclear arms if a national meltdown is imminent.

To be sure, the Strategic Plans Division — the keeper of the country’s nuclear keys — is headed by a U.S.-backed general, Khalid Kidwai, who was held in India as a prisoner of the 1971 war and released after the 1972 Simla Agreement on normalizing India-Pakistan relations. Kidwai has headed the SPD ever since it was created after the 1998 nuclear tests. In other words, it was on Kidwai’s watch that the infamous A.Q. Khan-led nuclear-smuggling ring remained in operation.

Yet for Washington, Kidwai is a trusted man. It was Kidwai whom military ruler Pervez Musharraf used to extract a tutored confession from Khan so that the entire blame for the illicit nuclear ring could fall on a single individual, sparing the military establishment — a charade the Bush administration readily went along with.

To tamp down growing international concerns over the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear assets, U.S. President Barack Obama said on April 29: "I’m confident we can make sure that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure, primarily, initially, because the Pakistani Army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands."

Obama’s confidence, amazingly, is rooted in his belief that the jihadist-infiltrated Pakistani Army is taking cognizance of such perils. Indeed, by suggesting that Washington continued to trust the Pakistani Army with custodial control of nuclear assets, Obama only compounded the insult he simultaneously hurled at President Asif Ali Zardari’s elected government in calling it "very fragile," ineffectual and unable "to gain the support and loyalty" of the Pakistani people.

Obama’s comments, made just before he received Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai for a trilateral meeting, highlighted a long-standing U.S. policy partiality for Pakistani military generals, even though the real Islamist-takeover threat today comes from within the increasingly radicalized Pakistani Army.

Rather than help build robust civilian institutions, Washington propped up military rulers for five decades and still continues to pamper the Pakistani military establishment, best illustrated by the proposed $3 billion in fresh military aid over the next five years and the setting up of new cooperation between the CIA and the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

The choice in Pakistan is not between Islamists and U.S.-sponsored generals, who actually reared the forces of jihad and still nurture many jihadists. Both are a threat to international peace and security. But even as Obama is making Pakistan the biggest recipient of U.S. aid in the world, his harsh criticism of Zardari — in office for just eight months — risks undermining a fledgling civilian government and emboldening the military. Zardari is right in saying that a military coup in Pakistan, as in the past, can occur only with U.S. support, however tacit.

Pakistan’s descent into a jihadist dungeon tellingly occurred not under civilian rule but under military rule. While one military dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, let loose the jihadists he reared, another dictator, Musharraf, pushed Pakistan to the very edge of the precipice. Before Musharraf’s nearly nine-year rule, few in the world looked at Pakistan as a failing state. How can Pakistan become a "normal" state if its military, intelligence and nuclear establishments remain outside civilian oversight?

Yet when the new civilian government ordered the ISI last July to report to the Interior Ministry, it did not receive support from Washington, allowing the army to quickly frustrate the move. The command and control over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons rest with the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, as Zardari is just the titular chair of the National Command Authority dominated by military and intelligence leaders. In such an anomalous setting, can the U.S. really prevent jihadist control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal?

The U.S. first allowed Pakistan to acquire the nuclear bomb by turning a blind eye to its illicit procurement of blueprints and items from overseas. Then, when the clandestine nuclear importers in Pakistan morphed into covert nuclear exporters, the U.S. failed to detect their proliferation activities for 16 long years. Worse still, Washington has not been interested in fully investigating the very network it helped uncover or in bringing its ringleaders to justice. As a result, international investigations into that ring have collapsed and even A.Q. Khan has been freed from house arrest.

Khan’s discharge followed Switzerland’s release of the two Tinner brothers, who along with their father were important conduits in the Pakistani ring. One of the brothers, Urs Tinner, has acknowledged working undercover for the CIA. In fact, the CIA shielded A.Q. Khan for a long time. As former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers has revealed, the CIA protected Khan from arrest and prosecution in Europe in 1975 and 1986.

Today, even as Obama seeks to assure the world about Pakistani-nuclear security, his aides admit Washington does not know where all of Pakistan’s storage sites are located. Pakistani officials have doggedly deflected U.S. requests for these details.

Although the U.S. has provided some $100 million worth of technical assistance to Islamabad under its International Nuclear Materials Protection and Cooperation program, American personnel have been denied access to most Pakistani nuclear sites, even when they have made a case for on-site installation and training.

The U.S. has been loath to sell Pakistan "Permissive Action Links" (PALs) — electronic locks embedded in weapon design that have special access codes. But it has helped Pakistan design a system of controls, barriers and sensors, including improvised electronic-locking devices added to already-built weapons. But rather than let Americans enter its sites, Pakistan sent its personnel for on-site training in the U.S. on intrusion detectors, portal monitors, locks and material-accounting equipment. Put simply, the U.S. has not been allowed to see how its money has been spent.

In any event, modern security and accounting systems can be of little value in the face of insider threats. The real threat of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal comes not from jihadists outside, but from jihadists within the system — specifically, from the jihadist-penetrated military, intelligence and nuclear establishments.

Yet, with the Obama administration hyping the Pakistani Taliban threat to win early congressional passage of record-level aid for Islamabad, international concerns have centered on outsider threats. The Taliban, either in Pakistan or Afghanistan, have not been active outside Pashtun areas, and there is no evidence of any nuclear assets being present in the troubled Pashtun parts.

Pakistan has emulated India’s example in storing nukes in disassembled form, with the warheads and delivery vehicles stowed in separate facilities. For outsiders to acquire even one complete bomb, capture of at least two facilities would be necessary, along with the expertise to mate the fissile "core" and trigger with the delivery vehicle. This is unlikely to happen without military generals and other senior insiders actively colluding with the outsiders.

Insider threats indeed have repeatedly been exposed — from the ring that sold centrifuge technology and bomb designs to the jihadist charity set up by two senior nuclear scientists, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majeed. Mahmood, who once served as A.Q. Khan’s boss and designed the Khushab reactor, advocated that the Pakistani nukes were the property of the whole ummah, or Islamic world, and Pakistan had a duty to share nuclear technology with other Muslim states.

Then CIA chief George Tenet writes in his 2007 book, "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA," that President George W. Bush was so concerned by the charity’s activities that he directed him to fly to Islamabad. The charity was shut down and Mahmood detained.

Programs to screen and monitor personnel can achieve little when jihad-spouting personnel abound in the Pakistani military and nuclear establishments. Such personnel can serve as sleepers for extremist groups.

Safeguarding Pakistani nuclear assets from jihadists demands the creation of a stable, moderate Pakistan. That, in turn, demands sustained international political investment in building and strengthening civilian institutions. But can that happen without a fundamental break from U.S. policies that continue to prop up a meddling army, fatten the ISI and encourage the military, intelligence and nuclear establishments to stay not accountable to the elected government?

If U.S. policy remains driven by political expediency and near-term objectives, an Islamist takeover of Pakistan could result from one of two scenarios: a collapse of central authority or, more likely, an intramilitary struggle in which the jihadists gain ascendancy.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in Delhi.
 
The Japan Times: Thursday, May 14, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

U.S.-India nuclear deal: Bereft of transformative power

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After the euphoria, the harsh reality

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, May 1, 2009

The much-trumpeted Indo-U.S. nuclear deal has failed to yield strategic benefits for India. Indeed, such is its burden that even as U.S. policy ignores vital Indian interests in the region, New Delhi stays mum.

The U.S.-India nuclear deal was promoted as a transformative initiative — one that would put the bilateral relationship on a much-higher pedestal. In his valedictory speech, President George W. Bush declared: “We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India.” By contrast, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has not made a single statement on the deal — not even to Parliament — ever since the vaunted deal came to fruition, other than to admit recently that he got his party to back the deal by threatening to resign.

 

Dr. Singh’s reticence has to do with the fact that the conditions and riders the U.S. Congress attached while ratifying the deal demolished the assurances he had made to Parliament. Consequently, Dr. Singh was unable to keep the promise he made to the Lok Sabha last July 22: “I will come to Parliament before operationalizing the nuclear agreement.” On several occasions before the deal was set in cement, Dr. Singh, however, had trumpeted its transformative character.

 

Seven months after the deal’s realization, there is no sign of its transformative power. Rather, doubts have arisen over the supposed “global strategic partnership” with America. The policy frame in which Washington is viewing India is not the larger Asian geopolitical landscape, but the southern Asian context. But even on regional matters of vital interest to India, the U.S. has sought to ignore New Delhi or pursue antithetical policy approaches. To the chagrin of Indian neocons — who ingenuously marketed the nuclear deal as a U.S. move to build India as a world power and counterweight to China — Washington has declared that its “most important bilateral relationship in the world” is with Beijing.

 

Those who rammed through the deal — even if it meant stunting India’s nuclear-deterrent development — blame the new U.S. administration for downgrading India’s importance and being unsympathetic to its security concerns. Actually, it’s the deal-pushers who are to blame for allowing their wishful thinking to blind them to the strategic trends that were firmly set long before Barack Obama came to the White House.

 

Take the China factor. America and the Soviet Union took three decades to achieve mutually assured destruction (MAD). During Bush’s presidency, America and China became locked in MAD — not in military but in economic terms. The two now are so tied in a mutually dependent relationship for their economic well-being that attempts to snap those ties would amount to mutually assured destruction. Just as the beleaguered U.S. economy cannot do without continuing capital inflows from China, the American market is the lifeline of the Chinese export juggernaut.

 

It was thus no surprise that Bush left the White House with a solid China-friendly legacy, best illustrated by the manner in which he ignored the Chinese crackdown in Tibet and showed up at the Beijing Olympics. It wasn’t a surprise either that Hillary Clinton paid obeisance in Beijing soon after her appointment as secretary of state, going to the unusual extent of publicly demoting human rights and emphasizing economic, environmental and security relations with China. Today, there is talk even of a US-China diarchy — a G-2 — ruling the world. The naïveté of Indian neocons was astonishing.

 

Take the Mumbai terrorist assaults. After Pakistan-based elements orchestrated those unparalleled attacks, two successive U.S. administrations leaned on India to refrain from imposing the mildest diplomatic sanctions against Islamabad. As Mrs. Clinton candidly admitted before a congressional panel on April 23, “We worked very hard, as did the prior administration, to prevent India from reacting.” That admission explains why Dr. Singh did not take the smallest of small steps against Pakistan — even as a symbolic expression of India’s outrage — despite saying in public that “some Pakistani official agencies must have supported” those attacks.

 

Take another example. India got no tangible help from the Bush or Obama administration to bring the plotters of the Mumbai strikes to justice, despite providing extraordinary access to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to independently investigate those attacks and even allowing the CIA to serve as a conduit for intelligence exchange with Islamabad. Rather, Washington wants India now to rise above the Mumbai attacks and aid Obama’s “Afpak” strategy by giving Pakistan a tranquil eastern border through troop redeployments.

 

The U.S. message to India is to forget Mumbai and silently suffer Pakistan’s war by terror — a message reinforced by Washington’s identification of terrorist safe havens only along Pakistan’s western border. Mrs. Clinton indeed suggested India endure more Mumbais stoically by telling Congress, “So, we do have a lot of work to do with the Indian government, to make sure that they continue to exercise the kind of restraint they showed after Mumbai, which was remarkable, especially given the fact that it was the political season.”

 

Take yet another case. The re-hyphenation of India with Pakistan today is complete. India now figures in U.S. calculations principally in relation to Pakistan and Obama’s new Afpak strategy. This poorly conceived strategy is doomed to fail. And its means and ends are sure to engender more terrorist attacks against India, already bearing the brunt of the blowback from past failed U.S. policies.

 

The re-hyphenation, however, flows not from a policy decision in Washington but from the disappearance of an optical illusion called “de-hyphenation.” As American scholars Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph have written, “For roughly 50 years, the U.S. destabilized the South Asia region by acting as an offshore balancer. Its actions allowed Pakistan to realize its goal of ‘parity’ with its much-bigger neighbour and to try to best that neighbour in several wars.” But with Pakistan’s descent into chaos and India’s economic rise, the U.S. had no choice in this decade but to advance ties with India, to quote Mrs. Clinton again, “as part of a wide-ranging diplomatic agenda to meet today’s daunting challenges topped by the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

 

Under Bush, U.S. policy simply went from hyphenation to parallelism. That involved building strategic partnerships with and selling arms to both India and Pakistan. No sooner had Bush initiated the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP) with India in early 2004 than he caught New Delhi unawares by designating Pakistan a Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA). His push to sell weapons to India coincided with the U.S. sale of F-16s, P-3C Orions, C-130s, TOW missiles, Aerostat surveillance radars, 155mm self-propelled howitzers and Phalanx systems to Pakistan to help maintain “military balance on the subcontinent.” This decade brought U.S. success in building parallel intelligence-sharing and defence-cooperation arrangements with India and Pakistan, while supposedly pursuing “de-hyphenation.”

 

On Pakistan — a pawn too valuable for any U.S. administration to stop using for regional objectives — American policy has displayed continuity for long. The fact that Obama, in his first 100 days, has helped put together $15.7 billion in international aid for Islamabad shows the U.S. resolve not to allow Pakistan to fail — a country where, he admits, “we have huge strategic interests.” But it was Bush who let Pakistan rake in a terrorist windfall, as he plied it with sophisticated weapons and more than $12.3 billion in funds, notwithstanding the escalating Pakistani-scripted terror attacks in India after 9/11.

 

Both under Bush and Obama, the Taliban’s top Afghan leadership (living in Quetta) has received protection not just from the Pakistani intelligence, but also from the CIA, which has not carried out a single drone attack in or around Quetta so that the U.S. retains the option to cut a political deal over Afghanistan. It’s no wonder that even as the Taliban’s sway in Pakistan spreads, Robert Gates, Bush’s and now Obama’s defence secretary, has said the U.S. “would be very open” to a Swat Valley-style agreement in Afghanistan with the Taliban.

 

For years, the U.S. has played to India’s ego and to Pakistan’s craving for funds and weapons. Bush kept India happy with a grand partnership vision while he pandered to Pakistan’s needs. The very day Bush announced his decision to sell F-16s to Pakistan — a public slap for India — Washington patronizingly offered to “help India become a major world power in the 21st century.” This was lapped up by Indian neocons as a “tectonic shift” in U.S. policy. Similarly, Obama massaged India’s ego by declaring that Richard Holbrooke’s mission would stay restricted to the Afpak belt, only to quietly include Kashmir and India in his envoy’s agenda. Now, Centcom chief Gen. David Petraeus has undiplomatically blurted out the truth to Congress that Holbrooke’s “portfolio very much includes India,” and Holbrooke and he are in “constant touch” with Indian officials.

 

Deal-peddlers in India overlooked a basic fact: In the U.S., stout institutional processes of policymaking inhibit abrupt shifts, and a deal over a single issue was unlikely to yield a fundamental policy change across the board. Even a change of administration, historically, has not meant a dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy. That is why Obama, elected on the slogan of change, has thus far not delivered substantive change in foreign policy. By employing softer, more conciliatory language, Obama, however, has sought to package his talk as change by itself.

 

Today, while India gropes for strategic benefits from the nuclear deal, the U.S. is set to reap non-proliferation and economic benefits once international inspections begin and contracts are signed. It is unfortunate that intense partisan rancour was kicked up in India over an oversold deal, which was pushed through with no public scrutiny, although it thrusts an uneconomical energy choice and carries long-term implications.

 

© Copyright 2000 – 2009 The Hindu

Avert an Islamist takeover of Pakistan

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India is in peril. Obama is making it worse

 

Brahma Chellaney says that India is indeed ‘the sponge that protects us all’ from terrorism emanating from Pakistan. The new President’s strategy is compounding the Af-Pak problem

The Spectator, April 29, 2009

One of the most striking things about the larger Asian strategic landscape is that India is wedged in an arc of failing or troubled states. This harsh reality is India’s most glaring weakness; its neighbourhood is so combustible as to impose a tyranny of geography. Today, Pakistan’s rapid Talebanisation tops India’s concerns. After all, the brunt of escalating terrorism from Pakistan will be borne by India, which already has become, in the words of ex-US official Ashley Tellis, ‘the sponge that protects us all’.

As Pakistan has begun to sink, top US intelligence and security officials have made a beeline to India for discussions, including the new CIA director Leon Panetta (who came to New Delhi on his first overseas visit), the FBI director Robert Mueller, the joint US chiefs of staff chairman Mike Mullen and the administration’s special envoy Richard Holbrooke. The fact that President Obama, in his first 100 days, has helped put together $15.7 billion in international aid for Islamabad shows that the United States will not allow Pakistan to become a failed state.

The real threat is of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan. Yet Obama’s strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan (or ‘Af-Pak’ in Washingtonese) inspires little confidence. Throwing more money at Pakistan and keeping up the pretence that the badly splintered and weakened al-Qa’eda poses the main terrorist threat risks failure.

The Af-Pak problem won’t go away without a fundamental break from the American policies that helped create this terrifying muddle. The US military can never win in Afghanistan, or even secure a ticket out of that country as Obama wants, without first dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for the Taleban and other state-reared terror groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (the group who carried out the Mumbai atrocities) and Jaish-e-Muhammad. As Bush’s national security adviser Stephen Hadley pointed out just before leaving office in January, ‘You can’t really solve Afghanistan without solving Pakistan.’

Yet to mend a broken policy on Pakistan, Obama is doing more of what helped to create the failure — dispensing rewards upfront. He has set out to make Islamabad the biggest recipient of US aid in the world without having first defined benchmarks for judging progress. It was under his predecessor, however, that Pakistan began raking in a terrorist windfall. The Bush administration plied Islamabad with sophisticated weapons, which Pakistan wanted to match India’s arsenal, and more than $12.3 billion in funds, even as the origins of almost every major terrorist attack in the world were being traced back to Pakistan. Now, when Pakistan is most vulnerable to international pressure, including to a threat to place it on the US list of state sponsors of terror, Obama refuses to exercise leverage to bring it to heel.

No less strange is another reality: for years, the Taleban’s entire top Afghan leadership has been holed up in Quetta, in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. Mullah Muhammad Omar and other members of the Taleban’s inner shura (council) have received protection not just from the Pakistani intelligence, but also from the CIA, which has not carried out a single drone attack in or around Quetta. Washington is trying to keep open the option of cutting a political deal with them. As Obama himself has put it, ‘There’s got to be an exit strategy.’ It’s no wonder that even as the Taleban’s sway in Pakistan spreads, the US defense secretary Robert Gates declared in Krakow that the United States ‘would be very open’ to an agreement in Afghanistan similar to the one Pakistan made with the Taleban which ceded control of the Swat Valley to the Taleban. All this is music to the ears of the Pakistani military and its offspring — the Taleban.

The scourge of transnational terrorism cannot be stemmed if attempts are made to draw distinctions between good and bad terrorists, and between those who threaten others’ security and those who threaten ours. But, unfortunately, that is what the Obama administration is doing, first by drawing a specious distinction between al-Qa’eda and the Taleban, and then seeking to split the Taleban into the Afghan Taleban and Pakistani Taleban. US forces have been directed to go after the Pakistani Taleban, led by Baitullah Mehsud, even as the CIA tacitly shields Mullah Omar and company. Similarly, the United States treats Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami as good terrorists and has offered a deal to Hekmatyar, while American forces target another Afghan private army that is led by Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son. It is troubling for India that Washington continues to pretend that terrorist safe havens exist only along Pakistan’s western frontier. To this day, no senior US official has admitted that terrorist sanctuaries are present along Pakistan’s border with India.

The Obama policy also does not face up to another reality: Pakistan’s political border with Afghanistan has ceased to exist in practice. The so-called Durand Line — a British colonial invention that left the large Pashtun community divided into two — now exists only on maps. Its disappearance is irreversible. How then can the US expect to prop up the Pakistani state within political frontiers that, in part, no longer exist? In fact, the writ of the Pakistani government has ceased to run in nearly half the country. With the state withering away in the Pashtun and Baluch lands, the jihadist-infiltrated military establishment and its infamous Inter-Services Intelligence agency have chosen to cede control to proxy militant groups.

The Obama team rejects the Bush administration’s institution-building approach in Afghanistan as an attempt to create ‘some sort of Central Asian Valhalla’. Yet it has unveiled $7.5 billion in civilian aid for an increasingly radicalised Pakistan to win hearts and minds there — a Valhalla even more distant. The attempt to get the Pakistani military to focus on counterinsurgency — through a $3-billion ‘Pakistani Counterinsurgency Capability Fund’ — misses the point that what Washington calls insurgents remain prized proxies for the Pakistani generals. The premise that a US military ‘surge’ in Afghanistan can be used, Iraq-style, as a show of force to cut deals with Taleban commanders is equally flawed. This surge-and-bribe approach doesn’t account for the fact that the Afghan militants, with cosy sanctuaries across the borders, have more leeway than their Iraqi counterparts. The new strategy also ignores the reality that the Pakistani generals have little incentive to lend genuine co-operation at a time when Obama has not hidden his Afghanistan exit strategy. The generals and the Taleban just need patiently to wait out the Americans to reclaim Afghanistan.

Unwittingly, Obama’s strategy may end up repeating the very mistakes of American policy over the past three decades that have come to haunt US security and that of the rest of the free world. In seeking narrow, tactical gains, the Obama team risks falling prey to a long-standing US policy weakness: the pursuit of short-term objectives without much regard for the security of friends. It must abandon its plan regionally to contain rather than defeat terrorism, or else an Islamist takeover of Pakistan is inevitable.

(c) The Spectator, UK.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/3573376/india-is-in-peril-obama-is-making-it-worse.thtml

U.S. aid to Pakistan: Spin and reality

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Pakistan’s terrorist windfall

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times
 

Pakistan has long proven adept at diplomatically levering its weakness into strength. Now it is using the threat of its possible implosion to rake in record-level bilateral and multilateral aid.

Bountiful aid has been pouring in without any requirement that Pakistan address the root cause of its emergence as the epicenter of global terrorism — a jihad culture and military-created terrorist outfits and militias. Even though the scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates not so much from the Islamist mullahs as from generals who reared the forces of jihad, rewards are being showered on the procreators of terrorism.

The Mumbai terrorist attacks, far from putting Islamabad in the international doghouse, have paradoxically helped open the floodgates of international aid, even if involuntarily. Between 1952 and 2008, Islamabad received over $73 billion as foreign aid, according to Pakistan’s Economic Survey.

But in the period since the November 2008 Mumbai strikes, the amount of aid pledged or delivered to Pakistan has totaled a staggering $23.3 billion. This figure excludes China’s unpublicized contributions but includes the International Monetary Fund’s $7.6-billion bailout package, for whose approval the head of U.S. military’s Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus, unusually interceded with the IMF brass.

Just last week, Islamabad secured more than $5 billion in new aid at a donors conference — the first of its kind for Pakistan. At that conference, host Japan and America pledged $1 billion each, while the European Union promised $640 million, Saudi Arabia $700 million, and Iran and the United Arab Emirates $300 million each.

Add to this picture the largest-ever U.S. aid flow for Pakistan that has been unveiled by the Obama administration — $7.5 billion in civilian aid over five years ($1 billion of which was pledged in down payment at the donors conference in Tokyo), some $3 billion in direct military assistance, plus countless millions of dollars in reimbursements to the Pakistani military for battling jihadists, including those it still nurtures and shields.

Despite the glib talk that the new aid would not be open-ended but result-oriented, the Obama administration first announced major new rewards for Pakistan upfront, and then persuaded other bilateral donors to make large contributions, without defining any specific conditions to help create a more moderate Pakistan not wedded to terrorism.

The talk of "no blank checks" and "an audit trail" has proven little more than spin. Put simply, Islamabad is being allowed to reap a terrorist windfall. America’s proposed Pakistan Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Enhancement (PEACE) Act, though, is likely to throw a few bones to those alarmed by the stepped-up assistance as deja vu. The U.S. House of Representatives’ version of this innocuously labeled bill seeks to set some metrics for the aid flow, but an opposing White House sees them as too stringent. The Senate version has not yet been unveiled.

By the time the bill is passed by both chambers, its focus will likely be on better accountability and on presidential certification of the Pakistani military’s assistance to help "root out al-Qaida and other violent extremists in Pakistan’s tribal regions" — the goal publicly identified by U.S. President Barack Obama.

In any event, if the benchmarks are not to the White House’s liking, Obama will largely ignore them the way his predecessor dismissed the congressionally imposed metrics for progress on Iraq — metrics that ultimately even Congress disregarded in the face of increased Iraqi violence. The point is that by doling out goodies upfront, Obama has undercut any attempt to get the Pakistani military to stop underwriting terrorist groups.

History actually is repeating itself with a vengeance. It was the multibillion-dollar aid packages during Ronald Reagan’s presidency that helped grease Pakistan’s descent into a jihadist dungeon. And the renewed U.S. munificence under George W. Bush only encouraged Pakistan to dig itself deeper into the dungeon.

Little surprise a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report concludes that America, despite its more than $12.3 billion in aid to Pakistan since 9/11, has "not met its national security goals to destroy terrorist threats and close the safe haven in Pakistan’s FATA" (Federally Administered Tribal Areas).

The Obama policy rejects the Bush administration’s institution-building approach in Afghanistan as an attempt to create "some sort of Central Asian Valhalla." Yet the new administration is seeking to pump billions of dollars of additional aid into an increasingly radicalized Pakistan to win hearts and minds there — a Valhalla even more distant. In fact, almost every Obama policy assumption in the publicly declared "AfPak" strategy has an Alice in Wonderland ring to it.

Take, for example, the decision to disburse $3 billion in military aid to Islamabad in the name of a "Pakistani Counterinsurgency Capability Fund." The attempt to get the Pakistani military to focus on counterinsurgency misses the point that what the Obama administration calls insurgents remain prized proxies for the Pakistani generals.

Or take the Obama policy premise that the U.S. military "surge" can be used, Iraq-style, as a show of force to cut deals with the "good" terrorists, especially "moderate" Taliban. This surge-and-bribe assumption overlooks the fact that the Afghan militants, with cozy sanctuaries deep inside Pakistan, have more leeway than their Iraqi counterparts and thus cannot be under pressure to cut deals with the Americans.

Also, the new rewards being doled out upfront to the Pakistani military establishment disregard the reality that the Pakistani generals have little incentive to lend genuine cooperation at a time when Obama has barely disguised his Afghanistan-exit strategy. The generals and their surrogates — the Taliban — just need to patiently wait out the American exit to reclaim Afghanistan.

The U.S. policy approach is further compounded by Washington’s squint-eyed identification of terrorist safe havens only along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, despite terrorist sanctuaries deep inside the Pakistani heartland, as well as by its long-standing pampering of the Pakistani military.

Worse still, the Obama administration wants to regionally contain rather than defeat terrorism, as if the monster of terrorism can be deftly confined to the AfPak belt — a blinkered approach that promises to bring Indian security under added pressure.

Pakistan is not the only failing state in the world. A dysfunctional Somalia, for example, has become the base for increasingly daring piracy along the western rim of the Indian Ocean, seriously disrupting shipping in one of the world’s busiest maritime passages. But even as Somali pirates — with ties to Islamists — now hold 17 captured ships and some 260 hostages, the annual U.S. aid for Somalia is not equivalent to even one day’s aid for Pakistan that the Obama team has helped put together internationally.

The reason Pakistan can harvest tens of billions of dollars by playing the failing-state card is no different from what endeared it to U.S. policy since the 1950s or made it an "all-weather ally" of China. Pakistan remains too useful a pawn for external powers involved in this region. These powers thus are unlikely to let it fail, even as they play up the threat of implosion to bolster the Pakistani state.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
 
The Japan Times: Saturday, April 25, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

When state failure brings international rewards

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Threaten to become a failed state, and reap a mass of aid

Pakistan deftly exploits international fears over its becoming a failed state to rake in an ever-growing mound of bilateral and multilateral aid, even as the Indian prime minister gratuitously certifies “Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are in safe hands as of now”

Brahma Chellaney, Asian Age, April 22, 2009

 

Pakistan has long proved to be adept at diplomatically levering its weakness into strength. Now it is using the threat of its possible implosion to rake in record-level bilateral and multilateral aid.

 

Bountiful aid has been pouring in without any requirement that Pakistan address the root cause of its emergence as the epicentre of global terrorism — a state-instilled jihad culture and military-created terrorist outfits and militias. Even though the scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates not so much from the Islamist mullahs as from generals who reared the forces of jihad, rewards are being showered on the procreators of terrorism.

 

The Pakistani-scripted Mumbai terrorist attacks, far from putting Islamabad in the international doghouse, have paradoxically helped open the floodgates of international aid, even if involuntarily. Between 1952 and 2008, Islamabad received over $73 billion as foreign aid, according to Pakistan’s Economic Survey. But in the period since the Mumbai strikes, the amount of aid pledged or delivered to Pakistan has totalled a staggering $23.3 billion. This figure excludes China’s unpublicized contributions but includes the International Monetary Fund’s $7.6-billion bailout package, released after the Mumbai attacks.

 

Just last week, Islamabad secured some $5.2 billion in new aid at a donors conference — the first of its kind for Pakistan. At that conference, host Japan and America pledged $1 billion each, while the European Union promised $640 million, Saudi Arabia $700 million, and Iran and the United Arab Emirates $300 million each.

 

Add to this picture the largest-ever U.S. aid flow for Pakistan, unveiled by the Obama administration — $7.5 billion in civilian aid over five years ($1 billion of which was pledged in down-payment at the donors conference in Tokyo), some $3 billion in direct military assistance, plus countless millions of dollars in reimbursements to the Pakistani military for battling jihadists, including those it still nurtures and shields.

 

Despite the glib talk that the new aid would not be open-ended but result-oriented, the Obama administration first announced major new rewards for Pakistan upfront, and then persuaded other bilateral donors to make large contributions, without defining any specific conditions to help create a more moderate Pakistan not wedded to terrorism. The talk of “no blank cheques” and “an audit trail” has proven little more than spin. Put simply, Islamabad is being allowed to reap a terrorist windfall.

America’s proposed Pakistan Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Enhancement (PEACE) Act, though, is likely to throw a few bones to those alarmed by the stepped-up assistance as déjà vu. The House version of this innocuously labelled bill seeks to set some metrics for the aid flow, but an opposing White House sees them as too stringent. The Senate version has not yet been unveiled. By the time the bill is passed by both chambers, its focus will likely be on accountability and presidential certification of the Pakistani military’s assistance to help “root out Al Qaeda and other violent extremists in Pakistan’s tribal regions” — the goal publicly identified by President Barack Obama.

 

In any event, if the benchmarks are not to the White House’s liking, Obama will largely ignore them the way his predecessor dismissed the congressionally imposed metrics for progress on Iraq — metrics that ultimately even Congress disregarded in the face of increased Iraqi violence. The point is that by doling out goodies upfront, Obama has undercut any attempt to get the Pakistani military to stop underwriting terrorist groups.

 

History actually is repeating itself with a vengeance. It was the multibillion-dollar aid packages in the Reagan years that helped grease Pakistan’s descent into a jihadist dungeon. And the renewed U.S. munificence under George W. Bush only encouraged Pakistan to dig itself deeper into the dungeon. Little surprise a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report concludes that America, despite its generous aid to Pakistan since 9/11, has “not met its national security goals to destroy terrorist threats and close the safe haven in Pakistan’s FATA” [Federally Administered Tribal Areas].

 

At the root of the U.S.-India strategic dissonance on the “Afpak” belt is Washington’s squint-eyed identification of terrorist safe havens only along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, as well as its long-standing pampering of the Pakistani military. The U.S. Congress certainly will not seek to condition the new aid flow to the dismantlement of the state-nurtured terrorist infrastructure in the Pakistani heartland — the staging ground for attacks against India. So, just as the more than $12.3 billion in U.S. assistance to Islamabad since 9/11 only engendered more Pakistani terrorism — with India bearing the brunt — Obama’s plan to shower Pakistan with mammoth new aid will embolden terrorism exporters there and bring Indian security under added pressure.

 

Still, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been conspicuous by his silence on this and on Obama’s itch to strike a political deal with the Taliban. Rather, he has gratuitously stated: “We have been assured that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are in safe hands as of now. And I have no reason to disbelieve the assurance”. Who gave that assurance? The answer: Those who are clueless and guileless on Pakistan are seeking to assure India even as they heap rewards on Islamabad and write off Indian security concerns.

 

Singh’s telling silence, and his earlier refusal to take the mildest diplomatic action against Pakistan over the Mumbai strikes, even as he held that “some Pakistani official agencies must have supported” the attacks, underscore the hidden costs of the nuclear deal he rammed through. India’s Pakistan policy stands effectively outsourced.

 

Singh refrained from taking the smallest of small steps against Pakistan because he believed Washington would help bring the Mumbai-attack planners to justice. Instead, to his chagrin, U.S. officials now are exhorting India to overcome Mumbai and provide Pakistan a tranquil eastern border through troop redeployments, even as non-official Americans are warning that the Indian inaction is bound to bring another major Pakistani-scripted terror attack before long. Like a Rand Corporation report earlier, Stratfor says Indian inaction signals a lack of resolve to deter Pakistan from staging more attacks.

 

Yet Special Representative Richard Holbrooke blithely pours salt on the Indian wounds. By meretriciously claiming in New Delhi that the U.S., India and Pakistan now face a common threat from terrorism and thus need to work together, Holbrooke sought to make Pakistan’s war by terror against India absolvable and unpreventable — a reality he actually would like India to stoically endure.

 

Pakistan is not the only failing state in the world. A dysfunctional Somalia, for example, has become the base for increasingly daring piracy along the western rim of the Indian Ocean, seriously disrupting shipping in one of the world’s busiest maritime passages. But even as Somali pirates — with ties to Islamists — now hold 17 captured ships and some 260 hostages, the annual U.S. aid for Somalia is not equivalent to even one day’s aid for Pakistan that the Obama team has helped put together internationally.

 

The reason Pakistan can harvest tens of billions of dollars by playing the failing-state card is no different from what endeared it to U.S. policy since the 1950s or made it an “all-weather ally” of China. Pakistan remains too useful a pawn for external powers involved in this region. These powers thus are unlikely to let it fail, even as they play up the threat of implosion to bolster the Pakistani state. It’s no wonder Pakistan seems determined as ever to pursue its “war of a thousand cuts” to turn India — with its aging, toothless leadership — into a failed state.

 

(c) Asian Age, 2009.

Belittling India

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From Bush love to Obama autograph

 

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, April 15-30, 2009

 

West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya has said he has “great respect” for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh but differs “with his policies, particularly his special love for America.” The way Singh rode roughshod over national institutions, including Parliament, and rammed the controversial Indo-U.S. nuclear deal down the country’s throat did create an impression, however specious, that he was beholden to Washington. In fact, Singh has made not a single statement on the deal — not even to Parliament — even since the much-vaunted deal came to fruition in October 2008.

 

That silence has to do with the fact that the conditions and riders the U.S. Congress attached while ratifying the deal demolished the solemn assurances Singh had made to Parliament. What may be even more painful for Singh is that the geopolitical advantages the deal was trumpeted to help usher in — including greater U.S. support for India vis-à-vis China and Pakistan — have been belied by the events since, especially the change of administration in Washington. Consequently, as Singh’s term in office ends, there isn’t much of a legacy he can boast of.

 

Actually, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya would have been more accurate had he referred to Singh’s “special love” for the U.S. president, whoever the incumbent. That personal foible has been highlighted both by Singh’s April 2 meeting with Barack Obama in London, on the sidelines of the G-20 summit, and by his September 25, 2008 joint news conference at the White House with George W. Bush. In London, to the surprise of the Americans present, Singh began his bilateral meeting by asking for Obama’s autograph for his daughter on a book authored by Obama. Addressing Obama, Singh quoted his daughter as saying: “I would cherish [it] if you could get Mr. Obama to autograph the book.” Singh went on to tell Obama: “You are much loved and respected in India.”

 

Later that day, when Obama was asked straightforwardly at a news conference what “America is doing to help India tackle terrorism emanating from Pakistan,” he began by calling Singh “a wonderful man” and then disclosed that he and Singh had discussed terrorism “not simply in terms of terrorism emanating from Pakistan… But we spoke about it more broadly…” Here is Obama showering Pakistan with billions of dollars in additional U.S. aid. But Singh, rather than focus on the Pakistani-scripted terror attacks in India, discusses the terrorism challenge “more broadly,” and indeed begins his meeting by seeking Obama’s autograph for his daughter. What happens if Obama’s Pakistan gamble doesn’t pay off?

 

Now consider Singh’s September 25, 2008 news conference with Bush. Singh started by reading a prepared statement. Almost every paragraph in that ended with a schmaltzy tribute to Bush:

 

·                           “And the last four-and-a-half years that I have been prime minister I have been the recipient of your generosity, your affection, your friendship. It means a lot to me and to the people of India.”

 

·                           “In these last four-and-a-half years, there has been a massive transformation of India-United States relations. And Mr. President, you have played a most-important role in making all this happen.”

 

·                           “And when history is written I think it will be recorded that President George W. Bush made an historic goal in bringing our two democracies closer to each other.” 

 

·                           “And when this restrictive regime ends I think a great deal of credit will go to President Bush. And for this I am very grateful to you, Mr. President.” 

 

·                           “So, Mr. President, this may be my last visit to you during your presidency, and let me say, Thank you very much. The people of India deeply love you…”

 

               This will go down in history easily as the most-fawning statement ever made by an Indian prime minister about a foreign leader. America and India, the world’s most-powerful and most-populous democracies, need to build close strategic ties, founded on shared political values and mutual respect and understanding. Singh’s record, however, shows he was unable to pursue such an objective without conducting himself in a manner belittling India, even if inadvertently.

 

(c) Covert, 2009.

For Barack Obama, ignorance is bliss when it comes to the Afpak region

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India’s re-hyphenation with Pakistan returns in US policy

 

From Obama’s call for Indo-Pakistan dialogue to Holbrooke’s second visit in seven weeks, US policy has returned to its traditional position of looking at India through the subcontinental prism while ignoring its security concerns

 

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, April 8, 2009

Despite America’s broken policy on Pakistan, President Barack Obama has unveiled the largest-ever US aid package for that country. Indeed, Islamabad is being made the biggest recipient of US aid in the world. If military, non-military and counterinsurgency aid and reimbursements to the Pakistani military were totalled, Pakistan — under Obama’s latest proposals — would overtake Israel and Egypt as the single largest recipient of American aid.

To supposedly mend a wrecked policy, Obama is doing more of what helped create the failure — dispensing rewards upfront. He has decided to shower billions of dollars in additional aid on Pakistan without even defining benchmarks for judging progress.

Worse yet, the Obama administration has neither acknowledged Pakistan’s role in staging terrorist strikes in India nor made the slightest effort to help bring the Pakistan-based planners of the unparalleled Mumbai attacks to justice. In the detailed, inter-agency “Afpak” policy unveiled by Obama, there is not even a passing mention of Pakistan’s use of proxies to wage a terror war against India. In other words, when Washington refuses to even recognize the problem, can New Delhi really expect the US to be of any help?

 

In fact, Washington is doing the opposite — making light of Indian concerns vis-à-vis Pakistan by asking New Delhi to adopt a flexible approach toward Islamabad so that the US can win greater Pakistani military cooperation on the Afghan front. Put simply, Washington is making short shrift of India’s interests in order to pursue its narrow regional agenda, centred on Obama’s resolve to extricate the US from the war in Afghanistan.

 

But make no mistake: Obama, through his rewards-in-advance policy, is only emboldening the Pakistani military establishment to continue its war by terror against the Indian republic.

 

Asked bluntly at his G-20 London summit news conference what “America is doing to help India tackle terrorism emanating from Pakistan”, Obama’s reply, while evasively long-winded, was revealing. He began by calling Prime Minister Manmohan Singh “a wonderful man”, just as he had described his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, as “marvellous”. But unlike Sarkozy, Singh had begun his bilateral meeting by asking for Obama’s autograph.

Obama then disclosed that he and Singh had discussed terrorism “not simply in terms of terrorism emanating from Pakistan… But we spoke about it more broadly…” Obama went on to say that “at a time when perhaps the greatest enemy of both India and Pakistan should be poverty, that it may make sense to create a more effective dialogue between India and Pakistan.”

This was before he meandered into a professorial sermon on energy efficiency and “reducing our carbon footprint”.

So the question he was asked went unanswered. The truth is that Obama has no intent to help pull India’s chestnuts out of the Pakistan-kindled fire; rather he wants India’s help on his misbegotten Afpak policy. Indeed, that policy is set to make things more difficult for India by reinforcing America’s dependence on the terror-procreating Pakistani military establishment — not only for the transport of the extra war supplies to meet the US military “surge” in Afghanistan, but also for help to negotiate with and co-opt the Afghan Taliban leadership that the Pakistani intelligence has long sheltered in the Quetta area.

How blind Obama and his special representative, Richard Holbrooke, are to the realities on the ground is evident from their separate claims that the hub of terrorism is Pakistan’s border region with Afghanistan. Little surprise the Afpak policy paper concludes by saying “the international community must work with Pakistan to disrupt the threats to security along Pakistan’s western border”. Holbrooke, ingenuously, has even linked terror attacks in India to elements operating from that ungoverned border area.

It is past time the Obama team faced up to the fact that the real problem is not at the Pakistani frontiers with Afghanistan. Rather it is the sanctuaries deep inside Pakistan that continue to breed and export terrorism. None of the 10 terrorists who attacked Mumbai last November came from Pakistan’s tribal belt. India is being targeted by Punjabi terror groups, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, operating from Pakistan’s heartland with the military’s connivance.

Yet the naïveté in Washington is astonishing. Almost every Obama policy assumption has an Alice in Wonderland ring to it.

Take, for example, the decision to disburse $3 billion in additional military aid to Islamabad in the name of a “Pakistani Counterinsurgency Capability Fund”. The attempt to get the Pakistani military to focus on counterinsurgency misses the point that what the Obama administration calls insurgents remain prized proxies for the Pakistani generals.

Or take the Obama policy premise that the “surge” can be used, Iraq-style, as a show of force to cut deals with the “good” terrorists. This surge-and-bribe assumption overlooks the fact that the Afghan militants, with cosy sanctuaries across the borders, have more leeway than their Iraqi counterparts.

Also, the new rewards being doled out disregard the reality that the Pakistani generals have little incentive to lend genuine cooperation at a time when Obama has barely disguised his exit strategy. The generals and their surrogates — the Taliban — just need to patiently wait out the American exit to reclaim Afghanistan.

Through his policy contradictions, Obama has tied himself up in knots. His policy rejects his predecessor’s institution-building approach in Afghanistan as an attempt to create “some sort of Central Asian Valhalla”. Yet it proposes $7.5 billion in civilian aid for an increasingly Talibanized Pakistan to win hearts and minds there — a Valhalla even more distant.

The upshot of Obama’s blinkered approach is India’s re-hyphenation with Pakistan in US policy. This is so evident from Holbrooke’s recurring visits to New Delhi and American calls — from the president down — that India reopen dialogue with Islamabad, even if it has to countenance more Pakistan-scripted terror attacks.

For long, Washington has realized that the best way to handle India is to massage its ego. It was thus claimed that in deference to India’s sensitivities, Kashmir had been removed from Holbrooke’s job description and that his mission would stay restricted to the Afpak belt.

 

In reality, Washington took India and Kashmir out of Holbrooke’s agenda only publicly. As Holbrooke has shown by coming to New Delhi twice in seven weeks — this time with the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman — India is very much part of his mandate. In fact, Washington’s proposals for troop reductions and de-escalation clearly bring in the Kashmir dispute.

 

Obama’s aides contend it is impossible to disentangle Kashmir from any effort to win Pakistani cooperation. So the way forward, they argue, is to work on Kashmir behind the scenes while pretending the issue is not on the agenda.

 

Still, asked by a Senate committee about tension reduction in Kashmir, Centcom chief, General David Petraeus, admitted last week: “Together with my great diplomatic wing man, Ambassador Holbrooke, this effort actually has started”. And National Security Adviser James Jones, while keeping up the pretence that there is no problem on Pakistan’s eastern side, earlier declared “we do intend to help both countries … build more trust and confidence so that Pakistan can address the issues that it confronts on the western side”.

 

When India is deeply immersed in an election process, why has Holbrooke come a second time in quick succession, knowing New Delhi is anything but happy about his visit? The reason is that he is using this interregnum to show his turf includes India. But more than a turf-defining mission, what Holbrooke desperately needs is a primer on the roots of terrorism, lest he continue to betray his abysmal ignorance.

 

(c) The Asian Age, 2009.

Waiting for another Mumbai

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26/11 can happen again

 

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, April 8, 2009

 

More than four months after the unparalleled Mumbai terrorist assaults, India has returned to business as usual. It has shied away from the hard decisions it needed to take, yet it set up a new organization of little utility — the National Investigative Agency — whose small staff is still struggling to find office space. Mumbai may have become a terrorist exemplar globally, but in India, there is little evidence it has changed thinking and policy fundamentally, even though it wreaked incalculable damage to the investment and tourism worth of “Brand India.”

 

India has confronted a continuous Pakistan-waged unconventional war since the 1980s, but to date, it is unable to shed its blinkers, let alone initiate any concrete counteraction to stem a rising existential threat. India is facing war, and yet it continues to debate interminably how it should respond, even as the level of Pakistani asymmetric warfare against it escalates qualitatively and quantitatively.

 

India has suffered more acts of major terror than any other nation in the 21st century. Still, the debate in India rages as if the last Pakistani act of war was the 1999 Kargil invasion. The blunt truth is that ever since the then Pakistani dictator Zial ul-Haq fashioned the instrument of proxy war against India in the 1980s by taking a page out of the CIA-sponsored covert war against the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, Pakistan has been at systematic war with the Indian republic.

 

Terrorism in general, and especially a foreign state-sponsored proxy war, cannot be fought as a law-and-order problem. What India needs is a comprehensive approach that blends different key elements to form a credible counter-terror strategy. Yet, to this day, India has not attempted to even formulate a counterterrorism doctrine.

 

An excess emphasis on defensive measures only plays into the designs of terrorists and their masters by instilling a siege mentality, underlined by the government’s refusal to take any risks in compelling the Indian Premier League to take its scheduled cricket series overseas. The siege mentality is also evident from the government’s focus on trying to prevent a repeat of the last attack rather than seeking to forestall the next innovative strike. The likelihood of terrorists arriving again on inflatable dinghies and striking luxury hotels is very low. Yet the response to Mumbai has been to set up security cordons around luxury hotels — cordons that any determined band of terrorists can bust.

 

Actually, on Mumbai, India lost twice over — the first time when 10 Pakistani terrorists held its commercial capital hostage for almost three days, and the second time when Pakistan outmaneuvered it diplomatically. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, strikingly, did not take a single step against Islamabad over the Mumbai attacks — however small or symbolic. Singh thus helped cap India’s response at the level of impotent fury. His focus was almost entirely on containing the domestic political fallout of the attacks.

 

In that light, it is no surprise that New Delhi has continually watered down its position. Gone is its insistence that Pakistan dismantle its terror infrastructure and allow the Mumbai suspects to be tried in India. With New Delhi having relaxed its pressure, it is pretty likely that the Mumbai masterminds, with their close ties to the Pakistani military leadership, will go scot-free. That in turn is likely to embolden the Pakistani military to sanction another terrorist attack on India that does as much damage as the Mumbai strikes.

 

Indeed, far from targeting Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as a terrorist organization, Singh naively sought to bolster its credibility by inviting its chief to India after the Mumbai attacks. But for second thoughts in Islamabad, the ISI chief would have landed up in India, to quote the credulous Singh, “to assist in the investigations.” How Singh could have believed that the ISI would lend a helping hand remains a puzzle. Just weeks later, the Indian foreign secretary declared that organizers of the Mumbai attacks and the earlier Indian embassy bombing in Kabul “remain clients and creations of the ISI.”

 

It is past time New Delhi addressed the glaring disconnect between its shrill rhetoric and inaction by framing a comprehensive counterterrorism doctrine and setting up a unified institution and command to wage war on terrorists and their sponsors. Besides building up its special-forces capabilities, it needs to employ better public relations as a counterterrorism instrument. Also, by quietly undertaking various actions, including at sub-threshold level, India can demonstrate that terrorism no longer is a cost-free option for Pakistan. Washington’s failure to help bring the Pakistan-based Mumbai masterminds to justice, and President Barack Obama’s new plan unveiling the largest-ever annual US aid flow to Islamabad, underscore that India will have to combat terrorism on its own strength.

 

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