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Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

U.S. military strikes spare Taliban leadership

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Stop the Faustian Bargain

 

The U.S. must resist the temptation to cut a deal with the medieval Taliban

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindustan Times, February 25, 2009

 

How gun-toting Islamists are expanding their hold on western Pakistan has been laid bare by Islamabad’s U.S.-condoned peace agreement effectively ceding the once-pristine Swat Valley as a Taliban mini-state. The Taliban’s sway on territory on both sides of the British-drawn Durand Line shows that the Afghanistan-Pakistan (‘Af-Pak’) border no longer exists in practice.

 

Less obvious is the Obama administration’s interest to seek a political deal with the Taliban behind the cover of a U.S. troop ‘surge’ in Afghanistan. Its approach seems simple: If you can’t defeat them, buy them off. Having failed to rout the Taliban, Washington is now preparing the ground to strike a deal with the Taliban leadership, but from a position of strength. That is why the surge has begun.

 

Outwardly, President Barack Obama is bolstering the war in Afghanistan while seeking to end the other one in Iraq. In reality, he is seeking to replicate in Afghanistan his predecessor’s experiment in Iraq, where a surge was used as a show of force to buy off tribal chiefs in the Sunni badlands. The Taliban leadership — with an elaborate command-and-control structure oiled by Wahhabi petrodollars and proceeds from the $720-million opium trade — has been ensconced for long in Pakistan’s Quetta area.

 

The very day Obama announced the surge last week, he acknowledged there can be no military solution. Even as U.S. officials expand contacts with the Taliban, Gen. David Petraeus, the Centcom chief, is openly looking for ways to win over Taliban commanders. His boss, Defence Secretary Robert Gates, has gone one step further to say Washington could accept a Swat-style agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

 

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 their security and those who threaten ours.  But, unfortunately, that is what the Obama administration is itching to do, first by drawing a specious distinction between Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and then seeking to illusorily differentiate between ‘moderate’ Taliban (the good terrorists) and those that rebuff deal-making (the bad terrorists).

 

Worse yet, Obama is following in his predecessor’s footsteps by taking friends and allies for granted. Several decisions — to induct 17,000 more troops, set up local Afghan militias in a country already bristling with armed militiamen, and open lines of communication with the Taliban — have been taken without prior consultations with partners, including NATO allies and India, which has a massive $1.2-billion aid programme in Afghanistan. It is as if the Richard Holbrooke mission and this week’s Af-Pak conference in Washington are intended merely to market decisions already made.

 

To arrest further deterioration in the Afghan war, the U.S. military needs to focus less on Al Qaeda — a badly splintered and weakened organization whose leadership operates out of mountain caves — and more on an increasingly resurgent Taliban that openly challenges NATO forces and terrorizes local populations. Yet, unmanned U.S. drones have targeted senior figures from Al Qaeda and other insurgent groups holed up in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), but not the Taliban leadership operating with impunity from Baluchistan, even though most drone aircraft reportedly fly out of the Baluch, CIA-run Shamsi airfield. U.S. ground commando raids also have spared the Taliban’s command-and-control in Quetta.

Even as the CIA’s covert war was expanded this month to take on Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud — now a major thorn in the side of the Pakistani military establishment — the Afghan Taliban’s ISI-backed core leadership in Quetta has been left unscathed so that the U.S. can potentially pursue a deal with it. CIA-ISI ties actually are expanding to cover new missions. And the CIA has even coordinated India-Pakistan intelligence exchanges over the Mumbai terrorist strikes.

Created by the ISI and midwifed by the CIA in 1994, the Taliban rapidly emerged as a Frankenstein’s monster. Yet the Clinton administration acquiesced in the Taliban’s ascension to power in Kabul in 1996 and turned a blind eye as that thuggish militia, in league with the ISI, fostered narco-terrorism and swelled the ranks of the Afghan war alumni waging transnational terrorism. With 9/11, however, the chickens came home to roost. The U.S. came full circle when it declared war on the Taliban in October 2001.

Now, desperate to save a faltering military campaign, U.S. policy is edging to come another full circle as Gates and Petraeus seek to use the surge to strike deals with ‘moderate’ Taliban (as if there can be moderates in an Islamist militia that enforces medieval practices). If the U.S. were to conclude a political deal that rehabilitates the Taliban chief, the one-eyed Mullah Muhammad Omar, and his top associates, it would be a powerful vindication of the Pakistani military’s role in rearing the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba as force multipliers vis-à-vis Afghanistan and India. Indeed, it would buoy up its long-running asymmetric war against India by terror.

 

A surge-and-bribe experiment is unlikely to yield a ticket out of Afghanistan for the U.S. military. The Af-Pak tactical gains Obama is seeking will come at strategic costs. The notion that attacks against America can be prevented not by defeating terrorism but by regionally confining it is preposterous. Terrorism cannot be boxed in hermetically in the region that already is the wellspring of global terror. Before he moves too far to retrace his steps, Obama must rethink his Af-Pak strategy and resist the temptation to pursue narrow, short-term objectives.

 

Brahma Chellaney  is a strategic affairs specialist.

Can terrorism be regionally contained?

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Face up to a common threat

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times
 

Despite a spreading jihad culture, U.S. President Barack Obama has ended America’s global "war on terror" as dramatically as his predecessor had initiated it. With the stroke of his pen, Obama has effectively terminated the war on terror that President George W. Bush had launched to defeat terrorists who, he said, wanted to "establish a radical Islamic empire that spans the Earth from Spain to Indonesia."

Effective defense against the asymmetric weapon of terrorism is difficult. Dealing with such unconventional warfare remains a central theme in international discourse, given the growing threat from jihadists and the spreading virus of Wahhabi Islam.

But the blunt truth is that the war on terror derailed long before Obama took office. The U.S. occupation of Iraq proved so divisive in international relations that it fractured the post-9/11 global consensus to fight terror. Guantanamo, the CIA’s secret prisons overseas and the torture of detainees, including waterboarding, came to symbolize the excesses of the war on terror.

The abrupt end of the war on terror thus means little. With Iraq searing his presidency, Bush himself had given up the pretense of waging a global war on terror — a war he had once equated with the Cold War struggle against communism while comparing Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida figures with tyrants like Josef Stalin and Pol Pot.

In fact, ever since the U.S. declaration of a global war on terror, the scourge of transnational terrorism has spread deeper and wider in the world. The war’s only outcome has been that it enabled the Bush administration to set up new U.S. military arrangements extending from the Caspian Sea basin to Southeast Asia.

Not calling it a war any longer but labeling it "an enduring struggle," as Obama has done, doesn’t change the realities on the ground. Secular, pluralistic states, depending on their location, have come under varying pressures from the forces of terror. Vulnerability to terrorist attacks is critically linked to a state’s neighborhood.

A democracy geographically distant from the Muslim world tends to be less vulnerable to frequent terrorist strikes than a democracy proximate to Islamic states. The luxury of geography of, say, Japan and Australia contrasts starkly with the tyranny of geography of India and Israel. It is such realities that no change of lexicon can address.

Still, Obama is right in saying, "The language we use matters." He has been wise to reach out to the Muslim world and to start undoing some of the excesses of the Bush years. The international fight against terrorism will be a long, hard slog. After all, the problem and solution are linked: Terrorism not only threatens the free, secular world, but also springs from the rejection of democratic and secular values.

Worse, terrorism is pursued as a sanctified tool of religion and a path to redemption. Indeed, because the concept of jihad is deeply embedded in religion, the line between an Islamic extremist and terrorist can be a thin one. Islamist ideology catalyzes terrorism, and acts of terror in turn strengthen Muslim extremism.

It is thus obvious that counterterrorism will have to be a long-haul exercise. The struggle against transnational terror can be won only by inculcating a liberal, secular ethos in societies steeped in religious and political bigotry — a daunting challenge indeed.

In that light, the with-us-or-against-us terminology and use of offensive terms like "Islamo-fascism" were counterproductive. Counterterrorism is not a struggle against any religion but against those that misuse and misappropriate religion.

The need is to reach out to Muslim moderates through correct idiom, not to unite the Muslim world through provocative language. It is imperative to cash in on the historical sectarian and ethnic schisms in the Islamic world.

Obama’s gentler, subtler tone no doubt will help. Such a tone has proven such an ideological challenge to al-Qaida — deprived of a hate-spewing and polarizing American leader like Bush — that it has hurled one insult after another at Obama.

Obama, however, will be able to sustain his softer tone only if the United States continues to be free of any terrorist attack at home, as it has been for 7 1/2 years. If a terrorist strike occurs in the U.S. on Obama’s watch, the president will come under intense attack for dismantling tools that had successfully shielded that country for long. Already, former Vice President Dick Cheney has accused the new administration of pusillanimity in approaching the "tough, mean, dirty, nasty business" of keeping the country safe from terrorists.

It is not an accident that Obama, in one of his first acts in office, has appointed a special envoy for each of the two regions central to the global fight against terrorism — the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt and the Middle East. With Cheney predicting a "high probability" of a nuclear or biological terrorist attack in the coming years, safeguarding nuclear assets in quasi-failed Pakistan from insider threats and militant strikes is another challenge.

Obama is likely to discover that ending the war on terror was the easy part. In fact, at a time when America’s challenges have been underscored by a deep economic recession, increasing reliance on capital inflows from authoritarian China and jihad-bankrolling Saudi Arabia, two overseas wars and eroding global influence, Obama already has started redefining U.S. antiterror objectives more narrowly.

Robert Gates, his defense secretary, has given the clearest indication yet that the new administration will seek to regionally contain terrorism rather than defeat it. While outwardly the U.S. looks set to pursue a military strategy in Afghanistan and a political approach toward Pakistan, in reality its troop surge in Afghanistan is intended to cut a political deal with the Taliban from a position of strength. Obama’s Afghanistan strategy can be summed up in three words: Surge, bribe and run.

Also, Washington’s proposal to triple nonmilitary aid to Islamabad while keeping existing military-aid flow intact, other than to tie it to concrete Pakistani cooperation on the Afghan front, will free the Pakistani military to continue its asymmetric war of terror against India.

Internationally, there is greater need than ever to bring the fight against terror back on track. It will require a concerted, sustained global campaign — and the employment of the full range of counterterrorism tools domestically — to beat back the challenge from the forces of terror.

Yet the jarring U.S. intent to focus on preventing attacks against America by regionally confining terrorism means that democracies with uncongenial neighborhoods, like India and Israel, will bear the brunt of escalating terrorism.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."
 
The Japan Times: Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

It is past time India began defending itself

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Foil the terror war

 

India has to act now to pre-empt further terror attacks

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, February 18, 2009

 

If, as the famous soldier and military historian Carl von Clausewitz theorized, war is the continuation of politics by other means, terrorism is the continuation of war by other means. Since the 1980s, Pakistan has waged such war unremittingly. Yet India has been unable to shed its blinkers, let alone initiate concrete counteraction. Even as the Pakistani asymmetric warfare has escalated qualitatively, leaving no part of India unscathed, the Indian republic continues to debate endlessly on how to respond to that war.

 

Islamabad’s grudging admission about the role of some Pakistani “non-state actors” in the Mumbai attacks notwithstanding, there is little hope that Pakistan will reform itself and kick its terrorism-fomenting addiction. President Asif Ali Zardari is right that the Taliban wants to take over Pakistan. Those who play with fire will be consumed by fire. By fathering the Taliban, Pakistan set in motion an inexorable political reconfiguration of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region (or Af-Pak in Washingtonese). Indeed, the political border between these two countries has already ceased to exist in practice.

 

But even as the writ of the Pakistani state no longer extends to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and much of Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) — that is, to nearly half the country — the alliance between its jihadist-infiltrated military and Islamists remains firm. Pakistan’s pattern of “prevarication, denial, diversionary tactics and misplaced sense of victimhood”, as the Indian foreign minister has called it, is best illustrated by a Pakistani think-tank’s widely circulated report which, reflecting the security establishment’s mindset, portrays the Mumbai attacks and the Indian dossier as a Hindu-Jewish-American plot to dismember Pakistan and divest it of its nuclear crown jewels by provoking a dual Indian and US invasion from opposite flanks.

 

Still, the evidence tracing the unparalleled Mumbai strikes to Pakistan became simply too overwhelming for Islamabad to continue to stonewall. But its epiphanic, partial admission is not designed to bring the real planners to justice but to shield them by making a few jihadists the fall guys and to drag out the investigations indefinitely, knowing that the Mumbai attacks would be eclipsed by newer terror strikes in India. In essence, it is a political ploy to deflect international pressure, contain Indian anger and lower bilateral tensions — the diplomatic equivalent of throwing a bone at a dog.

 

            Let’s face it: Pakistan’s ability to wage a war of terror with impunity owes a lot to India’s own failings. While Pakistan is a quasi-failed state, India is a state that has yet to come of age — a young republic still learning statecraft. Pakistan is disingenuous about wanting to end its state-nurtured terrorism, but India has been no less insincere in pledging to defeat such warfare. “When will India start defending itself?” That was the blunt question someone asked this writer at a recent conference overseas. The state that suffers the most terrorist blows in the world has, oddly, no counterterrorism doctrine and no defined defence policy.

 

Failure to move from sound-bites to action has turned India into such a veritable target for daring, innovative attacks that American analyst Ashley Tellis told Congress that, “India has become the sponge that protects us all”. Take Mumbai. The synaptic gap between New Delhi’s shrill rhetoric and lack of meaningful response has been glaring. What’s more, it has continued to water down its demands. Gone is its insistence that the accused be tried in India. It has also fallen into the Pakistan trap by focusing on the inquiry into an act of terror than on the infrastructure of terror that permits such acts to be carried out. Amateurishly, topmost officials contradict each other in public and call attention to a litany of mistakes.

 

The first response to the Mumbai attacks was to ingenuously invite the ISI chief to come and “assist in the investigations” — akin to police inviting the mafia to join a criminal probe. Now the world has been told that in both the Mumbai and Kabul embassy attacks, “the organizers were and remain clients and creations of the ISI”. Take another example. Twitchily defensive on Kashmir, New Delhi argues that issue can be dealt with only at the bilateral level with Pakistan. Yet India seeks to respond to Pakistan’s terror war not bilaterally but internationally. It is as if New Delhi has irredeemably lost its diplomatic script.

 

It is a sorry spectacle when Indians appear better at quoting statistics than in dealing with realities. The defence minister affirms “more than 30 terrorist camps are still operating in Pakistan”, while the army chief specifies that most such camps are located “10 to 50 kilometres” from the Indian frontier. But, unembarrassed, they have nothing to report on what they have done in response. It is as if those tasked with defending India are supposed to merely collect data and record it in files for posterity while hapless Indians continue to fall victim to terrorist strikes.

 

Terror orchestrators across the border know that India’s present tough talk will last only up to national elections. Once India returns to business as usual, they will seek to stump its defences again through synchronized swarm attacks on novel targets. War by terror is seriously undermining India’s security and rising strength. If India is to avert nightmare scenarios and not remain a sponge that absorbs attacks so that other states are spared, it better defend itself through a concerted counterterrorist strategy with near- and far-term components.

 

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

 

The Times of India: February 18, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

Come to terms with the “Afpak” realities

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OBAMA, HOLBROOKE DESTINED TO FAIL ON ‘AFPAK’ POLICY
 

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

By Brahma Chellaney

Global Viewpoint

Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media

 

Even as U.S. special representative Richard Holbrooke has embarked on his mission to find an answer to the Afghanistan-Pakistan predicament (“the Afpak problem” in Washingtonese), there is continuing reluctance in the international policy discourse to face up to a central reality: The political border between these two countries has now ceased to exist in practice.

 

The so-called Durand Line, in any event, was an artificial, British-colonial invention that left the large Pashtun community divided into two. Set up in 1893 as the border between British-led India and Afghanistan, the Durand Line had been despised and rejected by Afghanistan for long as a colonial imposition.

 

Today, that line exists only in maps. On the ground, it has little political, ethnic and economic relevance, even as the “Afpak” region has become a magnet for the world’s jihadists. A de facto Pashtunistan, long sought by Pashtuns, now exists on the ruins of an ongoing Islamist militancy but without any political authority in charge.

 

The disappearance of the Afpak political border seems irreversible. While the writ of the Pakistani state no longer extends to nearly half of that country (much of Baluchistan, large parts of the North-West Frontier Province and the whole of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas), ever-larger swaths of Afghanistan are outside the control of the government in Kabul.

 

The Pakistani army has lost increasing ground to insurgents in the western regions not because it is weaker than the armed extremists and insurgents but because an ethnic, tribal and militant backlash has resulted in the state withering away in the Pashtun and Baluch lands.

 

Forced to cede control, the jihadist-infiltrated military establishment and its infamous Inter-Services Intelligence agency have chosen to support proxy militant groups, especially the Taliban. However, with its own unity unraveling, Pakistan is paying a heavy price for having fathered the Taliban.

 

The international reluctance to come to terms with the new reality is because of the fundamental, far-reaching issues such acceptance would throw open. It is simpler to just keep up the pretense of wanting to stabilize Pakistan and Afghanistan within their existing political frontiers.

 

Take U.S. policy. As if determined to hide from this reality, Washington is now pursuing, at least outwardly, a military approach toward Afghanistan through a troop “surge” and a political strategy toward Pakistan centered on the tripling of non-military aid — or what Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi calls a “civilian surge.”

 

In reality, the Afghanistan surge is intended for a non-military mission — to cut deals with moderate Taliban leaders and other local commanders in the same way that the surge in Iraq was used as a show of force to buy off many Sunni leaders.

 

A surge-bribe-and-run strategy can hardly work in mountainous Afghanistan, a largely tribal society without the literacy level and middle class of Iraq.

 

A forward-looking Afpak policy demands consistency in approach toward two interlinked countries and recognition of the 2,640-kilometer Durand Line’s disappearance. The ethnic genie cannot be put back in the bottle.

 

To arrest further deterioration in the seven-year Afghan war, the U.S. military needs to focus less on al-Qaeda — a badly splintered and weakened organization whose leadership operates out of mountain caves — and more on an increasingly resurgent Taliban that operates openly and has sanctuaries and a command-and-control structure in Pakistan.

 

It is unproductive to keep blaming the fragile civilian governments in Kabul and Islamabad for the Afpak ills. In each of the two countries, the president is more like the mayor of the capital city. While in Afghanistan the assorted warlords and tribal chieftains call the shots, in Pakistan it is the powerful, meddling military establishment, except, of course, in the anarchic western tribal regions.

 

Presidents Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari, although regarded by their critics as too close to their American patrons, are powerless and helpless to deliver on anything. Yet the Obama administration is itching to dump Karzai as if his replacement with another U.S.-friendly figure in Kabul would help transform the situation.

Washington now complains that a weak, corrupt government in Kabul is driving Afghans into the Taliban’s clutches. So, even if it undermines the federal government, it wants to do business directly with provincial governors and tribal leaders and seek their help to set up local, Iraq-style militias.

Yet in Pakistan it is doing the opposite: propping up a shaky, inept central government while pampering the military establishment that is working to undermine the civilians in power.

Let’s be clear: Pakistan and Afghanistan, two artificially created states with no roots in history that have searched endlessly for a national identity, constitute the most dangerous region on earth. They have emerged as the global epicenter of transnational terrorism and narcotics trade. Additionally, Pakistan is where state-nurtured terrorism and state-reared nuclear smuggling uniquely intersect.

Yet, as if the forces of terror can be boxed in, the U.S. is now scaling back its objective to regionally contain rather than defeat terrorism — a strategy that promises to keep the Afpak problem as a festering threat to global security.

 

Given that this region has become ungovernable and borderless, it seems pointless to treat the existing political frontiers of Afghanistan and Pakistan as sacrosanct when the Afpak fusion term itself implies the two are no longer separate entities. The time has come to start debating what kind of a new political order in the Hindu-Kush region could create stable, moderate, governable and ethnically more harmonious states.

 

Make no mistake: The Afpak problem won’t go away without a fundamental break from failed U.S. policies. Continuing more of what hasn’t worked in the past, such as throwing more money at Pakistan and pouring more foreign troops into Afghanistan, is akin to feeding the beast.

 

(c) 2009 Global Viewpoint
DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES

February 13, 2009

“The most dangerous place on earth”

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Elaborate, dual charade tumbles out in the open

Pakistan’s terror-exporting and nuclear-smuggling record has come full circle with its non-inquiry in the name of an inquiry into the Mumbai attacks and the release of A.Q. Khan

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, February 11, 2009

A key parallel can be drawn between the most dangerous nuclear-trafficking operation in history (innocuously labelled “the A.Q. Khan affair”) and Pakistani-fomented terrorism against India. In both cases, Islamabad has doggedly sought to shield the role of state institutions by pinning the blame on a few individuals. But neither occurrence could have been possible without the active involvement of its military and intelligence.

Quasi-failed Pakistan is where state-nurtured terrorism and state-reared nuclear smuggling uniquely intersect. While the Pakistani nuclear-weapons programme was founded on illicitly acquired blueprints and items from overseas, with Abdul Qadeer Khan as the spearhead, the instrument of transnational terrorism was fashioned by dictator Zia ul-Haq. But so addictive is illicit activity that the clandestine nuclear importers later took to covert exports, while some of the military-raised terrorist figures branched off into independent enterprise.

Little surprise thus that U.S. President Bill Clinton called Pakistan “the most dangerous place on earth,” while his successor, George W. Bush, said “this is wilder than the Wild West.” Yet this artificially created country, still in search of a national identity, has had a congenital problem facing up to the truth on its own actions. No sooner had Pakistan been established than it militarily invaded Kashmir but claimed the attackers were tribesmen. Such penchant to pursue aggression and denial in chorus continues to this day.

But truth chases those that run away from it. Pakistan’s broken promises of “transparent,” “time-bound” inquiry into the November 26-29 Mumbai terrorist assaults and the state-engineered circumstances of Khan’s recent release from five-year house detention blow the lid off the government cover-up. In both instances, concerted efforts to deny the involvement of any state agency have only helped point to the role of official institutions.

Take Khan. Restrictions on Khan had gradually lessened, but now the house-arrest pretence has ended with a court decision spurred on by a government submission — that Khan was not under formal house detention but merely under guard for his own security. The court thus ruled that with no charge and no detention order against him, Khan had the right to move freely.

If Khan was really the wayward scientist who almost singlehandedly sold Pakistan’s nuclear secrets to other renegade states, why was he never charged or even allowed to be questioned by international investigators? How come he was made to confess on national television at midnight, only to be instantaneously pardoned? The truth is that Khan was held incommunicado to shield him from international inquiry and to stop him from spilling the beans on the state’s role.

Now that international investigations have unravelled, he has been freed on the condition that he would not speak in public about the illicit ring, let alone implicate others as accomplices. As Khan’s Dutch-born wife has admitted, he will not be able to speak out as “part of an agreement that has been reached”.

Such a deal saves from exposure the plethora of accomplices that go right up to the top echelons of Pakistan’s political and military establishments. No wonder the Pakistani foreign ministry has peremptorily declared, “The so-called A.Q. Khan affair is a closed chapter.” But history’s worst nuclear scandal won’t go away that easily. That is because the cover-up extends far beyond Pakistan’s borders.

The ring was unearthed in 2003 after admittedly operating for 16 long years. Such was the extent of its transnational operations that blueprints of a Chinese-designed nuclear bomb supplied to Pakistan were found on computers in Switzerland and Dubai. Yet, with the much-touted international investigations in shambles, no significant figure in the ring has been convicted or put on trial.

The principal reason is that the U.S. has not been interested in fully investigating the network or in bringing the ringleaders to justice. Indeed, European allies have accused the U.S. of withholding crucial documents and seeking to suppress facts about a ring that may have shared nuclear secrets with more countries than just Libya, Iran and North Korea and, perhaps, with non-state actors as well.

Take the Swiss release last month of the two Tinner brothers, who along with their father were important conduits in the Pakistani ring. The Swiss government has played a double game: While saying Washington has withheld critical evidence needed to convict the three, it has admitted destroying — on national-security grounds dubbed specious by a parliamentary panel — thousands of files of evidence. One of the brothers, Urs Tinner, acknowledges that he had been working undercover for the CIA.

Or take the earlier disclosure that the CIA shielded Khan from arrest and prosecution in Europe in 1975 and 1986. The Dutch government, according to former Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers, did not take Khan into custody on the CIA’s plea that it wanted “to follow him.”

 

Khan was sentenced in absentia by Amsterdam judge Anita Leeser in 1983 to four years in prison for stealing enrichment secrets from the Netherlands to build Pakistan’s Kahuta plant. After the conviction was overturned on a technicality, the CIA apparently influenced the Dutch decision not to bring new charges against Khan, whose case files, according to judge Leeser, disappeared “on purpose.”

 

Just as the CIA has had cozy ties with the Inter-Services Intelligence — an agency it helped train and fatten — it shielded Khan for long, thereby assisting the underground Pakistani bomb programme for the very reason China aided Islamabad’s nuclear and missile ambitions. Now, the chickens have come home to roost. According to ex-CIA chief George Tenet’s 2007 book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, two senior Pakistani nuclear scientists, Bashiruddin Mahmoud (who once served as Khan’s boss) and Abdul Majeed, provided Al Qaeda with a rough sketch of a nuclear-bomb design.

Tellingly, the Obama White House’s reaction to Khan’s release has not been to seek his re-arrest or to reverse the Bush administration’s kid-gloves approach by demanding that Islamabad allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to interrogate Khan about his past activities. Rather, it has merely sought assurances on what seems inconceivable — that Khan “is not engaged or involved in any of the activity that resulted in his house arrest earlier.”

Now consider Pakistan’s non-inquiry in the name of an inquiry into the Mumbai attacks. After weeks of alleged investigations and misleading clues planted in the media, it has ingeniously sought to buy time ad infinitum by declaring that “without substantial evidence from India, it will be exceedingly difficult to complete the investigation and proceed with the case.” It believes it can hide from the damming evidence that the coordinators of the Mumbai strikes, like the organizers of the Indian embassy bombing in Kabul, “remain clients and creations of the ISI,” in the words of the Indian foreign secretary.

However vexing the denouement, the non-investigation of the Mumbai attacks and the release of the central figure in the nuclear-smuggling ring prove that Pakistan is seeking to neither be a normal state nor adhere to international norms of civilized behaviour. Indeed, by getting Khan to claim sole responsibility for the ring in his 2004 teary-eyed confession and by presenting the two Mumbai-attack planners, Zarrar Shah and Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, as independent operators, Islamabad has laid bare its objective: Make a few individuals the fall guys to help preserve its illicit-activities infrastructure.

The Pakistani system is bound to produce more A.Q. Khans, Zarrar Shahs and Lakhvis unless it is thoroughly reformed, including by bringing the military, intelligence and nuclear establishments under civilian oversight, as is the custom in any normal country.

(c) Asian Age, 2009.

Chinese navy in the Indian Ocean rim

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China’s maritime chess

 

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, February 10, 2009

 

Boastful claims in China’s official media that Chinese warships forced an Indian submarine to surface in a standoff in Indian Ocean waters off Somalia are the latest pointer to the Chinese navy seeking to challenge India in its backyard. They also underline an incipient naval competition for power and influence between the world’s two most-populous nations.

 

            The claims came soon after the communist regime in Beijing made its first-ever deployment of a naval task force beyond the Pacific by dispatching battle-ready warships to the Indian Ocean rim under the anti-piracy banner. The start of Chinese patrols in the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden is intended to extend China’s naval role and presence far from its shores while demonstrating a capability to conduct complex operations in distant waters.

 

            With China’s new emphasis on the seas, the Indian navy has been trying to monitor Chinese naval movements. In separate incidents in 2006, it photographed three Chinese submarines in the Mediterranean and a new destroyer off the Yemini coast. In the latest case, an Indian submarine, seeking to “fingerprint” the two Chinese destroyers involved in the anti-piracy mission, recorded their acoustic, propeller and electromagnetic signatures. But according to reports carried by Xinhua and the China Daily, the Indian sub was cornered and compelled to surface — a claim rubbished by the Indian navy, which said no sub can be forced to surface in international waters.

           

What is clear is the Chinese political resolve to challenge India’s maritime pre-eminence in the Indian Ocean. A paper published by the military-run Chinese Institute for International Strategic Studies last May points to the inevitability of Beijing setting up naval bases overseas, including in the Indian Ocean rim. It warned that without naval assets overseas, “China’s maritime fleet will face an extremely dangerous situation,” adding: “Most of the world’s major powers have overseas bases, and China can be no exception”. An earlier article in the Liberation Army Daily had asserted that the contiguous corridor stretching from the Taiwan Straits to the Indian Ocean’s western rim constitutes China’s legitimate offshore-defence perimeter.

 

In that light, China has aggressively moved to build ports in the Indian Ocean rim, including in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Burma. Besides eyeing Pakistan’s Chinese-built port of Gwadar as a naval anchor, Beijing has sought naval links with the Maldives, Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar. It aims to control vital sea-lanes of communication between the Indian and Pacific Oceans through a “string of pearls” strategy. Its latest “pearl” is the billion-dollar port its engineers are building in Hambantota, Sri Lanka.

 

Today, the geopolitical importance of the Indian Ocean is beginning to rival that of the Pacific. Much of the global oil-export supply passes through the Indian Ocean rim region, particularly through two constricted passageways — the 89-kilometer-wide Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman, and the piracy-plagued Strait of Malacca, which is barely 2.5 kilometers wide at its narrowest point between Indonesia and Singapore. In addition, the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the nuclear standoff with Iran undergird the critical importance of the Indian Ocean region. Asserting naval presence in the Indian Ocean is part of the high-stakes game of maritime chess that China is now ready to play.

 

More broadly, China is seeking to underpin political, commercial and energy interests through a sea-based power projection force capability and position itself as a militarily strong and economically dynamic peer competitor to the U.S. while, at the same time, seeking to prevent the rise of peer competition from Asia’s other two main powers, India and Japan. Just as the need to battle pirates along the so-called Barbary Coast of North Africa in the early 19th century helped spur the rise of a powerful U.S. navy, China is today seeking to add force to its global power ambitions by taking on pirates under the placard of internationalism. Indeed, that same plank came handy to Beijing earlier to agree to joint anti-piracy patrols with Pakistan in the Arabian Sea and to extend similar cooperation to ASEAN.

 

The U.S., oddly, has welcomed the Chinese task-force deployment in the Indian Ocean rim. As if to underline its attempt to propitiate Beijing by overlooking Indian concerns, Washington has hoped that the Chinese deployment would be “the springboard for resumption” of Sino-U.S. military contacts — suspended by Beijing in reprisal to a recent U.S. package of largely defensive arms for Taiwan. But India, with its enormous strategic depth in the Indian Ocean, cannot afford to allow China to chip away at the Indian navy’s dominant role in the Indian Ocean.

 

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi

 

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1229198

Obama’s “Af-Pak” problem

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La estrategia afgana de Obama

Por Brahma Chellaney, profesor de Estudios Estratégicosen el Centro para la Investigación Política de Nueva Delhi

LA VANGUARDIA, February 7, 2009

La estrategia del presidente Barack Obama para Afganistán se centra en una “escalada” de las fuerzas estadounidenses, no para derrotar a los talibanes en el terreno militar, sino para llegar a un acuerdo político con el enemigo desde una posición de fuerza. Dicho de modo sencillo, intenta lograr en Afganistán lo que ha hecho el gobierno de Bush en Iraq, donde la “escalada” se utilizó en buena medida como demostración de fuerza para comprar a los dirigentes tribales y a otros caudillos locales suníes. Sin embargo, no es probable que esta estrategia funcione en Afganistán.

En consonancia con la promesa electoral de Obama de enviar más brigadas de combate a Afganistán, el almirante Michael Mullen, portavoz del Estado Mayor Conjunto, ha anunciado la práctica duplicación de los soldados de aquí al verano. Hay ya unos 33.000 soldados estadounidenses y otros 35.000 de las fuerzas aliadas. Sin embargo, la cuestión no es el número de efectivos (los soviéticos no pudieron doblegar a los afganos ni siquiera con 100.000 soldados), sino la estrategia. Obama ha expresado su confianza en el nuevo jefe del Centcom, el general David Petraeus, quien busca formas de ganarse a los jefes y caudillos locales, el puntal de los talibanes. Petraeus quiere explorar treguas y alianzas con los líderes tribales y guerrilleros para sacarlos del campo de batalla.

Eso es justo lo que hizo como jefe militar en Iraq durante la “escalada”, y se trata de una estrategia que cuenta con el pleno apoyo de Robert Gates, que sigue bajo Obama como secretario de Defensa. El plan “primero escalada, luego negociación” tiene como objetivo afianzar la seguridad en las ciudades afganas con la llegada de nuevas tropas estadounidenses como paso previo al inicio de las conversaciones con los talibanes.

Para que esas negociaciones tengan éxito, EE. UU. pretende arrinconar primero a los talibanes, lo cual incluye copiar otro aspecto de su experimento en Iraq (donde se ha presionado a más de 100.000 insurgentes suníes para que se pongan al servicio del Gobierno) y crear en todos los distritos provinciales afganos unas milicias locales con una pequeña formación. Estas medidas omiten el peligro que podría suponer que esas milicias se erijan ellas mismas en la ley y aterroricen a las poblaciones locales.

Si la nueva insurgencia talibán se encuentra ahora a la ofensiva (el 2008 ha resultado ser el peor año para los estadounidenses), ello se debe ante todo a dos razones: el respaldo que los talibanes aún obtienen de Pakistán y una creciente reacción pastún contra una presencia de las tropas extranjeras en suelo afgano que dura ya siete años. Una escalada de las tropas estadounidenses no forzará a los jefes talibanes ni a los caudillos locales a negociar acuerdos de paz; sobre todo, cuando algunos de los países con tropas en Afganistán dan señales de fatiga de guerra y de un deseo de retirar sus tropas. En todo caso, la presión se ejercerá sobre el Gobierno de Obama para que presente resultados rápidos en un momento en que retrocede el apoyo popular afgano a la guerra.

En realidad, sería ingenuo esperar un éxito del experimento iraquí de “escalada y soborno” en Afganistán, donde el terreno montañoso, la multitud y diversidad de las tribus, las pautas de cambios en las lealtades étnicas y tribales, la posición especial como centro mundial del tráfico de opio y una historia de conflicto civil intestino hacen que ese país sea muy diferente de cualquier otro país musulmán. En una tierra con una tradición tan larga de humillación de los ejércitos extranjeros, los sobornos no comprarán la paz. Pero Petraeus quiere idear una versión del siglo XXI de la estrategia imperial del divide y conquistarás. Si hay algo seguro es que su plan ayudará a los ya enquistados talibanes a afilar sus uñas.

Sin embargo, para contribuir a justificar la estrategia de “escalada y soborno”, se está difundiendo una engañosa distinción entre Al Qaeda y los talibanes que dibuja a la primera como el mismo diablo y a los segundos como una fuerza diferente con la que habría que lograr un compromiso. La cruda realidad es que Al Qaeda y las organizaciones respaldadas por los militares pakistaníes (como los talibanes, Laskar-e-Taiba y Jaish-e-Muhammad) constituyen hoy una mezcla difícil de separar de propagadores de la yihad con refugios seguros en Pakistán. El acuerdo con cualquiera de esos grupos sólo contribuirá a reforzar la comunidad de la yihad mundial y el conglomerado militar pakistaní.

Dadas estas circunstancias, sólo cabe considerar la estrategia de “escalada y soborno” como un enfoque miope que repetirá los errores cometidos por EE. UU. en las últimas tres décadas en Afganistán y Pakistán, unos errores que han puesto en peligro la seguridad estadounidense y la del resto del mundo libre.

Si Estados Unidos quiere reivindicar la lucha mundial contra el terrorismo, tendrá que enfrentarse a las lecciones de sus políticas pasadas, creadoras de monstruos de Frankenstein como Osama bin Laden y el mulá Mohamed Omar, así como al “Estado dentro del Estado pakistaní” (la Dirección de Inteligencia Interservicios, ISI, que adquirió gran poder en la década de 1980 como conducto encubierto de la ayuda estadounidense a las guerrillas afganas antisoviéticas).

La principal lección es no desviar la atención de los intereses a largo plazo y no dejarse llevar por la conveniencia política. Sin embargo, Washington arde otra vez en deseos de conceder primacía a las consideraciones cortoplacistas.

Aun cuando el Gobierno de Obama lograra reducir la violencia en Afganistán llegando a acuerdos, ello dejaría intactos a los talibanes como fuerza de combate, con activos vínculos con los militares pakistaníes. Semejante beneficio táctico tendrá graves costes a largo plazo para la seguridad regional e internacional.

Revitalizing global counterterrorism

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The Threat is Common

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, February 6, 2009

 

HERZLIYA (Israel): In the face of a spreading jihad culture, President Barack Obama has ended America’s global “war” on terror as dramatically and unaccountably as his predecessor had initiated it. With the stroke of his pen, Obama has effectively terminated the war on terror that George W. Bush had launched to defeat terrorists who, he said, wanted to “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia”.

 

            The asymmetric weapon of terrorism is a lethal one. Dealing with such unconventional warfare remains a central theme in international discourse, as at Israel’s Herzliya Conference involving participants from the highest levels of government, business and academia. But the blunt truth is that the war on terror stood derailed long before Obama took office. The US occupation of Iraq proved so divisive in international relations that it fractured the post-9/11 global consensus to fight terror. Guantánamo, CIA’s secret overseas prisons and the torture of detainees, including through waterboarding, came to symbolize the excesses of the war on terror. 

 

            The abrupt end of the war on terror thus means little. With Iraq and Afghanistan searing his presidency, Bush himself had given up the pretence of waging a global war on terror — a war he had once equated with the Cold War struggle against communism. In fact, ever since Bush declared his war on terror, the scourge of transnational terrorism has spread deeper and wider in the world. The war’s only outcome has been that it enabled the Bush administration to set up new U.S. military arrangements extending from the Caspian Sea basin to Southeast Asia.

 

            Not calling it a war any longer but labelling it a “struggle” or “strategic challenge” doesn’t change the grim realities. Secular, pluralistic states have come under varying pressures, depending on their location, from the forces of terror. After all, vulnerability to terrorist attacks is critically linked to a state’s external neighbourhood. A democracy geographically distant from the Muslim world tends to be less vulnerable to frequent terrorist strikes than a democracy proximate to Islamic states. The luxury of geography of Australia and the U.S. contrasts starkly with the tyranny of geography of India and Israel. It is such realities that no change of lexicon can address.

 

            Still, Obama is right in saying “the language we use matters”. He has been wise to reach out to the Muslim world and to start undoing some of the excesses of the Bush years. The international fight against terrorism will be a long, hard slog. After all, the problem and solution are linked: Terrorism not only threatens the free, secular world, but also springs from the rejection of democratic and secular values. Worse, terrorism is pursued as a sanctified tool of religion and a path to redemption. Thus, the struggle against transnational terror can be won only by inculcating a liberal, secular ethos in societies steeped in religious and political bigotry.

 

            In that light, the with-us-or-against-us terminology and use of offensive terms like “Islamofascism” were counterproductive. Counter-terrorism is not a struggle against any religion but against those that misuse and misappropriate religion. The need is to reach out to Muslim moderates through correct idiom, not to unite the Muslim world through provocative language. Obama’s gentler, subtler tone no doubt will help. But such a tone can be sustained only if the US continues to be free of any terrorist attack, as it has been for more than seven years. If a terrorist strike occurs in the US on Obama’s watch, the president will come under intense attack for dismantling tools that had successfully shielded that country for long


            Having appointed a special envoy for each of the two regions central to the global fight against terrorism — the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt and the Middle East — Obama is likely to discover that ending the war on terror was the easy part. In fact, at a time when America’s challenges have been underscored by a deep economic recession, increasing reliance on capital inflows from authoritarian China and jihad-bankrolling Saudi Arabia, two overseas wars and eroding global influence, Obama has already started redefining US anti-terror objectives more narrowly. His defence secretary has given the clearest indication yet that the new administration will seek to regionally contain terrorism rather than defeat it.


            While outwardly the US looks set to pursue a military strategy in Afghanistan and a political approach toward Pakistan, in reality its troop surge in Afghanistan is intended to cut a political deal with the Taliban from a position of strength. According to Robert Gates, US objectives have been “too broad and too far into the future” and the new scaled-back goal is “to keep Afghanistan from becoming a base for Al Qaida attacks on the US”. There isn’t enough “time, patience or money”, in his words, to pursue ambitious goals there. Washington’s proposal to triple non-military aid to Islamabad while keeping existing military-aid flow intact, other than to tie it to concrete Pakistani cooperation on the Afghan front, will free Pakistan to continue its asymmetric war of terror against India.


            The jarring US intent to focus on preventing attacks against America by regionally confining terrorism means that democracies with uncongenial neighbourhoods, like India and Israel, will bear the brunt of escalating terrorism.

 

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

The Pak-Afghan threat to regional and international security

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Key to Afghanistan: Pakistan

Brahma Chellaney
 
Washington Times, February 1, 2009
 
President Barack Obama has done well to appoint a special representative to the two interlinked countries that he says constitute "the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism" — Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Pakistani-Afghan belt has turned into a festering threat to international peace and security, and Richard Holbrooke has described his new role as a "very difficult assignment."
 
Mr. Obama is right to emphasize an integrated U.S. strategy toward those two countries. But even as he has embarked on some major steps, his strategy has yet to signal a meaningful integration. While pursuing a "surge" of U.S. forces in Afghanistan without clarity on the precise nature and length of the military mission, Mr. Obama is seeking to do, albeit in more subtle ways, what U.S. policy has traditionally done — prop up the Pakistani state.
 
Mr. Obama’s priority is to prevent Pakistan’s financial collapse while getting the Pakistani military to break its close nexus with the Taliban. Toward that end, Mr. Obama is set to more than triple nonmilitary aid to a near-bankrupt Pakistan, already one of the three largest recipients of U.S. assistance but with the military aid currently 3 times larger than the economic aid.
 
Sending 30,000 more U.S. forces into Afghanistan is a losing strategy. In fact, Taliban attacks escalated last year, even as the number of NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan nearly doubled in the first half of 2008.
 
The latest surge, oddly, is intended for a nonmilitary mission – to strike a political deal with the Taliban from a position of strength. That is why Defense Secretary Robert Gates, scaling down U.S. objectives he said were "too broad and too far into the future," told Congress this week there was not enough "time, patience or money" to pursue ambitious goals in Afghanistan.
 
Mr. Obama, ironically, has set out to do in Afghanistan what his predecessor did in Iraq, where a surge of U.S. troops was used largely as a show of force to buy off Sunni leaders and other local chieftains. But Iraq-style payoffs have little chance of creating a stable, more peaceful Afghanistan, a tribal society without the literacy level and middle class of Iraq.
 
Mr. Obama needs to face up to a stark truth: The war in Afghanistan can only be won in Pakistan, whose military establishment fathered the Taliban and still provides sanctuary, intelligence and material support to that Islamist militia. In fact, the Pakistani military, through its infamous Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, has exploited Afghanistan’s special status as the global poppy hub to fashion the instrument of narco-terrorism. Proceeds from the $300-million-a-year drug trade, routed through Pakistani territory, fund the Taliban and several Pakistan-based terror groups.
 
When the newly elected Pakistani government attempted last July to bring the ISI under civilian oversight, Washington did not come to its support, thus allowing the army to frustrate that move. Similarly, despite the risk that Pakistan could slide from narco-terrorism to nuclear terrorism, Washington prefers continued military control over the Pakistani nuclear arsenal through the National Command Authority because the general who heads that body is vetted by the Pentagon and CIA.
 
Still, some delicate shifts in U.S. policy are now under way. For one, the new administration, in keeping with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s pledge during her Senate confirmation hearing, has set out to "condition" future U.S. military aid to concrete Pakistani steps to evict foreign fighters and shut down al Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries. For another, the United States is to unveil a huge jump in nonmilitary aid to Islamabad under the pending bill, the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act, which Mr. Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Mrs. Clinton co-sponsored last July with eight other senators.
 
But given the troop surge, the new land-transit deals with Russia and Central Asian states will not significantly cut America’s logistics dependence on Pakistan, which also provides intelligence to the U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Pakistani generals haughtily believe the United States needs them more than Pakistan needs America.
 
Indeed, it would be naive to expect the Pakistani army and ISI to be brought to heel through a mere restructuring of the U.S. aid program. For the Pakistani military, the Taliban and other militant groups remain not just useful surrogates, but force multipliers vis-a-vis Afghanistan and India.
 
At a time when Pakistan’s solvency depends on continued U.S. aid and an American-backed multilateral credit line, Washington has greater leverage than ever. Yet, greater U.S. largess to help stabilize Pakistan is to run parallel to the surge-and-bribe endeavor in Afghanistan, with greenbacks serving as a common lubricant. The strategy suggests the United States is now seeking not to defeat but to contain terrorism in the region.
 
Without a fundamental break from failed U.S. policies and recognition that the path to success in Afghanistan lies through Pakistan, Mr. Holbrooke’s "very difficult assignment" will end in failure, even as the surge deepens the military quagmire in Afghanistan.
 
Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."
 

Obama’s strategy on Pakistan and Afghanistan

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Success in Afghanistan lies through Pakistan

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, January 31, 2009

 

Barack Obama’s strategy on Pakistan and Afghanistan signals subtle shifts but no fundamental break with failed U.S. policies, thus raising the spectre of Indian security coming under greater pressure.

 

U.S. President Barack Obama has done well to appoint a special representative to the two interlinked countries that he says constitute “the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism” — Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Pak-Afghan belt has turned into a festering threat to international peace and security, and Richard Holbrooke has described his role as a “very difficult assignment.”

Mr. Obama is right to emphasise an integrated U.S. strategy towards those two countries. But even as he has embarked on some major steps, his strategy has yet to signal a meaningful integration. While pursuing a “surge” of U.S. forces in Afghanistan without clarity on the precise nature and length of the military mission, Mr. Obama is seeking to do, albeit in more subtle ways, what U.S. policy has traditionally done — prop up the Pakistani state.

Mr. Obama’s priority is to prevent Pakistan’s financial collapse while getting the Pakistani military to stop aiding Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Toward that end, Mr. Obama is set to more than triple non-military aid to a near-bankrupt Pakistan, already one of the three largest recipients of U.S. assistance, but with the military aid currently being three times larger than the economic aid.

Sending 30,000 more U.S. forces into Afghanistan is a losing strategy. In fact, Taliban attacks escalated last year, even as the number of NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan nearly doubled in the first half of 2008. The Soviet Union, with 100,000 troops, couldn’t pacify a country that historically has been “the graveyard of empires.” Yet, Mr. Obama has embarked on a near-doubling of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to raise the combined U.S., NATO and allied force level there to 100,000.

The latest surge, oddly, is intended for a non-military mission — to strike a political deal with the Taliban from a position of strength. That is why Defence Secretary Robert Gates, scaling down America’s “too broad” objectives, told Congress this week that there was not enough “time, patience or money” to pursue ambitious goals in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama, ironically, has set out to do in Afghanistan what his predecessor did in Iraq, where a surge was used largely as a show of force to buy off Sunni leaders and local chieftains. Payoffs won’t create a stable, more peaceful Afghanistan, a tribal society without the literacy level and middle class of Iraq.

Mr. Obama needs to face up to a stark truth: the war in Afghanistan can only be won in Pakistan, whose military establishment fathered the Taliban and still provides sanctuary, intelligence and material support to that Islamist militia. In fact, the Pakistani military, through its infamous Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, has exploited Afghanistan’s special status as the global poppy hub to fashion the instrument of narco-terrorism. The proceeds from the $300-million-a-year drug trade, routed through Pakistani territory, fund the Taliban and several Pakistan-based terror groups, like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-i-Muhammad, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Maktab al-Khidamat and Hizb ul-Tahrir.

Pakistan is also Al Qaeda’s world headquarters. But while Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other Al Qaeda leaders operate out of mountain caves along Pakistan’s Afghan border, the presence of the Taliban and other Pakistani military-nurtured militants is more open on Pakistani soil. As Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry has put it bluntly, “a single country has become ground zero for the terrorist threat we face. The consensus among our intelligence agencies is that top Al Qaeda leaders are plotting their next attack from Pakistan, where the prevalence of religious extremists and nuclear weapons makes that country the central, crucial front in our struggle to protect America from terrorism.”

Narco to nuclear terrorism

Without its jihad culture being unravelled, there is a potent risk of Pakistan sliding from narco-terrorism to nuclear terrorism. Diminishing that risk demands that the Pakistani government be encouraged by the U.S. to assert civilian control over the military, intelligence and nuclear establishments. A.Q. Khan, who masterminded an international nuclear-smuggling ring for 16 long years with military connivance, including the provision of military transport aircraft, has still not been allowed to be questioned by international investigators.

To be sure, Mr. Obama identified Pakistan as the critical front 15 months ago when he advocated direct U.S. action there, including cross-border hot pursuit, if Pakistani security forces failed to play their role. But it will be difficult for him to reverse the long-standing U.S. policy of building up the Pakistani military as that country’s pivot. Since the time Pakistan was co-opted into the U.S.-led Cold War military alliances, successive U.S. administrations have valued the Pakistani military for promotion of regional interests, to the extent that the CIA helped train and fatten the ISI. The CIA-ISI ties remain cosy.

Tellingly, when the Pakistani government attempted last July to bring the ISI under civilian oversight, Washington did not come to its support, thus allowing the army to frustrate that move almost overnight. Instead, the U.S. has conveyed that the ISI is in the midst of being revamped, with its ranks being purged of jihadists — a story Washington has repeated almost every year or two in this decade. Similarly, Washington seems to prefer continued military control over the Pakistani nuclear arsenal through the National Command Authority (NCA) because the general who heads it is vetted by the Pentagon and the CIA.

Still, some delicate shifts in U.S. policy are now under way. For one, the new administration, in keeping with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s pledge during her Senate confirmation hearing, has set out to “condition” future U.S. military aid to concrete Pakistani steps to evict foreign fighters and shut down Al Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries. For another, the U.S. is to unveil a huge jump in non-military aid to Pakistan.

The administration is pushing for the early passage of the pending bill, the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act, which Mr. Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton had co-sponsored last July 2008 with eight other senators. The legislation is not a punitive but partnership-boosting measure to channel greater U.S. aid for Pakistan’s humanitarian and development needs. It also seeks to tie future U.S. military aid to a certification by the secretary of state to Congress that the Pakistani military was making “concerted efforts” to undermine Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But given the troop surge, the new land-transit deals with Russia and Central Asian states will not significantly cut America’s logistics dependence on Pakistan, which also provides intelligence to the U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Therefore, Pakistani generals haughtily believe the U.S. needs them more than Pakistan needs America.

Indeed, it will be naïve to expect the Pakistani army and ISI to be brought to heel through a mere restructuring of the U.S. aid programme. For the Pakistani military, the Taliban and other militant groups remain not just useful surrogates, but force multipliers. Also, the U.S. conditions being introduced relate principally to Pakistani cooperation on the western frontier. That could leave the Pakistani military to continue its long-running asymmetric warfare against India through terror groups.

The key point is that there is no indication that Mr. Obama intends to abandon the long-standing U.S. pampering of the Pakistani military. While championing a huge increase in non-military assistance to Pakistan, he has signalled no intent to slash the generous military-aid flow other than to tie it to specific goals or better accountability. Put simply, greater U.S. largesse to help stabilise Pakistan is to run parallel to the surge-and-bribe endeavour in Afghanistan, with greenbacks the common lubricant.

Biden doubly wrong

Also, the new administration seems confused over whether Afghanistan or Pakistan ought to be its priority No. 1. Mr. Biden, an early supporter of the surge, has contended that the U.S. must focus on securing Afghanistan because “if Afghanistan fails, Pakistan could follow.” He is doubly wrong. With the war now seven years old, the time when a surge could work has already passed. The U.S. can never win in Afghanistan without dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for the Taliban. Indeed, the real problem is not at the Pakistani frontiers with Afghanistan (and India). Rather it is the sanctuaries deep inside Pakistan that continue to breed and export terrorism.

The U.S. military cannot directly achieve in Afghanistan what high-pressure American diplomacy can deliver on that front through Pakistan. As previous U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley pointed out days before Mr. Obama assumed the presidency, “You can’t really solve Afghanistan without solving Pakistan.”

At a time when Pakistan’s solvency depends on continued U.S. aid flow and American-backed multilateral credit line, Washington has greater leverage than ever before. Without a fundamental shift in U.S. policy on Pakistan and recognition that the path to success in Afghanistan lies through Pakistan, Holbrooke’s “very difficult assignment” will end in failure, even as the surge deepens the military quagmire in Afghanistan.

(Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.)

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