An Afghanistan ‘Surge’ Is a Losing Battle

So why is Mr. Obama betting on it?

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY | From Wall Street Journal, January 9, 2009

Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s visit to Afghanistan this month — even before President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration — will underscore the new administration’s priority to ending the war there. But their planned "surge first, then negotiate" strategy isn’t likely to work.

The Obama-Biden team wants to weaken the Taliban militarily then strike a political deal with the enemy from a position of strength. This echoes what the Bush administration did in Iraq, where it used a surge largely as a show of force to buy off Sunni tribal leaders and other local chieftains. Current Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen has already announced a near-doubling of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, to up to 63,000, by mid-2009.

Sending more forces into Afghanistan is a losing strategy. The Soviets couldn’t tame the country with more than 100,000 troops. With the backing of Robert Gates, whom Mr. Obama will keep on as defense secretary, Central Command Commander General David Petraeus is thus looking for ways to win over local commanders and warlords — the mainstay of the Taliban. General Petraeus wants to explore truces and alliances with local tribal chieftains and guerrilla leaders and set up lightly trained local militias in every provincial district.

This idea turns a blind eye to the danger that such militias could terrorize local populations. It is also naïve to expect an Iraq-style surge-and-bribe experiment to work in Afghanistan, whose mountainous terrain, myriad tribes, patterns of shifting tribal and ethnic loyalties, special status as the global hub of poppy trade and history of internecine conflict set it apart from any other Muslim country. In a land with a long tradition of humbling foreign armies, payoffs won’t buy peace.

Even if the Obama administration could tame the Taliban enough to get them to the bargaining table, inking a political deal would only strengthen their cause. Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba now constitute a difficult-to-separate mix of jihad-spouting soulmates with safe havens in Pakistan. The only difference is that Al Qaeda operates out of mountain caves in the Pakistani-Afghan frontier region while the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba agitate more openly across the borders. A deal with any one such group will only strengthen the global jihadists’ cause.

Mr. Biden contends the U.S. must focus on securing Afghanistan because if it "fails, Pakistan could follow." This is exactly backward. The U.S. can never win in Afghanistan without first dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for the Taliban. The proposed surge could help the already-entrenched Taliban sharpen its claws while strengthening U.S. logistics dependence on the Pakistani military, which fathered that Islamist militia and Lashkar-e-Taiba. As outgoing National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley has pointed out, "You can’t really solve Afghanistan without solving Pakistan."

If America is to reclaim the global fight against terror, it must face up to the lessons from its past policies that gave rise to Osama bin Laden, Mullah Mohammed Omar and "the state within the Pakistani state" — the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, made powerful in the 1980s as a conduit of covert U.S. aid for anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas. In other words, the U.S. needs to keep the focus on its long-term interests and not be carried away by political expediency. That means encouraging a truly democratic Pakistan that doesn’t support terror groups in any form.

In seeking short-term success, the Obama team is falling prey to a long-standing U.S. policy weakness: The pursuit of narrow objectives without much regard for the security of friends. Perhaps India, America’s strategic partner, could be of help. After all, as the recent Mumbai terrorist assaults show, it’s India that is bearing the brunt of the blowback from failed U.S. policies in the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt. Perhaps New Delhi should be on Mr. Biden’s next travel itinerary.

Mr. Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123143672297764875.html

Explore other options

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, December 25, 2008  

Fundamentalism, extremism and militarism have eaten into the vitals of Pakistan to the extent that it has become a de facto failed nation by Westphalian standards, with the tail (the military establishment) wagging the dog (the state) and with military-reared terror groups and the Taliban operating with impunity. The country’s president, with no control over the national-security apparatus, may be excused for making conflicting and confusing statements since the 67-hour Mumbai terrorist assaults, for he is little more than the mayor of Islamabad, albeit with the pomp and pageantry befitting a head of state. But the military establishment still fomenting terrorism across Pakistan’s borders with India and Afghanistan can hardly be excused. It cannot escape culpability in acts of terror by whipping up war hysteria at home.

It is the terrorist sanctuaries deep inside Pakistan, not just on its borders, that threaten world security, with terror groups enjoying a cozy relationship with “the state within the state” — the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). That may outwardly convey that it is incumbent on the international community to bring the Pakistani military, especially the ISI, to heel or risk the further spread of the scourge of terrorism.

Yet, unless New Delhi is willing to take the lead on countering Pakistan-sponsored terrorism through clear political direction and resolve, the international community is going to offer little more than sympathy to victim India. The only voice of the international community — the United Nations — is in decline, with its Security Council a seat of big-power intrigue. India needs no great power’s approval to defend its security and honour. If India acts on its own and succeeds, it will win international respect.

If it fails, some nations will make a little noise before ignoring the failure. But if it does little more than collect evidence to try and influence those pursuing their own narrow strategic interests, it will invite more Mumbai-style murderous rampages.

For the promotion of its near-term interests in the region, the U.S. continues to prop up the Pakistani military through generous aid and weapon transfers, instead of helping empower the civilian government in Islamabad. Had it supported the bold move of President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani last July to bring the ISI under the control of the interior ministry, civilian oversight would have been established over a key terror-harbouring instrument. But by not backing the government, it allowed the Army to frustrate the attempt to bring the ISI under civilian control. The Army, similarly, has refused to hand over control of Pakistan’s nuclear assets to the civilian government. All this has happened despite Gen. Ashfaq Kayani’s professed intent to move the Army away from politics to its core functions.

Still, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has declined to take the smallest of small steps against Pakistan even as a token expression of India’s outrage over the Mumbai assaults by 10 terrorists — all from Pakistan’s Punjab province. Instead, he has reposed his faith in the international community, urging it again this week to “use its power to persuade Pakistan” to dismantle its state-reared terror complex.

For India, the options are narrow yet clear. When the seat of official power and the seat of real power are far apart in a rotting state plagued by government atrophy, no effective action can be expected against military-nurtured groups fomenting terrorism against India unless the latter is willing to inflict pain on the real wielders of authority in Pakistan and show beyond doubt that the costs of continuing complicity in transnational terror are unbearably high for them. After all, the terror complex was set up by the Pakistani military to wage a war of a thousand cuts against India, not to dismantle it at the enemy’s bidding or the international community’s urging.

Between the two extremes — inaction and military strikes — are several dozen options for India, including economic and political opportunities against an increasingly vulnerable, near-bankrupt Pakistan. Such options cannot be the subject of a public debate though. Calibrated counteraction not only will demonstrate Indian intent but also help step up pressure on the international community to act.

Also, given the communications intercepts that link the Mumbai attackers to Pakistan-based masterminds and ISI handlers, why not add the name of the ISI head, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, to the Indian list of terrorist figures in Pakistan? Pasha cannot feign ignorance about his own agency’s aid to the Laskar-e-Taiba figures who masterminded the Mumbai assaults.

Make no mistake: India will have to fight its own war against Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. In essence, that would entail lending Pakistan a helping hand to stay embroiled in growing problems at home, with the hope that an ungovernable state that already is a threat to regional and international security self-destructs.

The writer is an expert on security affairs

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1216472&pageid=0

It Ain’t Working

US should stop propping up the Pakistani military

Brahma Chellaney Times of India December 18, 2008

US aid to Islamabad is now close to $2 billion a year, putting Pakistan on par with Israel and Egypt as the top recipients of American assistance. And on the eve of the Mumbai terrorist assaults, the US persuaded the IMF to hand a near-bankrupt Pakistan an economic lifeline in the form of a $7.6 billion aid package, with no strings attached. Despite such largesse, Pakistan is host to the world’s most-wanted men and the main Al Qaeda sanctuary. Recent polling shows that Osama bin Laden is more popular in Pakistan than ever, even as America’s negative rating there has soared.

Let’s be clear: US policy on Pakistan isn’t working, and unless Washington fundamentally reverses course, it risks losing the war in Afghanistan and making the West an increasing jihadist target, including the scene of Mumbai-style murderous rampages. After all, as the history of terrorism since the 1980s attests, innovative terrorist strikes carried out against Indian targets have later been replicated in the West. That includes attacks on symbols of state authority, the midair bombing of a commercial jetliner and coordinated strikes on a city transportation system.

The jihadists’ logic in employing soft-state India as their laboratory has been that if they can bleed the world’s largest democracy through novel and recurrent attacks, they perfect techniques for application against the tougher free societies in the West. If the terrorists can bring the developing world’s most-successful democratic experiment under siege, with the intent to unravel its secular and pluralistic character, it is only a matter of time before Western societies get similarly besieged. That the tourism ad’s “incredible India” is, in reality, little more than a miserable India — which presents itself as an easy target by merely craving international sympathy as a constant victim — does not detract from the danger that the Mumbai-attack masterminds have set up a model for use elsewhere.

Yet the US response, however positive in the diplomatic realm, has failed to recognize that the Mumbai attacks mark a potent new threat to free societies and that unless the masterminds are brought to justice, such cold-blooded rampages are likely to be carried out in the West. The alacrity with which the American media returned to the India-Pakistan hyphenation in covering the Mumbai assaults betrayed superficiality and old mindsets — a failing compounded by media organizations calling the attackers not terrorists but “militants” (like the New York Times) or “gunmen” (including the Washington Post). Diplomatically, it has been déjà vu — the US exerting pressure and Islamabad staging yet another anti-terrorist charade to deflect that pressure and pre-empt Indian retaliation.

Given the easy manner outlawed terrorist outfits in Pakistan resurface under new names, the US knows well that a ban on any group or temporary detention of a terrorist figure is of little enduring value. More Mumbai-type attacks can be prevented only if the masterminds are identified and put on trial and their sponsors in the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment are, with the help of Europeans, indicted in The Hague for war crimes. Yet, despite a broken Pakistan policy, the US seems reluctant to fix its approach. The reason for that is not hard to seek: US policy remains wedded to the Pakistani institution that reared the forces of jihad — the military.

Indeed, US policy is still governed by a consideration that dates back to the 1950s — treating the Pakistani military as central to the pursuit of American geopolitical objectives. As American scholars Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph have put it, “For roughly 50 years, the US 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”. The more recent “de-hyphenation” of India and Pakistan was not a calculated US policy shift but the product of Pakistan’s descent into shambles and India’s notable rise after 1998. Under Bush, US policy simply went from hyphenation to parallelism. That has involved building strategic partnerships with and selling arms to both. For the first time ever, the US is building parallel intelligence-sharing and defence-cooperation arrangements with both.

The war in Afghanistan and the containment strategy against Iran have only reinforced the US dependence on the Pakistani military, despite mountains of intelligence indicating the latter is playing both sides — bolstering the Taliban and other terror groups while pretending to be a counter-terror ally. Instead of helping empower Pakistan’s civilian government to gain full control over the national-security system, including the nuclear establishment and the ISI, US policy acts as a stumbling block by continuing to prop up the Pakistani military through generous aid and weapon transfers, including bombers and submarines of relevance only against India.

For its own sake, Washington has to stop pampering and building up the military as Pakistan’s pivot. By fattening the Pakistani military, America has, however inadvertently, allowed that institution to maintain cosy ties with terror groups. A break from this policy approach would be for the Obama administration to embrace the idea currently being discussed in Washington — condition further aid to the reconfiguration of the Pakistani military to effectively fight terror and to concrete actions to end institutional support to extremism. If not, the US is bound to lose two wars — the one in Afghanistan and the other on transnational terror — while staying mired in Iraq.

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. 

(c) The Times of India, 2008.

Stop pampering Pakistan’s military

The Mumbai attacks underscore the importance of rooting out institutional support for terror

Christian Science Monitor, December 12, 2008 edition

The recent Mumbai terrorist assaults underscore the imperative for a major change in American policy on Pakistan – a shift that holds the key to the successful outcome of both the war in Afghanistan and the wider international fight against transnational terror.

First, if the US does not insist on getting to the bottom of who sponsored and executed the attacks in India’s commercial and cultural capital, the Mumbai attacks will probably be repeated in the West. After all, India has served as a laboratory for transnational terrorists, who try out new techniques against Indian targets before seeking to replicate them in other pluralistic states.

Novel strikes first carried out against Indian targets and then perpetrated in the West include attacks on symbols of state authority, the midair bombing of a commercial jetliner, and coordinated strikes on a city transportation system.

By carrying out a series of simultaneous murderous rampages after innovatively arriving by sea, the Mumbai attackers have set up a model for use against other jihadist targets. The manner in which the world was riveted as a band of 10 young terrorists – nearly all from Punjab Province in Pakistan – held India hostage for three days is something jihadists would love to replicate elsewhere.

Second, let’s be clear: The scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates not so much from the Islamist mullahs as from generals who reared the forces of jihad and fathered the Taliban and Al Qaeda-linked groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group reportedly behind the Mumbai attacks.

Facing growing international pressure to hunt down the Mumbai masterminds, Pakistan’s government raided a militant camp in Kashmir Sunday. Yet civil-military relations in Pakistan are so skewed that the present civilian government is powerless to check the sponsorship of terrorist elements by the military and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, or even to stop the Army’s meddling in foreign policy. Until civilian officials can stand up to these institutions, Pakistan will neither become a normal state nor cease to be a "Terroristan" for international security.

US policy, however, still props up the Pakistan military through generous aid and weapon transfers. Even as Pakistan has emerged as a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terror, US policy continues to be governed by a consideration dating back to the 1950s. Washington has to stop viewing, and building up, the military as Pakistan’s pivot. By fattening the Pakistani military, America has, however inadvertently, allowed that institution to maintain cozy ties with terrorist groups.

One break from this policy approach would be the idea currently being discussed in Washington – to tie further US aid to a reconfiguration of the Pakistani military to effectively fight militants. The nearly $11 billion in US military aid to Pakistan since 9/11 has been diverted to beef up forces against India. Such diversion, however, is part of a pattern that became conspicuous in the 1980s when the ISI agency siphoned off billions of dollars from the covert CIA assistance meant for anti-Soviet guerrillas in Afghanistan.

For too long, Washington has allowed politically expedient considerations to override its long-term interests.

The US must actively encourage the elected leaders in Pakistan to gain full control over all of their country’s national-security apparatus, including the nuclear establishment and ISI. And to forestall a military coup in response to such action, Washington should warn the generals of serious action, including possible indictment in The Hague.

The ISI, a citadel of Islamist sentiment and a key source of support to the Taliban and other terrorist groups supporting jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, should be restructured or disbanded. State-reared terror groups and their splinter cells, some now operating autonomously, have morphed into a hydra.

US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan, like border troops in India, have been trying to stop the inflow of terrorists and arms from Pakistan. The real problem, however, is not at the Pakistani frontiers with Afghanistan and India. Rather it is the terrorist sanctuaries deep inside Pakistan that continue to breed extremism and export terrorism.

Since the economic viability of Pakistan depends on continued US aid as well as on US support for multilateral institutional lending, Washington has the necessary leverage. Further aid should be linked to definitive measures by Pakistan to sever institutional support to extremism. Only when the institutional support for terrorism is irrevocably cut off will the sanctuaries for training, command, control, and supply begin to wither away.

Unless the US reverses course on Pakistan, it will begin losing the war in Afghanistan. While America did make sincere efforts in the aftermath of the Mumbai assaults, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, personally visiting Islamabad to exert pressure, US diplomacy remains limited by Washington’s continuing overreliance on the Pakistani military.

Before the chickens come home to roost, the US pampering of the Pakistani military has to end.

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

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1212/p09s01-coop.html

Obama represents welcome change for India

Liberation from Bush

With the end of the loathed Bush era, it is curtains for America’s neocons. But what about Indian neocons who hailed the Bush Doctrine, cheered on the invasion of Iraq, advocated the dispatch of Indian forces there, pushed for aligning Indian policy with the misguided Bush stance on Pakistan, Iran and Burma, and want Indian troops in Afghanistan?

If there is anyone who claims to have got a sense of Bush’s soul, it is Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, now preparing for his last Bush White House visit. Singh looked into Bush’s eyes and ostensibly read three words: love for India. History may spell those words differently: trouble for India.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, November 5, 2008

When the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the end of the Cold War, there was common hope that the world would finally reap the peace dividend. But nearly two decades later, potent new dangers and divisions confront the world. The credit for making the world more unsafe and divided goes largely to President George W. Bush, who will go down in history as an extraordinarily reckless and blundering leader. The greatest damage from his cowboy diplomacy was to America’s own interests and international standing. Little surprise he is leaving office as the most unpopular president in the history of U.S. polling.

The unprecedented mess that has occurred on Bush’s watch crimps his successor’s options. This raises the troubling question whether things could get worse before they start becoming better.

After all, America has not only exported its financial crisis to the rest of the world, but also is still waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan and trying to avert war with Iran and North Korea. Iraq is in a mess even if the number of monthly deaths has dropped to its lowest since May 2004. A resurgent Taliban is tearing apart the U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan. A nuclear-armed, terror-wedded Pakistan is sinking. Osama bin Laden is still at large. And international terrorism is on the rise. All this has happened when U.S. neoconservatives (or “neocons”) were boasting that America has a monopoly on power unrivalled since the Roman Empire.

            The abdication of American values has been epitomized by Bush’s establishment of the infamous prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the revealed network of illegal CIA detention camps elsewhere. That has helped undermine America’s real strength — its ability to inspire and lead. The United States, after all, won the Cold War not by military means but by spreading the ideas of freedom, open markets and better life that helped drain the lifeblood from communism’s international appeal.

Had Bush not landed his country in costly, intractable military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, he may have been tempted to unleash America’s untrammelled power elsewhere — by going after the next fire-snorting dragon on the neocons’ target list, be it Syria, Iran or North Korea. Thus, a silver lining of his blunders was that some countries were saved and that the initial neocon triumphalism gave way to a hard-to-conceal erosion of U.S. soft and hard power, with much of the world seeing Iraq, Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, the Patriot Act and Guantanamo as symbols of such decline.

The epoch-shaping U.S. presidential election marks the end of the misbegotten Bush era. Not unsurprisingly, the liberation from Bush is bringing a collective sigh of relief in the world.

Bush’s flub diplomacy was fashioned by the neocons, for whom 9/11 came as a blessing in disguise to gain ascendancy in policymaking. Given Bush’s provincial background, his knowledge of foreign affairs was minimal when he came to the White House. Indeed, after becoming president, he once confessed that “this foreign policy stuff is a little frustrating”.

The neocons were the architects of the Bush Doctrine, founded on the belief that aggression pays and that naked aggression pays handsomely. The core tenets of the Bush Doctrine were fourfold: the United States should pursue pre-emptive strikes where necessary; it should be willing to act unilaterally — alone or with a “coalition of the willing” — if it cannot win the United Nations’ sanction; the primary focus should be on politically transforming the Middle East; and Iraq ought to be the cornerstone in bringing about region-wide democratic change.

Enunciating the doctrine’s most-controversial tenet — pre-emptive action — Bush, in his June 2002 address at West Point, had said deterrence and containment were no longer enough to defend U.S. interests and America thus “must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act”.

The neocons, in views expressed through the Project for the New American Century, the American Enterprise Institute, the journals Weekly Standard and First Things, and their own website, had for long vented their messianic ambition to remake the Middle East and then the rest of the world. Their rise in policymaking accentuated their estrangement in the Republican Party from conservative realists, whose mouthpiece, the National Review, once ran a mocking headline: “You can’t spell ‘messianic’ without mess”.

The ascendance of the neocons, many of them Jewish, was facilitated by their intellectual partnership with the Christian Right — a constituency dear to Bush, a born-again Christian, and his wife, Laura. A foreign-policy focus on the Biblical lands meshed well with the neocon and Christian Right worldview.

Yet, such were the simplistic calculations that an occupied Iraq was visualized as a profit hub for U.S. energy, infrastructure, construction and other firms and as an everlasting American military outpost. Occupation, however, turned out not only to be a huge financial burden on the United States, but also has transformed a stable, secular Iraq into a failed state whose ruins fan Islamist trends. No thought was given to how, in an era of globalization, imperialism moulded on conquest could be practiced, even if under the garb of democracy promotion. Democracy, in any event, centres on the exercise of free choice, which presupposes that the state enjoys sovereignty.

The neocons advocated — and Bush blithely accepted — an expansion of U.S. military bases across Eastern Europe, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest and Central Asia. Using the war on terror as justification, Bush exerted pressure on several states to win permission for US forces to set up bases for the long haul. The new bases have helped establish the largest-ever U.S. military presence overseas since World War II.

But all that assertiveness and interventionism only made the United States unpopular. The Bush Doctrine, in its zeal to identify and target “rogue” states, helped turn — as American commentator Nicholas Kristof has put it — “a superpower into a rogue country”.

From Bush’s refusal to back family planning through the UN Population Fund to his wife’s missionary diplomacy against the Burmese military regime, Christian fundamentalist beliefs have played havoc with U.S. foreign policy.

The extent to which Bush was influenced by his religious beliefs can be seen from the manner his relationship with Vladimir Putin bloomed the moment the now Russian prime minister told Bush in 2001 that he had been given a cross by his mother. According to Bob Woodward’s Bush At War, Bush instantly said to Putin: “That speaks volumes to me, Mr. President. May I call you Vladimir?” Bush then said publicly: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward… I was able to get a sense of his soul”. The curmudgeonly John McCain also claims to have looked into Putin’s eyes and seen not soul, but three letters: K-G-B.

By contrast, if there is anyone who claims to have got a sense of Bush’s soul it is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, now preparing for his last Bush White House darshan. Singh looked into Bush’s eyes and ostensibly read three words: love for India. History may spell those words differently: trouble for India.

With the end of the loathed Bush era, it is curtains for America’s neocons. But what about Indian neocons who hailed the Bush Doctrine, cheered on the invasion of Iraq, advocated the dispatch of Indian forces to aid the US occupation of Iraq, pushed for aligning Indian policy with the misguided Bush stance on Pakistan, Iran and Burma, and until recently wanted New Delhi to consider sending troops to Afghanistan? Will they disown their past, or change colours, or simply wait to latch on the next U.S. presidential doctrine?  

(c) Asian Age, 2008.