BRAHMA CHELLANEY

► 1982: U.S. President Ronald Reagan dedicates the Space Shuttle Columbia to the resistance fighters — the jihadists — in Afghanistan. He proclaimed: “Just as the Columbia, we think, represents man’s finest aspirations in the field of science and technology, so too does the struggle of the Afghan people represent man’s highest aspirations for freedom. I am dedicating, on behalf of the American people, the March 22nd launch of the Columbia to the people of Afghanistan.” Watch his announcement on YouTube.

► 1983: “To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom,” President Reagan publicly declared on March 21, 1983.

► 1985: “These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers.” — President Reagan, introducing the Afghan mujahedeen leaders to the media at the White House. Two such moral equivalents, Osama bin Laden and Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar, later became America’s nemesis.

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times, November 8, 2011

When Libya’s interim government announced the “liberation” of the country on October 23, it declared that a system based on the Islamic Sharia, including polygamy, will replace the secular dictatorship that Moammar Gadhafi ran for 42 years. “We, as a Muslim nation, have taken Islamic Sharia as the source of legislation; therefore, any law that contradicts the principles of Islam is legally nullified,” declared interim leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil.

Swapping one evil for another may seem a cruel political comedown after seven months of relentless NATO airstrikes in the name of promoting democracy in Libya — an air war, with special-forces support, that enabled the ragtag rebel militias to triumph but left a vast trail of death and destruction.

The Western powers that militarily effected the regime change in Libya have made little effort to stop its new rulers from establishing a theocratic system founded on Islamic jurisprudence.

For the United States, Britain and France, such a political turn is an unavoidable price to pay to have their own men in power. The Islamist embrace indeed helps protect the credibility of men who otherwise may be seen as foreign puppets in their society.

This is the same reason why these powers have condoned the rulers of the oil sheikdoms for their long-standing alliance with radical clerics. For example, the U.S.-backed House of Saud not only practices the century-old political tradition of Wahhabi Islam — the source of modern Islamic fundamentalism — but also exports this fringe form of Islam, with the result that the more liberal Islamic traditions elsewhere are being gradually snuffed out.

Yet when the Saudi crown prince died recently, Washington did not seek to encourage a more reform-oriented replacement. Now named as next in line to the king is Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, seen in Washington as a dependable ally despite his close ties with jihad-extolling clerics and his role as the head of the kingdom’s well-oiled security apparatus, which routinely carries out beheadings, floggings, and eye-gougings. Nayef has been dubbed the new “crown prince of darkness.”

So critical have the Arab monarchs become to U.S. interests that Washington has failed to stop these cloistered kings from continuing to fund Muslim extremist groups and madrasas in other countries. From Africa to South and Southeast Asia, Arab petrodollars have played a key role in fomenting militant Islamic fundamentalism that targets the West, Israel, and India as its enemies.

In fact, U.S. policy winked at this year’s Saudi military intervention in Bahrain to help crush the prodemocracy movement of the majority Shiite community. The Saudi intervention actually paralleled the 1979 Soviet intervention to bolster a besieged regime in Kabul — an invasion that led to the multibillion-dollar, CIA-led arming of Afghan rebels and the consequent rise of transnational Islamic terrorists, including al-Qaida.

The plain fact is that the U.S.-led regional strategy, far from being forward-looking, is driven by narrowly defined geopolitical interests. The imperative to have pliant regimes in oil-rich countries trumps other considerations and concerns, including political repression and the costs that women pay in Islamist-oriented states.

As a result, the U.S. still props up the Wahhabist monarchs in the Arab world, even as the relatively secular Arab states — Syria, Libya and Iraq — have fallen victim to U.S.-sponsored regime change or sanctions. The absence of oil resources in another more-secular Arab state — Egypt — made its long-standing ruler, Hosni Mubarak, dispensable for U.S. policy when he came under a popular siege domestically.

With the U.S. support they enjoy, the most-tyrannical regimes — the oil monarchies — have been able to ride out the Arab Spring, emerging virtually unscathed. For the U.S., the six monarchical states that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman — are also critical for strategic interests.

After withdrawing its forces from Iraq, Washington plans to use Kuwait as a new military hub to expand its military presence in the Persian Gulf region and foster a U.S.-led “security architecture,” under which its air and naval patrols would be regionally integrated.

NATO’s regime change in Libya — which has the world’s largest reserves of light sweet crude, the top-notch oil that American and European refineries prefer — was clearly not about ushering in an era of liberal democracy.

Having been born in blood, the new Libya faces uncertain times. The only certain element is that its new rulers will remain beholden to those that helped install them.

U.S. Senator John McCain has already announced after meeting the new Libyan rulers that they are “willing to reimburse us and our allies” for the costs of effecting the regime change. Given that the U.S. Treasury Department alone holds $37 billion worth of frozen Libyan assets, paying the estimated $1.2-billion bill for the NATO military mission may seem a small price for Libya.

More fundamentally, America’s troubling ties with Islamist rulers and groups were cemented in the 1980s when the Reagan administration openly employed Islam as an ideological tool to spur the spirit of jihad against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

The blatant use of Islam for geopolitical aims fostered a series of developments that have come to haunt the security of the free world, including the rise of the mujahideen, or “holy warriors,” the inculcation of a jihad culture in Pakistan by a U.S.-backed military ruler, Zia ul-Haq, and the birth of the Pakistan-fathered Afghan Taliban in which the CIA served as the midwife.

It was at a White House ceremony attended by some “holy warriors” from the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt in the mid-1980s that President Ronald Reagan proclaimed the mujahideen as the “moral equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers.”

Two such moral equivalents, Osama bin Laden and Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar, later became America’s nemesis. Whereas the U.S. finally killed bin Laden in a daring raid deep inside Pakistan this year, it is still seeking to cut a deal with Mullah Omar and his Quetta Shura to help secure a face-saving exit from the decade-long war in Afghanistan.

Make no mistake: International terrorism and the modern-day Frankenstein monsters are the haunting by-products of the war against atheism and communism that the U.S. was supposed to have won.

Yet the lessons from that war have already been forgotten, including the need to keep the focus on long-term goals and not be carried away by political expediency and narrow geopolitical objectives.

The current attempt to strike a Faustian bargain with the Taliban, for example, ignores the very lesson from the creation of this evil force.

Another lesson that has fallen by the wayside is the need for caution in training Islamic insurgents and funneling lethal arms to them to help overthrow a regime. In Libya, bringing the myriad rebel militias under government control is likely to prove difficult, potentially creating a jihadist citadel at the southern doorsteps of Europe. Yet the regime-change success in Libya is likely to encourage greater Western indirect military support to Sunni rebels seeking to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad’s authoritarian but secular regime, which has banned face veils in universities.

It has been argued by exponents of the U.S. policy approach that because a war runs on expediency, with strange bedfellows involved as partners, unsavory allies are unavoidable — ranging from Islamist militias to regimes that bankroll militant Islamic fundamentalism overseas. After all, to get rid of Nazism, the allies needed Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

However, these advocates overlook the fact that Stalin did not create Hitler or foster Nazism; nor was Stalin’s removal necessary to eradicate Nazism.

Paradoxically, the U.S. practice of propping up malleable but Islamist rulers in the Middle East creates a street-level situation not only laden with strong anti-U.S. sentiment but also support for more authentically Islamist and independent forces. So, if elections are held, it is such autonomous Islamists that often emerge as winners, as the diverse cases of Gaza and Tunisia attest.

This trend, in turn, encourages U.S. policy to back rulers that espouse Islamist beliefs as the legitimating credo of their hold on power.

Let’s be clear: The global fight against terrorism can succeed only by ensuring that states do not contribute in any way to the rise of virulent Islamic fundamentalism extolling violence as a sanctified religious tool. Yet today, history is in danger of repeating itself.

The brutal killing of Gadhafi by his NATO-backed captors and the macabre public display of his body for several days in another city populated by a rival tribe were redolent of the manner in which former Afghan President Najibullah was dragged out of the United Nations compound in Kabul by the Taliban in 1996, beaten, shot dead, and hung from a traffic barricade.

What followed was unending bloodletting that has turned Afghanistan into an open sore for regional and international security.

In this light, will Libya become another jihadist haven?

Brahma Chellaney is author of “Asian Juggernaut” (Harper, 2010) and “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press, 2011).

The Japan Times: Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2011. (C) All rights reserved

India is an easy terrorist target

Brahma Chellaney
The Daily Beast, July 14, 2011

It is not a mere coincidence that Mumbai, India’s commercial hub, has repeatedly been struck by terrorists since 1993. Mumbai has become the favored target because the terrorist aim is to undermine India’s booming economy and its status as a rising power by rattling foreign investors and driving away tourists.

India’s economic rise has intersected with Pakistan’s descent into chaos. Each terror strike on Mumbai raises fresh international concerns about security in India and prompts a sizable number of foreign tourists to abandon or delay travel plans.

Undercutting India’s strength by repeatedly targeting its economic capital is a geopolitical objective that only a state sponsor of terrorism can seek to pursue, not street gangs, underworld figures, or local fundamentalists. And that sponsor — which made the mistake of leaving its marks on the three-day Mumbai terrorist siege in November 2008 that killed 166 people — is the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s notorious military intelligence agency.

The latest explosions that ripped through Mumbai at the height of the evening rush may have had an additional objective behind them — to blunt international pressure to bring the Pakistan-based coordinators of the 2008 siege to justice. With India now saddled with another terrorist attack to investigate, the international profile of the 2008 siege is bound to decline.

At a time when the U.S. has ratcheted up pressure on the Pakistani army and ISI, including by putting the release of further military aid on hold, those behind the latest bombings may have had yet another motive — to shift the focus from the deteriorating U.S.-Pakistan relations to the India-Pakistan context so as to raise concerns in Washington about potential subcontinental hostilities and to persuade the U.S. not to lean too heavily on the Pakistani military establishment.

But unlike the 2008 siege by heavily armed commandos from Pakistan on a suicide mission, the bombs in the latest attack were planted and detonated stealthily. This marks a return to an earlier pattern witnessed, for example, in the 1993 and 2006 Mumbai serial blasts. This pattern not only obviates the need for a high level of training and logistical sophistication, but also precludes telltale signs of external involvement by permitting a terrorist undertaking to be outsourced to proxy figures in the criminal or fundamentalist world in Mumbai.

The latest bombings actually raise wrenching questions about India’s Pakistan and counterterrorism policies. The unparalleled 2008 siege was supposed to be India’s 9/11 and serve as a tipping point in India’s forbearance with terrorist violence. This week’s explosions are a reminder that little has changed.

For New Delhi, the chickens have come home to roost. Its decision early this year to resume political dialogue with Pakistan at all levels was made without having secured any anti-terror commitment. Even though the Pakistan-based masterminds of the 2008 siege remain untouched and Pakistani terrorist-training camps near the border with India, according to Indian officials, continue to operate with impunity, New Delhi returned to square one by resuming comprehensive dialogue.

After the 2008 attack, an array of options was available to India, especially in the diplomatic, economic and political spheres. Between the two extremes — empty talk and war — New Delhi could have invoked measures commonly available to nations to step up pressure, such as recalling its ambassador from Islamabad and invoking trade sanctions. Yet a feckless Indian leadership did not take the smallest of small steps even as a symbolic expression of India’s outrage over Pakistan’s role as the staging ground for that attack.

New Delhi actually responded to the 2008 siege by fashioning a new and unique tool — dossier bombing. The weighty dossiers — delivered at regular intervals and containing documented evidence of the involvement of the ISI and its front organization, the Lashkar-i-Taiba terrorist group, in that attack — only persuaded Pakistan to stay its ground, with India eventually climbing down.

Today, the now-familiar Indian cycle of empty rhetoric is repeating itself — ritual condemnation of the latest bombings and a worn-out promise to defeat terror. Yet the bombers have driven home a clear message: India, despite its rising international stature, is powerless to stop terror attacks. The bombings also have the potential to further undercut the flagging credibility of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Singh is the latest in a succession of weak, aging prime ministers whose absence of decisive leadership over the past 22 years has resulted in India’s failure to formulate a prudent counterterror strategy backed by firm resolve.

The fundamental mistake Singh’s government has made is to separate its Pakistan policy and counterterrorism strategy and put them on separate tracks. The two are simply not separable.

Increasingly, terrorism has been treated as a law-and-order issue requiring more policing and better intelligence. To regard terrorism as a law-and-order problem is to do what the terrorists want — to sap national strength. No amount of security can stop terrorism if India is reluctant to go after terrorist cells and networks and those that harbor extremists.

The ugly truth is that transnational terrorists see India as an easy target because it imposes no costs on them and their patrons.

What India needs is a concerted, sustained campaign against the forces of terror. But what a succession of leaders has offered are only words to comfort the nation. If India does not break out of this straitjacket, it will only be a matter of time before terrorists strike yet again.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of Asian Juggernaut (Harper, 2010) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, 2011).

(c) The Daily Beast, 2011

After Osama: Triumph for one, but lessons for all

When the dust settles, it is likely to be business as usual: Indians impotent as ever, Pakistanis playing both ally and enemy, and the US doling out further multibillion-dollar awards to Pakistan

Brahma Chellaney
Mint, May 4, 2011

Conducted without the cooperation or even advance knowledge of Pakistan, the US helicopter assault that killed Osama bin Laden in his hideout beside a Pakistani military academy has exposed that country’s Janus-faced policy — a supposed ally on counterterrorism that in reality acts as an ally of transnational terrorists, harbouring them in its bosom covertly. The new spotlight on Islamabad’s duplicitous role raises uncomfortable questions for US policy, including about the billions of dollars in annual aid still being lavished on Pakistan. Yet the US is unlikely to heed the renewed call, among others, of Amrullah Saleh, Afghanistan’s intelligence director until last summer, to “wake up to the fact that Pakistan is a hostile state exporting terror”.

In a potential lesson for India, which has stoically put up with Pakistan-orchestrated acts of cross-border terrorism for years without retaliating even once, the US assault team managed to breach Pakistani defences by slipping deep inside Pakistan, with President Barack Obama informing his Pakistani counterpart about the successful operation only after the mission crew safely crossed back into Afghan airspace with Osama’s body.

In fact, the breakthrough came only after the US, even at the risk of rupturing its longstanding ties with the Pakistani army and ISI, deployed a number of CIA operatives, Special Operations forces and contractors deep inside Pakistan without the knowledge of the Pakistani military. Just last month, Pakistan’s main power brokers, generals Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and Ahmed Shuja Pasha, were stridently demanding the removal of all “undeclared” CIA operatives and contractors. But the prized “kill” has only reinforced the need for independent US intelligence operations in the Pakistani heartland, where the real terrorist sanctuaries are located, not on Pakistan’s borders.

In different ways, Osama in death has paradoxically exposed Pakistani, US and Indian policies. After all, a raid — even if spectacularly triumphant for one side, mortifying for another, and welcomed by the third party — cannot cover up or atone for flawed policies.

Take India: With the Hafiz Saeeds and Dawood Ibrahims in Pakistan mocking this country, the raid inadvertently shows up the naivety of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s basic assumptions about why refraining from exerting pressure and relying merely on engagement is the best way to persuade Pakistan to stop sponsoring terror.

Whereas Obama proudly declared that the US had “kept its commitment to see that justice is done”, India believes in delivering not justice but dossiers. That is why India’s reaction to 26/11 was to avoid taking the smallest of small steps — such as the recall of its own high commissioner from Islamabad — as just a token expression of outrage over Pakistan’s role as the staging ground for those daring terrorist attacks.

As for Pakistan, it can no longer be regarded as a reliable US ally. But no one has been more exposed than the two generals there who were making stroppy demands of the US until recently. Although the superannuated Kayani and Pasha have succeeded in staying on in office, their credibility at home and abroad is set to take a beating.

More important, the raid has exposed US policy, underlining a failed strategy that has unintentionally turned Pakistan into Ground Zero for global terrorism.

Obama, after taking office, implemented a military surge in Afghanistan, but an aid surge to Pakistan, turning the latter into the largest recipient of US aid, although the Afghan Taliban leadership and Al Qaeda remnants remained ensconced in Pakistan. That only deepened US involvement in the wrong war and emboldened Pakistan to fatten the Afghan Taliban even as US drone strikes in Waziristan continued to severely weaken Al Qaeda. Rather than help build robust civilian institutions in Pakistan, Washington has continued to pamper the jihadist-penetrated Pakistani military establishment, best illustrated by the fresh $3 billion military aid package earmarked for next fiscal.

Logically, there must now be a redefinition of the US-Pakistan relationship. After all, the US military’s main foe in Afghanistan is not the badly fragmented and incapacitated Al Qaeda, but a resurgent Taliban enjoying safe havens in Pakistan, which has brazenly egged on the Afghan president to dump the Americans for Chinese support. Yet Obama’s narrowing of the Afghan war goals has ironically made the US more dependent on Pakistan. By moving away from the Bush-era counterinsurgency strategy towards limited objectives centred on political reconciliation with the Afghan Taliban, Obama now needs Pakistan’s Scotch whisky-sipping but jihadist-rearing military generals to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table.

That is why when the dust settles, it is likely to be business as usual: Indians impotent as ever, Pakistanis playing both an ally and an enemy, and Americans doling out further multibillion-dollar awards to Islamabad. With Osama’s death boosting his flagging political fortunes, Obama no longer looks like a one-termer, but rather a president who will last to shape the endgame in Afghanistan.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.
Comment at views@livemint.com

After bin Laden, spotlight on Pakistan

Brahma Chellaney

Column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate

The killing of Osama bin Laden by United States special forces in a helicopter assault on a sprawling luxury mansion near Islamabad recalls the capture of other Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistani cities. Once again, we see that the real terrorist sanctuaries are located not along Pakistan’s borders with Afghanistan and India, but in the Pakistani heartland.

This, in turn, underlines another fundamental reality — that the fight against international terrorism cannot be won without demilitarizing and de-radicalizing Pakistan, including by rebalancing civil-military relations there and reining in the country’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Other terrorist leaders captured in Pakistan since 9/11 — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda’s third in command; Abu Zubeida, the network’s operations chief; Yasser Jazeeri; Abu Faraj Farj; and Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the coordinators of 9/11 — were also found living in cities across Pakistan. If there is any surprise about bin Laden’s hideout, it is its location in a military town, Abbottadad, in the shadow of an army academy.

This only underscores the major protection that bin Laden must have received from elements of the Pakistani security establishment to help him elude the US dragnet for nearly a decade. The breakthrough in hunting him down came only after the US, even at the risk of rupturing its longstanding ties with the Pakistani army and ISI, deployed a number of CIA operatives, Special Operations forces, and contractors deep inside Pakistan without the knowledge of the Pakistani military.

In recent years, with its senior operations men captured or killed and bin Laden holed up in Pakistan, the badly splintered Al Qaeda had already lost the ability to mount a major international attack or openly challenge US interests. With bin Laden’s death, Al Qaeda is likely to wither away as an organization.

Yet its dangerous ideology is expected to live on and motivate state-sponsored non-state actors. It will be mainly such elements that will have the capacity to launch major transnational terrorist attacks, like the 2008 Mumbai strikes. Even in Afghanistan, the US military’s main foe is not Al Qaeda but a resurgent Taliban, which enjoys safe haven in Pakistan.

That is why the spotlight is likely to turn on the terrorist nexus within Pakistan and the role of, and relationship between, state and non-state actors there. Significantly, as the CIA closed in on bin Laden, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullens, for the first time publicly linked the Pakistani military with some of the militants attacking US forces in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s homegrown Islamist militias continue to operate openly, and the Pakistani army and intelligence remain loath to sever their cozy ties with extremist and terrorist elements.

For the US, Pakistan poses a particularly difficult challenge. Despite providing $20 billion to Pakistan in counterterrorism aid since 9/11, the US has received grudging assistance, at best, and duplicitous cooperation, at worst. Today, amid a rising tide of anti-Americanism, US policy on Pakistan is rapidly unraveling. Yet Pakistan, with one of the world’s lowest tax-to-GDP ratios, has become more dependent than ever on US aid.

Even as Americans exult over bin Laden’s killing, the US government must recognize that its failed policy on Pakistan has inadvertently made that country the world’s main terrorist sanctuary. Rather than helping to build robust civilian institutions there, the US has pampered the jihadist-penetrated Pakistani military establishment, best illustrated by the fresh $3 billion military aid package earmarked for the next fiscal year. After dictator Pervez Musharraf was driven out of office, the new Pakistani civilian government ordered the ISI to report to the interior ministry, but received no support from the US for this effort to assert civilian control, allowing the army to quickly frustrate the effort.

After coming to office, US President Barack Obama implemented a military surge in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, however, he implemented an aid surge, turning it into the largest recipient of US aid, even though the Afghan Taliban leadership and Al Qaeda remnants remained ensconced in the country. This only deepened US involvement in the wrong war and emboldened Pakistan to fatten the Afghan Taliban, even as sustained US attacks continued to severely weaken Al Qaeda.

Make no mistake: the scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates more from the country’s Scotch whisky-sipping generals than from the bead-rubbing mullahs. It is the self-styled secular generals who have reared the forces of jihad and fathered the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jalaluddin Haqqani militia, and other groups. Yet, by passing the blame for their ongoing terrorist-proxy policy to their mullah puppets, the generals have made the US believe that the key is to contain the religious fringe, not the puppeteers.

In fact, Pakistan’s descent into a jihadist dungeon occurred not under civilian rule, but under two military dictators — one who nurtured and let loose jihadist forces, and another who took his country to the very edge of the precipice.

Without reform of the Pakistani army and ISI, there can be no end to transnational terrorism — and no genuine nation-building in Pakistan. How can Pakistan be a “normal” state if its army and intelligence agency remain outside civilian oversight and decisive power remains with military generals?

With bin Laden dead, the only way that Al Qaeda can reconstitute itself is if the Pakistani military succeeds in reinstalling a proxy regime in Afghanistan. Until the Pakistani military’s vise-like grip on power is broken and the ISI cut down to size, Pakistan is likely to remain Ground Zero for the terrorist threat that the world confronts.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and the forthcoming Water: Asia’s New Battlefield.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.