Category Archives: Terrorism

Needed: A new political order in the Hindu-Kush region

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Time has come to accept the de facto partition of Afghanistan

Brahma Chellaney

The Sunday Guardian, July 18, 2010 

As the Afghanistan war approaches its 10th anniversary, it
is a reminder that this is the longest foreign war in American history. The
U.S. war effort is clearly faltering, to the extent that Afghan President Hamid
Karzai has started exploring the possibility of cutting his own deal with the
Taliban.

If defeat is beginning to stare the U.S. in the face, it is
largely because of President Barack Obama’s botched strategy. Obama has
designed his twin troop surges not to militarily rout the Afghan Taliban but to
strike a political deal with the enemy from a position of strength. But as CIA
director Leon Panetta admitted recently about the Taliban, “We have seen no
evidence that they are truly interested in reconciliation.”

Why would the Taliban be interested in negotiating a deal
with the Americans when Obama publicly declared, just weeks after coming to
office, that he was interested in a military exit from Afghanistan? The Taliban
and their sponsors, the Pakistan military, simply want to wait out the Americans.

Unable to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, the
Obama administration is searching for credible options to fend off defeat.
While the U.S. has no cost-free option, its least bad option, according to
Robert Blackwill, is to accept the de facto partition of Afghanistan.
Blackwill, who served as U.S. ambassador to India, deputy national security
advisor for strategic planning and presidential envoy to Iraq in the George W.
Bush administration, says in an article that de facto partition offers the only
alternative to strategic defeat. That option means that the U.S. will end
ground operations in Afghanistan but use air power and its special forces to
attack Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan’s Pashtun-dominated south and east
while ensuring that the non-Pashtun northern and western Afghan regions retain
their present de facto autonomy.

Blackwill has picked up the de facto partition idea from
M.J. Akbar, who has been advocating it for a while. This idea meshes with the
thesis this writer has been propounding that the way to contain the scourge of
international terrorism is to stop treating as sacrosanct the existing
political borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is continuing reluctance
in the international policy discourse to face up to a central reality: The
political border between these two problem 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
Afghanistan-Pakistan 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 Af-Pak 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 Pakistani military and its infamous
Inter-Services Intelligence agency have chosen to support proxy militant
groups, in addition to 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. The plain fact is that
the entire war effort has been focused on the wrong side of the Durand Line. A
forward-looking Af-Pak policy demands consistency in approach toward these 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 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.

The Obama administration complains that a weak, corrupt
government in Kabul is driving Afghans into the Taliban’s clutches. So, it has
sought to do business directly with provincial governors and tribal leaders and
seek their help to set up local, Iraq-style militias to assist the U.S. forces.
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. Despite the generous U.S. aid, the 2010
Failed States Index ranks Pakistan as the 10th most failed state on Earth.

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 Af-Pak 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 Af-Pak 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.
Accepting the de facto partition of Afghanistan can serve as a first step in
that direction.

U.S.-funded private armies in Afghanistan

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U.S. is building a new tribe of warlords in Afghanistan

Brahma
Chellaney

The Sunday Guardian, June 20, 2010

Just as the
United States
fattened jihadist militias in the 1980s, short-term interests are again leading
it to fund private Afghan miltias. This will carry serious consequences for
regional security, long after the Americans have pulled out from Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan,
in any case, is becoming increasingly unwinnable for the Americans, as
underscored by the recent series of U.S. political
and military setbacks. The Afghan Taliban, with its inner shura (council) ensconced in the Quetta area of Pakistan,
is stepping up attacks across Afghanistan.
That has brought into question the viability of President Barack Obama’s plan to turn around Afghanistan
and begin withdrawing forces by July 2011.

            Faced with a desperate situation,
the administration is rolling out local militias in virtually every Afghan
province. It is racing to secure Afghanistan so
that the president can start pulling out from July 2011 — a deadline he set on
his own, overriding the concerns of a sceptical military.

Under the militia-building plan, designed to
complement Obama’s two successive troop “surges,” local militias are being set
up in the Afghan provinces as part of a strategy to get a handle on the
situation. The militias are being established in two ways — either by training
and arming village recruits, or by bribing insurgent leaders to cross over with
their fighters and become the new law-enforcement force. The latter way has
become increasingly popular with the Americans as it offers the quickest
shortcut.

As a result, a new array of U.S.-backed provincial warlords have emerged across
Afghanistan, with millions of dollars in American funds being paid to them to
provide highway security and run missions with U.S. special forces. The
combination of American-sanctions arms and American funds has made these
warlords, with their private armies, so powerful that they have orchestrated
the removal of local Afghan officials who have dared to defy their diktats.

            For example, in southern Oruzgan Province, the most powerful man today is not the provincial governor or the
local army commander or the police chief, but a U.S.-funded chief of a
1500-strong private army, Matiullah
Khan.

The U.S. support for establishment of private
militias, initiated quietly without any consultation with allies and partners,
flies in the face of the common agreement that the international community must
focus on institution-building, demobilization of existing militias and
reconstruction to create a stable, moderate Afghanistan — goals that have prompted
India to pour massive $1.5 billion aid into that country. The decision ignores
the danger that such militias could go out of control and threaten regional and
international security. That is exactly what happened with the militias President
Ronald Reagan heavily armed in the 1980s, the so-called mujahideen.

            The new U.S.-supported warlords
already are acting as a law unto themselves, undermining state institutions,
conniving with drug dealers and seeking to strike private deals with the
Taliban. As the Taliban
have targeted for assassination former insurgents who have switched sides, some
of the warlords have sought to keep both the Americans and the Taliban happy.
The Americans, for their part, have sought to encourage greater defections from
insurgent ranks by offering new incentives. For example, it has been made
public by British Maj. Gen. Philip Jones, who directs the reintegration effort
for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. that insurgents who cross over to
the NATO side can keep weapons to provide security to local communities.

Confronting grim realities on the ground, Washington is seeking to pursue shortcuts, lest the
Afghan war burn Obama’s presidency in the same way Iraq consumed George W. Bush’s.
Still, it is important to remember the origins of the Afpak problem.

A covert U.S.
war against the nine-year Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan
helped instil an Afpak jihad culture and create Frankensteins like Osama bin
Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar. It was at a mid-1980s White House ceremony
attended by some turbaned and bearded Afpak “holy warriors” that President
Ronald Reagan proclaimed mujahideen leaders the “moral equivalent of the
founding fathers” of America. Now a
second military intervention in Afghanistan
since 2001 — this time by the U.S.,
with the aid of NATO and other allied troops — has further destabilized the
region.

Yet, in trying to salvage the overt U.S. war in Afghanistan, Obama is ignoring the
lessons of the earlier covert war and unwittingly seeking to repeat history. In
the same way the U.S.
created mujahideen by funnelling
billions of dollars worth of arms to them in the 1980s, Washington is now
setting up local militias and warlords across Afghanistan. And just as the covert
war’s imperatives prompted the U.S. in the 1980s to provide multibillion-dollar
aid packages to Pakistan while turning a blind eye to its nuclear-smuggling and
other illicit trans-border activities, Washington is now showering
unprecedented aid on that country while seeking to neither bring the rogue
Inter-Services Intelligence under civilian oversight nor subject the now-free A.Q.
Khan to international questioning. The U.S.
indeed has increased its cooperation with the Pakistani military, including new
joint CIA-ISI missions in tribal areas, commando training to Frontier Corps and
sharing of U.S.
intercepts of militant cellular and satellite phone calls.

Before long, the new militias would be
terrorizing local populations. The new breed of warlords would likely foster
anarchy. The Americans will leave behind an Afghan
government too weak to enforce its writ and a new tribe of warlords eager to
challenge central authority.

Today, America
is unable to stop the misuse of its large annual military aid by Pakistan or
account for the arms it has supplied to Afghan security forces. Controlling
non-state actors is even harder. That
is the lesson from the rise of the Afghan Taliban, fathered by the ISI and
endorsed by U.S. policy as a
way out of the chaos that engulfed Afghanistan after President
Najibullah’s 1992 ouster.

Just because Afghan security forces are not yet
sufficiently large or adequately groomed to take over the fight cannot justify
the setting up of more militias in a country already swarming with armed
militiamen.

Obama’s Afghan strategy should be
viewed as a shortsighted strategy intent on repeating the very mistakes of
American policy on Afghanistan
and Pakistan over the past
three decades that have come to haunt U.S. security and that of the rest
of the free world. Obama is giving
priority to what is politically expedient than to long-term interests — the
very mistake that gave rise to the phenomenon of jihadist transnational terror.

Obama’s Afghan policy: Surge, bribe and run

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U.S. Afpak path comes full circle

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times

What U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has been pursuing in Afghanistan for the past one year has now received international imprimatur, thanks to the well-scripted London conference. Four words sum up that strategy: Surge, bribe and run.

Obama has designed his twin troop surges not to militarily rout the Afghan Taliban but to strike a political deal with the enemy from a position of strength. Without a deal with Taliban commanders, the United States cannot execute the "run" part.

The Obama approach has been straightforward: If you can’t defeat them, buy them off. Having failed to rout the Taliban, Washington has been holding indirect talks with the Afghan militia’s shura, or top council, whose members are holed up in Quetta, capital of Pakistan’s sprawling Baluchistan province, including the one-eyed chief, Mullah Mohammad Omar. The talks have been conducted through the Pakistani, Saudi and Afghan intelligence agencies.

Obama, paradoxically, is seeking to apply to Afghanistan the Iraq model of his predecessor, George W. Bush, who used a military surge largely as a show of force to buy off Sunni tribal leaders and other local chieftains. But Afghanistan isn’t Iraq, and it is a moot question whether the same strategy can work, especially when Obama has not hidden his intent to end the U.S. war before he comes up for re-election in 2012.

In a land with a long tradition of humbling foreign armies, payoffs are unlikely to buy peace. All that the Pakistan-backed Taliban has to do is to simply wait out the Americans. After all, popular support for the Afghan war has markedly ebbed in the U.S., even as the other countries with troops in Afghanistan exhibit war fatigue.

If a resurgent Taliban is now on the offensive, with 2008 and 2009 proving to be the deadliest years for U.S. forces since the 2001 American intervention, it is primarily because of two reasons: the sustenance the Taliban still draws from Pakistan; and a growing Pashtun backlash against foreign intervention.

The Taliban leadership — with an elaborate command-and-control structure oiled by Wahhabi petrodollars and proceeds from opium trade — operates from the comfort of sanctuaries in Pakistan. Fathered by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and midwifed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in 1994, the Taliban emerged as a Frankenstein’s monster.

Yet President Bill Clinton’s administration acquiesced in the Taliban’s ascension to power in Kabul in 1996 and turned a blind eye as the 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 coming another full circle as Washington advertises its readiness to strike deals with "moderate" Taliban (as if there can be moderates in an Islamist militia that enforces medieval practices).

In the past year, the U.S. military and intelligence have carried out a series of air and drone strikes and ground commando attacks from Afghanistan in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region against the Pakistani Taliban, the nemesis of the Pakistani military. The CIA alone has admitted carrying out a dozen drone strikes in Waziristan to avenge the bombing of its base in Khost, Afghanistan, by a Jordanian double agent, who in a prerecorded video said he was going to take revenge for the U.S. attack — carried out at Pakistan’s instance — that killed the Pakistani Taliban chief, Baitullah Mehsud.

Yet, the U.S. military and intelligence have not carried out a single air, drone or ground attack against the Afghan Taliban leadership in Baluchistan, south of Waziristan. The CIA and the ISI are again working together, including in shielding the Afghan Taliban shura members so as to facilitate a possible deal.

Obama’s Afghan strategy should be viewed as shortsighted and apt to repeat the very mistakes of American policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past three decades that have come to haunt U.S. security and that of the rest of the free world.

Washington is showing it has not learned any lessons from its past policies that gave rise to monsters like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar and to "the state within the Pakistani state," the ISI, which was made powerful during Ronald Reagan’s presidency as a conduit of covert U.S. aid for Afghan guerrillas fighting Soviet occupiers.

To justify the planned Faustian bargain with the Taliban, the Obama team is drawing a specious distinction between al-Qaida and the Taliban and illusorily seeking to differentiate between "moderate" Taliban and those that rebuff deal-making.

The scourge of transnational terrorism cannot be stemmed if such specious distinctions are drawn. India, which is on the frontline of the global fight against international terrorism, is likely to bear the brunt of the blowback of Obama’s Afpak strategy, just as it came under terrorist siege as a consequence of the Reagan-era U.S. policies.

The Taliban, al-Qaida and groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba are a difficult-to- separate mix of soul mates who together constitute the global jihad syndicate. To cut a deal with any constituent of this syndicate will only bring more international terrorism. A stable Afghanistan cannot emerge without dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for the Afghan Taliban and militarily decapitating the latter’s command center in Baluchistan. Instead of seeking to achieve that, the U.S. is actually partnering the Pakistani military to win over the Taliban.

Even if the Obama administration managed to bring down violence in Afghanistan by doing a deal with the Taliban, the Taliban would remain intact as a fighting force, with active ties to the Pakistani military. Such a tactical gain would exact serious costs on regional and international security by keeping the Afpak region as the epicenter of a growing transnational-terrorism scourge and upsetting civilian reconstruction in Afghanistan, where Japan and India are two of the largest bilateral aid donors.

Regrettably, the Obama administration is falling prey to a long- standing U.S. policy weakness: The pursuit of narrow objectives without much regard for the interests of friends.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is a regular contributor to The Japan Times.
The Japan Times: Sunday, Feb. 7, 2010
(C) All rights reserved

Sinhalese war idols cross political swords

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Sri Lanka’s warhorses fail at peace

Neither presidential candidate shows signs of addressing the country’s dangerously mono-ethnic national identity


Two celebrated heroes who, as president and army chief, helped end Sri Lanka’s long and brutal civil war against the Tamil Tigers are now crossing political swords. Whichever candidate wins Sri Lanka’spresidential election on January 26 will have to lead that small but strategically located island-nation in a fundamentally different direction – from making war, as it has done for more than a quarter-century, to making peace through ethnic reconciliation and power sharing.

Sri Lanka, almost since independence in 1948, has been racked by acrimonious rivalry between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, who make up 12% of today’s 21.3 million population. Now the country is being divided by the political rivalry between two Sinhalese war idols, each of whom wants to be remembered as the true leader who crushed the Tamil Tiger guerrillas.

The antagonism between President Mahinda Rajapaksa and the now-retired General Sarath Fonseka has been in the making for months. No sooner had Sri Lanka’s military crushed the Tamil Tigers – who ran a de facto state for more than two decades in the north and east – than Rajapaksa removed Fonseka as army chief to appoint him to the new, largely ceremonial post of chief of defence staff.

Once the four-star general was moved to the new position, his relationship with the president began to sour. After rumours swirled of an army coup last fall, the president, seeking military assistance should the need arise, alerted India.

When Rajapaksa decided last November to call an early election to help cash in on his war-hero status with the Sinhalese, he had a surprise waiting for him: anticipating the move, Fonseka submitted his resignation so that he could stand against the incumbent as the common opposition candidate. In his bitter resignation letter, the general accused Rajapaksa of "unnecessarily placing Indian troops on high alert" and failing to "win the peace in spite of the fact that the army under my leadership won the war".

Now the political clash between the two men – both playing the Sinhalese nationalist card while wooing the Tamil minority – has overshadowed the serious economic and political challenges confronting Sri Lanka.

Years of war have left Sri Lanka’s economy strapped for cash. Despite a $2.8bn International Monetary Fund bailout package, the economy continues to totter, with inflation soaring and public-sector salary disputes flaring. The government, desperate to earn foreign exchange, has launched a major campaign to attract international tourists.

But a vulnerable economy dependent on external credit has only helped increase pressure on Sri Lanka to investigate allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This was a war with no witnesses, as the government barred independent journalists and observers from the war zone. Yet the UN estimates that more than 7,000 noncombatants were killed in the final months of the war as government forces overran Tamil Tiger bases.

How elusive the peace dividend remains can be seen from the government’s decision to press ahead with the expansion of an already-large military. The Sri Lankan military is bigger in troop strength than the British and Israeli militaries, having expanded fivefold since the late 1980’s to more than 200,000 troops today. In victory, that strength is being raised further, in the name of "eternal vigilance".

With an ever-larger military machine backed by village-level militias, civil society has been the main loser. Sweeping emergency regulations remain in place, arming the security forces with expansive powers of search, arrest, and seizure of property. Individuals can still be held in unacknowledged detention for up to 18 months.

Now calls are growing for the government to surrender the special powers that it acquired during the war and end the control of information as an instrument of state policy. Fonseka has promised to curtail the almost unchecked powers that the president now enjoys and free thousands of young Tamil men suspected of rebel links. Rajapaksa, for his part, has eased some of the travel restrictions in the Tamil-dominated north after opening up sealed camps where more than 270,000 Tamils were interned for months. More than 100,000 still remain in those camps.

Neither of the two main candidates, though, has promised to tackle the country’s key challenge: transforming Sri Lanka from a unitary state into a federation that grants provincial and local autonomy. After all, the issues that triggered the civil war were rooted in the country’s post-independence moves to fashion a mono-ethnic national identity, best illustrated by the 1956 "Sinhalese only" language policy and the 1972 constitution’s elimination of a ban on discrimination against minorities. Sri Lanka is the only country, apart from Malaysia, with affirmative action for the majority ethnic community.

As the incumbent with control over the state machinery and media support, Rajapaksa has the edge in the election. But, with the fractured opposition rallying behind Fonseka and a moderate Tamil party also coming out in support of him, this election may produce a surprise result.

Whichever "hero" wins, however, building enduring peace and stability in war-scarred Sri Lanka requires a genuine process of national reconciliation and healing. The country’s future hinges on it.

• Brahma Chellaney, a former member of India’s National Security Council, is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.

• Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

America’s Afghan war is just not winnable

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This column has been syndicated globally by Project Syndicate http://www.project-syndicate.org/
Last Exit from Kabul?

Brahma Chellaney

America’s war in Afghanistan is approaching a tipping point, with doubts about President Barack Obama’s strategy growing. Yet, after dispatching 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, Obama is considering sending another 14,000.

Let’s be clear: America’s Afghan war is not winnable, even though Obama has redefined American goals from defeating the Taliban to preventing Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a base to launch attacks on the United States. But Al Qaeda is no longer a serious factor in the Afghan war, where the principal combatants are now the American military and the Taliban, with its associated militias and private armies. Rather than seeking to defeat the Taliban, the US has encouraged the Pakistani, Afghan, and Saudi intelligence services to hold proxy negotiations with the Taliban’s top leadership, holed up in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

The US is fighting the wrong war. After America’s invasion drove Al Qaeda’s leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan emerged as the main base and sanctuary for transnational terrorists. Support and sustenance for the Taliban and many other Afghan militants also comes from inside Pakistan. Despite this, Obama is pursuing a military surge in Afghanistan but an aid surge to Pakistan, which is now the single largest recipient of US assistance in the world.

To defeat Al Qaeda, the US doesn’t need a troop buildup – certainly not in Afghanistan. Without a large ground force in Afghanistan or even major ground operations, the US can hold Al Qaeda’s remnants at bay in their havens in the mountainous tribal regions of Pakistan through covert operations, Predator drones, and cruise-missile attacks. And isn’t that what the CIA is doing already?

Indeed, US intelligence experts believe that Al Qaeda already is badly fragmented and in no position to openly challenge American interests. According to the latest Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community released last February, “Because of the pressure we and our allies have put on Al Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan…Al Qaeda today is less capable and effective than it was a year ago.”

Had Obama’s goal been to rout the Taliban, a further military surge may have made sense, because a resurgent Taliban can be defeated only through major ground operations, not by airstrikes and covert action alone. But if the US administration’s principal war target is not the Taliban but Al Qaeda remnants, why use a troop-intensive strategy based on protecting population centers to win grassroots support? In reality, what the Obama administration calls a “clear, hold, build” strategy is actually a “surge, bribe, run” strategy – except that the muddled nature of the mission and deepening US involvement undermine the “run” component.

Before Afghanistan becomes a Vietnam-style quagmire, Obama must rethink his plan for another troop surge. Gradually drawing down US troop levels makes more sense, because what unites the disparate elements of the Taliban syndicate is a common opposition to foreign military presence.

An American military exit from Afghanistan would not be a shot in the arm for the forces of global jihad, as many in the US seem to fear. On the contrary, it would remove the Taliban’s unifying element and unleash developments – a vicious power struggle in Afghanistan along sectarian and ethnic lines – whose significance would be largely internal or regional.

The Taliban, with the active support of the Pakistani military, would certainly make a run for Kabul to replay the 1996 power grab. But it wouldn’t be easy, owing in part to the Taliban’s fragmentation, with the tail (private armies and militias) wagging the dog.

Moreover, the non-Taliban and non-Pashtun forces are now stronger, more organized, and better prepared than in 1996 to resist any advance on Kabul, having been empowered by provincial autonomy or by the offices they still hold in the Afghan federal government. And, by retaining Afghan bases to carry out covert operations, Predator missions, and other airstrikes, the US would be able to unleash punitive power to prevent a Taliban takeover. After all, it was American air power, combined with the Northern Alliance’s ground operations, which ousted the Taliban in 2001.

In fact, the most likely outcome of any Afghan power struggle triggered by an American withdrawal would be to formalize the present de facto partition of Afghanistan along ethnic lines – the direction in which Iraq, too, is headed.

In this scenario, the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and other ethnic minorities would be able to ensure self-governance in the Afghan areas that they dominate, leaving the Pashtun lands on both sides of the British-drawn Durand Line in ferment. Thanks to ethnic polarization, the Durand Line, or the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, exists today only on maps. On the ground, it has little political and economic relevance, and it would be militarily impracticable to re-impose the line.

As in Iraq, an American withdrawal would potentially unleash forces of Balkanization. That may sound disturbing, but it is probably an unstoppable consequence of the initial US invasion.

An American pullout actually would aid the fight against international terrorism. Instead of remaining bogged down in Afghanistan and seeking to cajole and bribe the Pakistani military into ending their support for Islamic militants, the US would become free to pursue a broader, more balanced counterterrorism strategy. For example, the US would better appreciate the dangers to international security posed by Pakistani terror groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

The threat of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan comes not from the Taliban, but from groups that have long drawn support from the Pakistani army as part of a long-standing military-mullah alliance. That is where the focus of the fight should be.

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

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.

The human-rights challenge posed by Sri Lanka

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Sri Lankan peace process in pieces

Brahma
Chellaney

India Abroad, October 2, 2009

If war-scarred Sri Lanka is to re-emerge as a
tropical paradise, it has to build enduring peace through genuine inter-ethnic
equality and by making the transition from being a unitary state to being a
federation that grants local autonomy. Yet even in victory, the Sri Lankan
government seems unable to define peace or outline a political solution to the
long-standing grievances of the Tamil minority.

A process of national reconciliation anchored in
federalism and multiculturalism indeed can succeed only if possible war crimes
and other human-rights abuses by all parties are independently and credibly
investigated. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has acknowledged
civilian casualties were “unacceptably high,” especially as the war built to a
bloody crescendo earlier this year. The continuing air of martial triumph in Sri Lanka,
though, is making it difficult to heal the wounds of war through three
essential “Rs”: Relief, recovery and reconciliation.

In fact, the military victory bears a distinct family
imprint: President Mahinda Rajapaksa was guided by two of his brothers,
Gotabaya, the powerful defense secretary who fashioned the war plan, and Basil,
the presidential special adviser who formulated the political strategy.

Yet another brother, Chamal, is the ports and civil
aviation minister who awarded China
a contract to build the billion-dollar Hambantotta port on Sri Lanka’s
southeast. In return, Beijing provided Colombo not only the weapon systems that
decisively titled the military balance in its favor, but also the diplomatic
cover to prosecute the war in defiance of international calls to cease
offensive operations to help stanch rising civilian casualties.

Through such support, China
has succeeded in extending its strategic reach to a critically located country
in India’s backyard that
sits astride vital sea-lanes of communication in the Indian
Ocean region.

India
also is culpable for the Sri Lankan bloodbath. Having been outwitted by China, India
was compelled to lend critical assistance to Colombo,
lest it lose further ground in Sri
Lanka. From opening an unlimited line of
credit for Sri Lanka to extending naval and intelligence cooperation, India
provided war-relevant support in the face of a deteriorating humanitarian
situation in that island-nation.

Sinhalese nationalists now portray President Rajapaksa as
a modern-day incarnation of Dutugemunu, a Sinhalese ruler who, according to
legend, vanquished an invading Tamil army led by Kind Elara more than 2,000
years ago. But months after the Tamil Tigers were crushed, it is clear the
demands of peace extend far beyond the battlefield.

What is needed is a fundamental shift in government’s
policies to help create greater inter-ethnic equality, regional autonomy and a
reversal of the state-driven militarization of society. But Rajapaksa, despite
promising to address the root causes of conflict, has declared: “Federalism is
out of the question.”

How elusive the peace dividend remains can be seen from Sri Lanka’s
decision to press ahead with a further expansion of its military. Not content
with increasing the military’s size fivefold since the late 1980s to more than
200,000 troops today, Colombo
is raising the strength further to 300,000, in the name of “eternal vigilance.”
Soon after the May 2008 victory, the government, for example, announced a drive
to recruit 50,000 new troops to help control the northern areas captured from
the rebels.

The Sri Lankan military already is bigger than that of Britain and Israel. The planned further
expansion would make the military in tiny Sri
Lanka larger than the militaries of major powers like France, Japan
and Germany.
By citing a continuing danger of guerrilla remnants reviving the insurgency,
Rajapaksa is determined to keep a hyper-militarized Sri Lanka on something of a war
footing.

Yet another issue of concern is the manner the government
still holds nearly 300,000 civilians in camps where, in the recent words of UN
High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, the “internally displaced
persons are effectively detained under conditions of internment.”

Such detention risks causing more resentment among the
Tamils and sowing the seeds of future unrest. The internment was intended to
help weed out rebels, many of whom already have been identified and transferred
to military sites. Those in the evacuee camps are the victims and survivors of
the deadly war. To confine them in the camps against their will is to further
victimize and traumatize them.

Sri
Lanka’s interests would be better served
through greater transparency. It should grant the UN, International Red Cross
and nongovernmental organizations at home and abroad unfettered access to care
for and protect the civilians in these camps, allowing those who wish to leave
the camps to stay with relatives and friends.

Then there is the issue of thousands of missing people,
mostly Tamils. Given that many families are still searching for missing
members, the government ought to publish a list of all those it is holding — in
evacuee camps, prisons, military sites and other security centers. Even
suspected rebels in state custody ought to be identified and not denied access
to legal representation.

Bearing in mind that thousands of civilians were killed
just in the final months of the war, authorities should disclose the names of
those they know to be dead — civilians and insurgents — and the possible
circumstances of their death.

The way to fill the power vacuum in the Tamil-dominated
north is not by dispatching additional army troops in tens of thousands, but by
setting up a credible local administration to keep the peace and initiate
rehabilitation and reconstruction after more than a quarter of a century of
war. Yet there is a lurking danger that the government may seek to change
demography by returning to its old policy of settling Sinhalese in Tamil areas.

More fundamentally, such have been the costs of victory
that Sri Lankan civil society stands badly weakened. The wartime suppression of
a free press and curtailment of fundamental rights continues in peacetime,
undermining democratic freedoms and creating a fear psychosis. Sweeping
emergency regulations remain in place, arming the security forces with
expansive powers of search, arrest and seizure of property. Public meetings
cannot be held without government permission. Individuals can still be held in
unacknowledged detention for up to 18 months.

For the process of reconciliation and healing to begin in
earnest, it is essential the government give up wartime powers and accept, as
the UN human-rights commissioner has sought, “an independent and credible
international investigation … to ascertain the occurrence, nature and scale of
violations of international human-rights and international humanitarian law” by
all parties during the conflict. According to Ms. Pillay, “A new future for the
country, the prospect of meaningful reconciliation and lasting peace, where
respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms can become a reality for all,
hinges upon such an in-depth and comprehensive approach.”

Rather than begin a political dialogue on regional
autonomy and a more level-playing field for the Tamils in education and
government jobs, the government has seen its space get constricted by the
post-victory upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism opposed to the devolution of
powers to the minorities. The hard-line constituency argues that the Tamils in
defeat shouldn’t get what they couldn’t secure through three decades of unrest
and violence.

Indeed, such chauvinism seeks to tar federalism as a
potential forerunner to secession, although the Tamil insurgency sprang from
the state’s rejection of decentralization and power-sharing. The looming
parliamentary and presidential elections also make devolution difficult, even
though the opposition is splintered and Rajapaksa seems set to win a second
term.

Add to the picture the absence of international pressure,
despite the leverage provided by a cash-strapped Sri Lankan economy. The United States enjoys a one-country veto in the
International Monetary Fund, yet it chose to abstain from the recent IMF vote
approving a desperately needed $2.8-billion loan to Sri Lanka.

In the face of China’s
stonewalling in the UN, Ban Ki-moon has been unable to appoint a UN special
envoy on Sri Lanka,
let alone order a probe into possible war crimes there. By contrast, the UN
carried out a recently concluded investigation into Israel’s
three-week military offensive in Gaza
earlier this year.

Today, reversing the militarization of society, ending
the control of information as an instrument of state policy and promoting
political and ethnic reconciliation are crucial to post-conflict peace-building
and to furthering the interests of all Sri Lankans — Sinhalese, Tamils and
Muslims. So also is the need to discard the almost mono-ethnic character of the
security forces.

Colombo
has to stop dragging its feet, as it has done for long, on implementing the
Constitution’s 13th amendment, which requires the ceding of some powers at the
provincial level. But these tasks are unlikely to be addressed without
sustained international diplomatic intervention.

As world history attests, peace sought to be achieved
through the suppression and humiliation of an ethnic community has proven
elusive. It will be a double tragedy for Sri Lanka if making peace proves
more difficult than making war.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of
strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Center for Policy
Research in New Delhi, is on the international advisory council of the Campaign for Peace and
Justice in Sri Lanka. 

(c) India Abroad, 2009.

A Way Out of Afghanistan

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An advantageous U.S. exit

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

America’s war in Afghanistan is approaching a tipping point, with doubts about President Barack Obama’s strategy rising. Yet, after dispatching 21,000 additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan, Obama is considering sending another 14,000 combat troops there. Let’s be clear: America’s Afghan war is just not winnable.

First, Obama has redefined U.S. goals too narrowly. America’s primary goal now is not to defeat the Taliban but to prevent al-Qaida from using Afghanistan as a base to launch an attack on the United States.

Obama told the Associated Press in a July 2 interview, "I have a very narrow definition of success when it comes to our national security interests, and that is that al-Qaida and its affiliates cannot set up safe havens from which to attack America."

But al-Qaida is not really a factor in the Afghan war, where the principal combatants are the U.S. military and the Taliban plus associated militias. Rather than seek to defeat the Taliban, Washington has encouraged Pakistani, Afghan and Saudi intelligence to hold proxy talks with the Taliban’s top leadership holed up in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

Second, the U.S. is fighting the wrong war. After the American invasion drove al-Qaida leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan has emerged as the main base and sanctuary for transnational terrorists. Support and sustenance for the Taliban and many other Afghan militants also comes from inside Pakistan. Yet Obama pursues a military surge in Afghanistan but an aid surge to Pakistan, to the extent that Islamabad is being made the single largest recipient of U.S. assistance in the world.

In that light, Obama’s war strategy is questionable. To defeat al-Qaida, the U.S. doesn’t need a troop buildup — certainly not in Afghanistan. Without a large ground force in Afghanistan or even major ground operations, the U.S. can hold al-Qaida remnants at bay in their havens in the mountainous tribal regions of Pakistan through covert operations, Predator drones and cruise-missile attacks. Isn’t that precisely what the CIA already is doing?

U.S. intelligence believes that al-Qaida already is badly fragmented and weakened and thus is in no position to openly challenge American interests. According to the 2009 Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community: "Because of the pressure we and our allies have put on al-Qaida’s core leadership in Pakistan . . . al-Qaida today is less capable and effective than it was a year ago."

Had the Obama goal been to rout the Taliban, a further military surge may have made sense because a resurgent Taliban can be defeated only through major ground operations, not by airstrikes and covert actions alone. Yet, the Obama administration presses ahead with a "clear, hold, build" strategy.

When the administration’s principal war target is not the Taliban but rather al-Qaida remnants on the run, why chase a troop-intensive strategy pivoted on protecting population centers to win grassroots support? In reality, what it calls a "clear, hold, build" strategy is actually a "surge, bribe, run" strategy, except that the muddled nature of the mission and the deepening U.S. involvement crimp the "run" option.

America’s quandary is a reminder that it is easier to get into a war than to get out. In fact, Obama undermined his unfolding war strategy last March by publicly declaring, "There’s got to be an exit strategy." The message that sent to the Taliban and its sponsor, the Pakistani military, was that they ought to simply out-wait the Americans to reclaim Afghanistan.

Before Afghanistan becomes a Vietnam-style quagmire, Obama must rethink his plan for another troop surge. Gradually drawing down U.S. troop levels indeed makes more sense because what holds the disparate constituents of the Taliban syndicate together is a common opposition to foreign military presence.

An American military exit from Afghanistan will not come as a shot in the arm for the forces of global jihad, as many in Washington seem to fear. To the contrary, it will remove the common unifying element and unleash developments whose significance would be largely internal or regional. In Afghanistan, a vicious power struggle would break out along sectarian and ethnic lines. The Taliban, with the active support of the Pakistani military, would certainly make a run for Kabul to replay the 1996 power grab.

But it won’t be easy to repeat 1996. For one, the Taliban is splintered today, with the tail (private armies and militias) wagging the dog. For another, the non-Taliban and non-Pashtun forces now are stronger, more organized and better prepared than in 1996 to resist the Taliban’s advance to Kabul, having been empowered by the autonomy they have enjoyed in provinces or by the offices they still hold in the Afghan federal government.

Also, by retaining Afghan bases to carry out covert operations and Predator missions and other airstrikes, the U.S. military would be able to unleash punitive air power to prevent a 1996 repeat. After all, it was the combination of American air power and the Northern Alliance’s ground operations that ousted the Taliban from power in 2001.

Against this background, the most likely outcome of the Afghan power struggle triggered by an American decision to pull out would be the formalization of the present de facto partition of Afghanistan along ethnic lines. Iraq, too, is headed in the same direction.

The Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and other ethnic minorities would be able to ensure self-governance in the Afghan areas they dominate, leaving the Pashtun lands on both sides of the British-drawn Durand Line in ferment. Thanks to ethnic polarization, the Durand Line, or the Afpak border, exists today only on maps. On the ground, it has little political, ethnic and economic relevance.

As in Iraq, an American withdrawal would potentially let loose forces of Balkanization in the Afpak belt. That may sound disturbing, but this would be an unintended and perhaps unstoppable consequence of the U.S. invasion.

An American pullout actually would aid the fight against international terrorism. Instead of staying bogged down in Afghanistan and seeking to cajole and bribe the Pakistani military from continuing to provide succor to Islamic militants, Washington would become free to pursue a broader and more-balanced counterterrorism strategy.

Also, minus the Afghan-war burden, the U.S. would better appreciate the dangers to international security posed by Pakistani terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e- Mohammed. The threat of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan comes not from the Taliban but from these groups that have long drawn support from the Pakistani army as part of the deep-rooted military-mullah alliance.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is a regular contributor to The Japan Times.
 
The Japan Times: Monday, Sept. 14, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

The fallacies behind India’s Pakistan policy

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Dangerous misconceptions

Brahma Chellaney

India Abroad, August 14, 2009

Even though India’s extended hand has been slapped again and again by Pakistan, right-minded Indians still desire peace and stability on the subcontinent — but with dignity. Instead
of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s one-sided commitment to “go more than half
the way” to make peace with Pakistan, India’s correct position should be that it is ever ready to walk more than half the distance on cooperation or confrontation, depending on whether Pakistan wants peace or war.

Singh’s recent statements in Parliament point to the fallacies on which he has been reconstructing his Pakistan policy. His personal imprint on that policy bears at least eight perilous misconceptions.

One, political geography is unalterable. “We cannot wish away the fact that Pakistan is our neighbor,” Singh says. So, “a stable, peaceful and prosperous Pakistan” is in India’s “own interest.” But political maps are never carved in stone, as the breaking away of Bangladesh, Eritrea and East Timor showed. In fact, the most-profound global events in recent history have been the fragmentation of several states, including the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Pakistan — the world’s Terroristan rolled into an Anarchistan — looks increasingly decrepit and combustible.

The redrawing of the “Afpak” political frontiers indeed may be essential for regional and international security. The British-drawn Durand Line, in any case, has ceased to exist in effect, making a Pashtunistan no longer look implausible. The “moth-eaten” Pakistan, as its founder called it, now resembles a Molotov cocktail waiting for a match.

Two, India and Pakistan are locked by a shared destiny. Therefore, “our objective must be a permanent peace with Pakistan, where we are bound together by a shared future and a common prosperity.” Despite Singh’s constant harping on a “shared destiny,” how can a plural, inclusive and democratic India share a common future with a theocratic, militarized and radicalized Pakistan? In fact, Pakistan, with its “war of a thousand cuts,” poses an existential threat to the very principles and values on which India is founded.

Three, the alternative to a policy seeking to placate a terror-exporting adversary is war. “It is in our vital interest to make sincere efforts to live in peace with Pakistan … There
is no other way unless we go to war.” Lest his message not be clearly
understood, Singh repeated: “Unless we want to go to war with Pakistan,
dialogue is the only way out.” This draws on the classic argument of appeasers
that the only alternative to appeasement is provocation or conflict. The simple
truth is that between bending backwards and waging aggression lie a hundred
different options.

Yet, by greeting each major cross-border terror strike in recent years with complete inaction, Singh has speciously suggested to the nation that the only alternative to such abysmal pusillanimity is war. After 26/11, for example, Singh exercised not one of the multiple political, economic and diplomatic options he had —from recalling the high commissioner from Islamabad and
disbanding the farcical Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism to designating Pakistan’s Inter-Services
Intelligence as a terrorist organization and invoking trade sanctions. As a result, India ended up not taking the smallest of small steps even as a token expression of outrage over Pakistan’s role.

Four, India cannot emerge as a world power without making peace with Pakistan. “I sincerely believe India cannot realize its development ambition or its ambition of being a great power
if our neighborhood remains disturbed … it is in our vital interest, therefore, to try again to make peace with Pakistan.” To say that the country cannot emerge as a major power without making peace with an adversary wedded to waging war by terror is to go against the grain of world history and to encourage the foe to hold India’s progress hostage. Does Singh wish to egg on Pakistan to have its cake and eat it too — wage unconventional war while enjoying the comfort offered by Indian-initiated conciliation and peace talks?

Next-door China has emerged as a global player by building comprehensive national power, not by
coming to terms with Taiwan, which it has kept under a threat of military invasion. Beijing
also has pursued a consistently assertive approach toward India for long.

Singh does not understand that the irredentist Pakistan is locked in mortal combat with the
status quoist India, seeking its salvation in India’s unravelling.Even if India
handed Kashmir Valley on a platter, Pakistan’s war by terror would not end.

Five, as India has nothing to hide and indeed “our conduct is an open book,” it can let Pakistan include any issue in the bilateral agenda. “We are not afraid of discussing any issue of concern between the two countries. If there are any misgivings, we are willing to
discuss them and remove them.” It was such logic that permitted Pakistan to turn its terror target, India, into an accused on Baluchistan.

Singh’s attempt to rationalize that blunder, though, threatens to exacerbate matters. Not “afraid of discussing any issue” extends an invitation to Pakistan to place on the bilateral agenda any subject it wants, including a matter internal to India.

Six, if Pakistan merely acknowledges what is incontrovertible, that is enough for India to change policy course. “This is the first time that Pakistan has … admitted that their nationals and a terrorist organization based in Pakistan carried out a ghastly terrorist act in India.” That prompted the policy change at Sharm-el-Sheikh, Singh divulged.

That it took Pakistan more six months even to submit a detailed response to India’s dossier of evidence, that its response states upfront that the state-sponsored group involved in the Mumbai attacks — the Lashkar-e-Taiba — is a “defunct” organization against which no action thus is possible, that Islamabad has publicly discredited Indian evidence against the No. 1 mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, as “propaganda” and freed him, that the Pakistani
terrorist-training camps along the India border remain operational, and that
Pakistan has rubbished India’s demand to hand over 42 fugitives like Dawood
Ibrahim, Tiger Memon, Chota Shakeel and Lakhbir Singh — all that doesn’t
matter. What matters is an admission of what no longer is deniable.

Seven, high-level dialogue and “meaningful” dialogue can be optically delinked. Those not paying attention to Singh’s word play would have missed the distinction he drew
in his July 29 speech: “We can have a meaningful dialogue with Pakistan only if they fulfill their commitment, in letter and spirit, not to allow their territory to be used in any manner for terrorist activities against India.” However, at the level of prime minister, foreign minister and foreign
secretary, India will continue its dialogue with Pakistan on “all outstanding
issues,” irrespective of whether Pakistan demonstrates its anti-terror bona fides
or not. Such casuistry is designed to carve space for the misbegotten
approach.

Eight, diplomacy of hope and prayer makes sense. “I hope and pray that the leadership in Pakistan will have the strength and the courage to defeat those who want to destroy, not just peace between India and Pakistan, but the future of South Asia.” Wishful thinking has long hobbled Indian foreign policy. Now, in the glaring absence of holistic, institutionalized decision-making, prayers are being added to the wishes.

Yet, even God cannot help those praying for Pakistan to kick its terrorism habit. A state that has employed armed proxies against India virtually from its inception cannot do without them. A de-terrorized Pakistan will become an extinct Pakistan.

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” (HarperCollins).

India’s roller-coaster policy on Pakistan

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India needs
statecraft, not stagecraft

Two successive prime
ministers have led India on
a roller-coaster ride on Pakistan,
highlighting the risks of a meandering, personality-driven policy approach, says Brahma Chellaney

The Economic Times, July 24, 2009

The national outcry over Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s
cave-in at Sharm-el-Sheikh may have caught him by surprise. Singh probably
calculated that just as he had got away by embracing the sponsor of terror, Pakistan, as a fellow victim of terror — through
the infamous Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism — he could use another non-aligned
nations’ meeting to reverse India’s
post-26/11 policy at the US
urging. But the chorus of disapproval that has greeted his volte-face shows he
underrated the continuing anger in India over the unparalleled Pakistani
terrorist assaults on Mumbai. After all, India is being uniquely targeted
not just by non-state actors (NSAs), but by state-sponsored non-state actors
(SSNSAs), with Singh himself having admitted earlier that “some Pakistani official agencies must
have supported” the Mumbai attacks.

Like his predecessor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Singh has taken India on a roller-coaster ride on
counterterrorism, with an ever-shifting policy course on Pakistan. His latest U-turn on Pakistan, however, parallels the manner he
pushed through the controversial nuclear deal with the US. In both
cases, he broke his solemn assurances to Parliament. Also, like the nuclear
deal, Singh’s decision to delink talks with Islamabad from Pakistani action against
terrorism was the product not of institutional
thinking
but of personal choice. Yet another parallel is that the PM has himself moved
the goalpost to help cover his concessions. And just as he tried to spin the
reality on the terms and conditions of the nuclear deal, Singh has turned to
casuistry to camouflage his shift on Pakistan.

Calling Pakistan
“the epicentre of terrorism”, the PM declared in the Lok Sabha on December 11,
2008 that, “The infrastructure of terrorism has to be dismantled permanently.” Pakistan must meet the “minimum pre-condition”
of ensuring its soil will not be used for terror activities against India, Singh
had put on public record. Yet today, his government willy-nilly is moving back
to business as usual with Pakistan, although Islamabad has done nothing — as
New Delhi admits — to shut down terrorist-training camps along the Indian
border or to cut the lifeline its military establishment provides to the terror
groups.

Just as the nuclear deal bore Singh’s personal imprint, the
latest Pakistan-policy shift has been sculpted by him, with little regard for
professional inputs. Indeed, he has ignored the lesson from his 2006 action when he turned Indian policy
on its head and embraced Pakistan
as fellow victim of and joint partner
against terror. The stalled Joint
Anti-Terror Mechanism has
stood out as an astonishing blunder. Still, at Sharm-el-Sheikh, Singh
again obliterated the line between the victim and the aggressor by agreeing that
“terrorism is the main threat to both countries”, and then went one step further
to commit India
to “share real-time, credible and actionable” intelligence on terrorism with the
country still wedded to waging war by terror.

Now take the shifting goalpost. Singh first sought the
dismantlement of Pakistan’s
terror infrastructure against India.
His benchmark then narrowed to bringing to justice the “perpetrators” (the
actual executors, not the masterminds) of the Mumbai attacks. Next, on the way
back home from the G-8 L’Aquila summit, Singh further watered down his stance
by saying India was “willing to walk more than half the distance” if Pakistan undertook
not actual action but merely offered “a renewed reaffirmation” to “bring the
perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre to justice”. That is exactly what happened:
In exchange for Pakistan’s
mere reaffirmation of its anti-terror commitments, Singh changed Indian policy
course. Such a shifting goalpost is redolent of the nuclear deal.

The reliance on spin to cloak concessions has been another
defining characteristic. On Mumbai, India lost twice over — the first time when
10 Pakistani terrorists held its commercial capital hostage for almost three
days, and the second time when Islamabad outmaneuvered it in the diplomatic
game, to the extent that Pakistan managed to formally turn the insurrection in
its Baluchistan province into a bilateral issue to help brand its terror
target, India, as an accused. Yet Singh has followed a familiar pattern to cover up broken promises to the
nation. The Sharm-el-Sheikh statement “does not mean any dilution of our stand. It only
strengthens our stand,” he claimed. Yet, on specifics, he has not explained the
false move on Baluchistan, or the delinking of talks from Pakistani action
against terrorism, or the placing on record India’s interest in a stable, democratic,
“Islamic Republic of Pakistan”, as if to endorse dictator Zia ul-Haq’s
Islamization and the jihad culture it instilled.

Let’s be clear: The inclusion of Baluchistan resulted from US pressure on India
to address Pakistan’s
concerns over Indian consular and other activities in Afghanistan.
And the agreement to share real-time actionable intelligence is part of a CIA
initiative to build cooperation between the Indian and Pakistani intelligence
agencies. Even Hillary Clinton publicly sought “sharing of workable
intelligence”. The Obama administration had made it clear it would wait for the
Indian elections to be over before nudging New Delhi
to reopen talks with Islamabad.
The Sharm-el-Sheikh statement can only boost Washington’s Afpak strategy, a key component
of which is to prop up the Pakistani state financially and politically. 

Take yet
another parallel: Just as Singh argued that without the nuclear deal
India’s energy and economic interests would be seriously compromised, he now
contends that without settling differences and making peace with Pakistan,
India cannot be a great power. Every right-minded Indian would want peace. But
to say that the country cannot emerge as a major power without making peace
with the adversary is to go against the grain of world history and to embolden
the foe to stay implacably antagonistic. Did China
become a world power by coming to terms with Taiwan? Even if India surrendered Kashmir, would Pakistan
be willing or able to stop cross-border terror attacks?

India’s meandering approach on Pakistan
is just one example of Indian policy being unable to stay the course on matters
critical to national interest. In the absence of realistic, goal-oriented
statecraft or a distinct strategic doctrine, ad hoc, personality-driven
policy-making is becoming the norm. A secure, prosperous India, however, can emerge only
through institutionalized, integrated policymaking and the unflinching pursuit
of clearly laid-out goals.

The writer is
professor of strategic studies, Centre for Policy Research.

(c) The Ecinomic Times, 2009.

Afpak strategy doomed to fail

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Afpak policy will blow up in Obama face

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, July 1-15, 2009

The situation in the Afghanistan-Pakistan (“Afpak”) belt
is deteriorating rapidly. Despite President Barack Obama’s troop “surge” in
Afghanistan, June witnessed a level of militant attacks not seen since late
2001, when the United States launched its military intervention in that
landlocked country. In Pakistan,
notwithstanding Obama’s generous aid “surge” designed to make Islamabad the single largest recipient of
American assistance in the world, the forces of militancy and extremism
continue to gain ground. His Afpak strategy’s prospects are beginning to dim
just three months after it was unveiled with fanfare.

Yet pressure is growing on New Delhi to actively assist a strategy that
is detrimental to Indian interests and, in any event, doomed to fail. This puts
New Delhi in a difficult predicament: It would
like to stay on the right side of Washington
but without jeopardizing its own interests. Obama wants victim India to come to the aid of terror-exporting Pakistan,
including by offering new “peace” talks and redeploying troops, even if it
means more terrorist infiltration. While seeking to prop up the Pakistani state
through munificent aid, Washington continues
to pretend that terrorist safe havens exist only along Pakistan’s
western frontier. India is
being targeted by Pakistan-based, military-backed Punjabi terror groups, like
the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, that are of little interest to U.S. policy.
Far from helping to bring the Pakistan-based planners of the Mumbai attacks to
justice, the Obama strategy can only encourage Islamabad
to continue its terror war against India.

But even if New Delhi were
to bend to Washington’s
wishes, Obama’s Afpak strategy is likely to blow up in his face, with serious
consequences for international security. Apart from setting out to give another
$10.5 billion in aid to Pakistan, on top of the $14 billion already provided
since 2001, Obama’s strategy increases U.S. dependence on the very institutions
responsible for the terrifying mess in Pakistan — the  Pakistani army and intelligence. The Afghan
war is now costing American taxpayers more than $60 billion a year. But after
7½ years of waging war, the U.S.
military is no closer to winning a ticket out of Afghanistan, despite Obama’s public
declaration, “There’s got to be an exit strategy”.

Let’s be clear: Even though the Obama administration is
already holding back-channel negotiations over a political deal with the Afghan
Taliban shura through Saudi, Pakistani and Afghan intelligence officials, there
can be no exit for American forces until Afghanistan has a functioning army
and national police that can hold the country together. In Pakistan, the
task to build stability centers on strengthening civilian institutions and
reining in the powerful, meddling military establishment.

Building national institutions in Afghanistan and Pakistan and defeating
transnational terrorism are long-drawn-out missions requiring a generational
commitment. But Obama doesn’t want the Afpak problem to burn his presidency the
way Iraq
consumed Bush’s. That has meant the following: (i) institution-building is now
being openly disparaged as nation-building; (ii) instead of seeking to defeat
terrorism, the Obama plan is to regionally contain terrorism in the Afpak belt,
as if the monster of terrorism can be hermitically confined to a region; (iii)
redefine success; and (iv) take shortcuts to achieve politically expedient
objectives. A classic example of how shortcuts are being taken, without regard
for regional security, is the ongoing programme to set up U.S.-funded local
militias in every Afghan province. In a country already teeming with militias,
new local militias are being established, with the first militia unit made up
of 240 Afghan villagers having been rolled out recently in Wardak province
after receiving just three weeks of training. Like the old militias, the new
militias will begin terrorizing the local populations before long.

Obama fails to recognize the structural character of the
Afpak problem. Worse still, he has made public comments that potentially have
the effect of undercutting the legitimacy of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. How can he seek to implement a strategy
by undermining the elected heads of state in both countries? Little surprise
his strategy is already beginning to unravel.

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

(c) Covert, 2009.