A Cursed Partnership

U.S. and India are miles apart on counterterrorism

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, May 15, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.

(c) The Times of India, 2009.

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

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

Brahma Chellaney, Asian Age, April 22, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(c) Asian Age, 2009.

26/11 can happen again

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, April 8, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(c) 2005-2009 Diligent Media Corporation Ltd. All rights reserved.

Fobbing off the burden

Barack Obama’s myopic Afpak plan, with its narrow goals, is bad news for India

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, March 30, 2009

Throwing more money at Pakistan, without clarity of goals, and keeping up the pretence that Al Qaeda poses the main threat makes Barack Obama look more like George W. Bush than a U.S. president heralding change. Obama has failed to appreciate that the ‘Afpak’ problem won’t go away without a fundamental break from U.S. policies that helped create this terrifying muddle. 

Worse still, Obama wants to regionally contain rather than defeat terrorism, as if the monster of terrorism can be deftly confined to the Afpak belt — a blinkered approach that promises to bring Indian security under added pressure. His aides contend that by refocusing U.S. power to contain and deter, America can diplomatically encircle the terrorist threats from Pakistan and the Taliban. Distant America may afford this, but next-door India will bear the consequences.

In unveiling an Afpak plan founded on narrow goals, Obama has fallen prey to a long-standing U.S. policy weakness: The pursuit of near-term objectives without much regard for the security of regional friends. To focus entirely on one’s own security, and to give primacy to what is politically expedient, is to repeat the very mistakes of past U.S. policy that inadvertently gave rise to the scourge of jihadist transnational terror.

Let’s be clear: Pakistan and Afghanistan, two artificially created states with no roots in history, constitute the most dangerous region on earth. Additionally, Pakistan is where state-nurtured terrorism and state-reared nuclear smuggling uniquely intersect. Yet Obama’s central objective is not to clean up the mess but to extricate the U.S. from the war in Afghanistan by winning over the bulk of the Taliban, including by pandering to Pakistan, the terrorist procreator and sanctuary provider.

Obama has abandoned the international goal of institution-building in Afghanistan, disparagingly equating it with nation-building. In place of creating a unified, stable, democratic Afghanistan, Obama has defined a short-term mission: “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan”. But given that Al Qaeda already is badly splintered and weakened and in no position to openly challenge U.S. interests, Obama can declare ‘mission accomplished’ any time he wants. As the latest Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community presented to a Senate committee on February 12 admits, “Because of the pressure we and our allies have put on Al Qaida’s core leadership in Pakistan … Al Qaeda today is less capable and effective than it was a year ago”.

Obama’s lowering of the bar is to facilitate an end to U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan much before he comes up for re-election. And his playing up the threat from Al Qaeda — whose remnants are holed up in mountain caves — helps create room to negotiate a political deal with the more-formidable Taliban.

In what passes for grand strategy, Obama’s plan, in theory, clubs Pakistan (with its militant safe havens) and Afghanistan in a single theatre of operation. But in practice, it follows opposite tracks: Showering billions of dollars in additional aid on Pakistan and promising not to deploy troops there, while stepping up military operations in Afghanistan to force the Taliban to the negotiating table. It is good though that he wants to build up the size and strength of the Afghan national army — the only institution he has named. But that is to facilitate a U.S. military exit.

To make his plan more presentable, Obama proclaimed “benchmarks and metrics to measure our performance and that of our allies” — Islamabad and Kabul. Yet he shied away from defining the benchmarks or explaining how the stepped-up aid flow to Islamabad will be calibrated to meeting them. As he acknowledged, the benchmarks are yet to be developed by his team, in concert with Congress.

The blunt truth is that by unveiling new rewards for Pakistan upfront, in the form of a quantum jump in aid — even as Washington admits that Islamabad has misused past aid — Obama has undercut his benchmark-setting endeavour. The talk of new “benchmarks and metrics” thus is just public relations to market what otherwise would have been a difficult decision to justify — the tripling of non-military aid to renegade Pakistan while maintaining the existing munificent level of military assistance.

The way to bring a near-bankrupt Pakistan to heel is to threaten suspension of all bilateral and multilateral aid flow — a threat that will have a lightening effect. Yet, Obama first unveils new goodies and then expects the Pakistani intelligence to stop underwriting the Taliban. (He has still to name Lashkar-e-Taiba and other Pakistan-based terror groups that serve as proxies against India.) At a time when Pakistan is most vulnerable to international pressure, including to a threat to place it on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terror, Obama is reluctant to exercise leverage, proposing instead the largest-ever annual U.S. aid flow to that country. Before long, more lethal, directed-at-India U.S. weapons also will flow to Islamabad — “like whiskey to an alcoholic”, to quote the Indian foreign secretary.

America and India must embed counterterrorism cooperation in an institutional framework so that their collaboration over the Pakistan-scripted Mumbai terror strikes does not prove a one-shot affair. But can such an institutional process be built if America both disregards the interests of India — already bearing the brunt of the blowback from past failed U.S. policies — and continues to heap rewards on Pakistan without so much as helping to bring the Mumbai-attack planners to justice? Kashmir’s exclusion from Obama’s plan was inevitable, given that Washington’s priority is to reduce its load, not to add more. But having devised his hallucinatory loop of delusion without detailed consultations with India, Obama now wants to co-opt New Delhi in the plan’s implementation, especially by persuading it to emulate his kid-gloves treatment of Pakistan.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=HomePage&id=22084576-ed5b-4623-8a52-b028fdc6807b&Headline=Fobbing+off+the+burden

Stop the Faustian Bargain

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

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindustan Times, February 25, 2009

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

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

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

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

The scourge of transnational terrorism cannot be stemmed if attempts are made to draw distinctions between good and bad terrorists, and between those who threaten their security and those who threaten ours.  But, unfortunately, that is what the Obama administration is itching to do, first by drawing a specious distinction between Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and then seeking to illusorily differentiate between ‘moderate’ Taliban (the good terrorists) and those that rebuff deal-making (the bad terrorists).

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brahma Chellaney  is a strategic affairs specialist.

Foil the terror war

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

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, February 18, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

The Threat is Common

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, February 6, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.