Employ other options

It is still not too late for India to fundamentally change tack in order to make Pakistan verifiably dismantle its military-nurtured terror complex.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, January 28, 2009

Ever since
the Pakistani-scripted Mumbai terrorist assaults, it was clear that diplomacy alone
would not make Pakistan
sever its ties with terror groups, especially if it were not backed by forceful
pressure. Yet New Delhi
chose to fire only empty rhetoric. The external affairs minister has now admitted
that Pakistan remains “in a
state of denial”, while the home minister has characterized Islamabad’s response as: “Zero. What have
they provided? Nothing”.

More than
two months after the attacks, India’s
options are rapidly shrinking. A Rand Corporation report, raising the spectre
of more Mumbai-style carnages, warns: “Pakistan
has likely concluded from the events since the December 2001 attack on the
Indian parliament complex and prior, that India
is unable or unwilling to mount a serious effort to punish and deter Pakistan for
these attacks. Accordingly, from India’s vantage point, to not
respond would signal a lack of Indian resolve or capability”. It is still not too late for India to change
tack. 

Let’s be
clear on two key aspects. First, it is naïve to contend that the only
alternative to the present inaction is war. Between these two extremes lie a
hundred different political, economic and diplomatic options — none of which New Delhi has exercised. It
has, for example, not recalled its high commissioner from Islamabad, or suspended the composite
dialogue process, or disbanded the farcical joint anti-terror mechanism, or halted
state-assisted cultural and sporting links, or invoked trade sanctions.

Furthermore, despite the Inter-Services Intelligence
agency’s direct involvement in the Indian Embassy bombing in Kabul
last July and indirect role in the more-recent Mumbai attacks, New
Delhi has neither declared nor urged the U.S. to designate the ISI as a
terrorist organization. Yet by New Delhi’s own account, that rogue Pakistani
agency has a long history of plotting and executing terrorist attacks in India,
including the 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai which killed hundreds of people and the 2006 Mumbai train bombings that left
more than 200 dead. India’s
commercial capital has been repeatedly targeted to undermine the country’s
rising economic power.

New
Delhi
actually has shied away from taking even the smallest of small steps as a
symbolic expression of India’s
outrage. Such glaring inaction does not jibe with the prime minister’s thesis that
“some Pakistani official agencies must have supported” the Mumbai attacks. Nor
does it square with the popular expectation that the attacks would be a tipping
point in India’s
forbearance with Pakistan-fomented terrorism.

Second, even
in the military realm, India
has more than one option against Pakistan. Contrary to the
simplistic belief, there isn’t just one military option — waging war. Mounting
a military attack is at one end of the spectrum and, obviously, can be the
option of only last resort. India
ought to look at a military option that falls short of war. 

Often in
interstate relations, as history testifies, a credible threat to use force can
achieve objectives that actual use of force may not help accomplish. But for a
threat of force to deliver desired results, it has to be realistic, sustained
and ceaseless until the adversary has demonstrably conformed to international
norms and rules. Mounting such a threat entails full-scale force mobilization
so that the adversary realizes it will face a decisive military onslaught
unless it complies with the demands. But there can be no credible threat if the
adversary believes — as it did during India’s botched Operation Parakram
in 2002 — that the threat is not backed by the requisite political will to
carry it out.

Furthermore,
given that a credible threat of force demands war-like simulation, the strategy
brought into play has to replicate war scenarios. As modern history attests, the
outcome of any war is crucially shaped by elements other than the
sophistication and range of weaponry. The single most-important factor is
strategy. War can be won by taking an enemy by surprise, or by punching through
a front that the adversary didn’t expect to be the focal point of attack, or
other flanking manoeuvres. 

There will
be little surprise element in the present circumstances, given that an all-out troop
mobilization will become known. But the second element — keeping the enemy on
tenterhooks as to which front may be chosen for the principal onslaught — can
be ensured through offensive military deployments along the entire length of India’s border with Pakistan.

Such a
strategy, if sustained and backed by political resolve to go the whole hog if
necessary, will put unbearable pressure on Pakistan at a time when that state
is in dire straits financially, with its solvency in question and political
authority fragmented. Moreover, the snow-blocked Himalayan mountain-passes
foreclose the possibility of China
opening another front to relieve Indian military pressure on its “all-weather”
ally.

Pakistan has never been more vulnerable to
coercive pressure than today. The deployment of battle-ready Indian forces
along the entire border will force Pakistan to follow suit. Such
mobilization will cost it millions of dollars daily. It will bleed Pakistan at a
time when it is already seeking international credit extending beyond the recent
$7.6 billion IMF bailout package. Bankrupting Pakistan, in any event, has to be
part and parcel of the Indian strategy.

With full
force mobilization in place and the armoured corps ready to punch through
Pakistani defences at multiple points, India
would be well-positioned to ratchet up political, economic and diplomatic
pressures on Pakistan and
get the U.S. and others to
lean on Islamabad.
For India to de-escalate, Pakistan would have to verifiably and
irreversibly dismantle its military-run terror complex and hand over to India
top-ranking terrorist figures. This would be an operation intended to compel Pakistan
to come clean, no matter what it takes.

Make no
mistake: Non-military pressures will not work because Pakistan is a
militarized state, even if a failing one. With the Obama administration set to
prop up Pakistan by tripling non-military aid to it while maintaining the
existing military-aid flow, albeit with conditions tied to Pakistani
cooperation on the Afghan front, India has to stop offshoring its Pakistan
policy. Without a credible Indian threat of force, Pakistan, far from dismantling its terrorist
infrastructure, will continue to prevaricate over the identity of the 10 Mumbai
attackers and not bring to justice all the planners of those strikes, making
more Mumbai-style terrorist rampages certain.

More than
six decades after its creation, Pakistan has not only failed to emerge as a
normal nation, but actually lapsed into a de facto failed state by Westphalian
standards, with the line between state and non-state actors blurred and the
tail (the military establishment) wagging the dog (the state). It has become
what its founder had feared: A truly “moth-eaten” state. It is the world’s
Terroristan rolled into an Anarchistan. Keeping such a state intact will pose
very serious challenges to regional and international security.

Rather than
leave an ungovernable Pakistan
and a wild Afghanistan
as festering threats to global security, the time has come to think bold about
a new political order in the Hindu-Kush region. To fix Afghanistan, as the previous U.S. national security adviser said just before
demitting office, we need to first “solve Pakistan”. To help Pakistan
self-destruct, it has become imperative to do what Ronald Reagan did to the
Soviet Union — make it broke — while cashing in on its deep internal
fault-lines.  

(c) Asian Age, 2009.

Words are all we have

While Pakistan is guilty of sponsoring terror, India’s leadership is guilty of encouraging terror and making the country an easy prey

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, December 31, 2008

On the ninth anniversary of India’s Kandahar capitulation, it is evident that its costs continue to multiply. That cave-in set in motion a seemingly inexorable dual process — making India an easy prey for transnational terrorists, and the further softening of the Indian republic. Today, India has the dubious global distinction of suffering the largest number of terrorism-related casualties. Yet, far from waging its own war on terror, it is more interested in collecting evidence on Pakistan’s complicity while obsessively craving international sympathy as a victim.

Such a masochist approach raises troubling questions. Are they no limits to India’s patience in the face of increasingly provocative transnational terrorism? How much further can India be assaulted and terrorized before it finally concludes enough is enough? Or is it that the more terrorism it suffers, the greater becomes its capacity to absorb strikes? The 12/13 Parliament attack was supposed to be India’s 9/11. Now it is the 11/26 Mumbai assaults. That is, before a new set of terrorists again expose the Indian leadership’s cravenness.

Strategically, India’s imperative not to brook the latest terrorist assaults but to respond effectively parallels America’s post-9/11 attitude. Non-stop live television coverage of the 67-hour strikes has created not only an upsurge of patriotic revulsion and national unity, but also a propitious international setting for Indian counteraction. The providential capture of one fidayeen attacker alive helped unravel the Pakistani-scripted plot. Yet, having offshored India’s Pakistan policy, the aging leadership is throwing away a golden opportunity that won’t repeat itself.

The December 12 Parliament resolution on terrorism thus will go the way the Parliament resolutions of 1962 and 1994 on Chinese and Pakistani territorial aggression did — as mere words. The latest resolution, in any case, is long on rhetoric. The terrorists and their patrons certainly will not be taken in by words that palpably ring hallow by spelling out no action, yet smugly declare India will be “victorious in its fight against the barbaric menace of terrorism”.

All talk and no action bleeds India. Punitive military action, of course, is at the top rung of the strategic ladder — a daunting choice tied to good timing so that the adversary is taken unawares and snow-blocked Himalayan mountain-passes bar China from opening another front. But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh thus far has not taken the smallest of small steps against the terrorists’ haven, Pakistan. By shying away from invoking the mildest diplomatic or economic sanctions as a token expression of India’s outrage, he has capped India’s response at impotent fury. Instead, Singh bafflingly expects — and indeed urges — the international community to deal “sternly and effectively with the epicentre of terrorism”.

Israel’s heavy response to however small a provocation and India’s non-response to frontal attacks on its security and honour make these countries polar-opposites. Still, as the international reaction to Mumbai and Gaza illustrates, it is the meek that get counselled while the intrepid wage action unhindered.

While Atal Bihari Vajpayee took India on a roller-coaster ride with an ever-shifting policy on Pakistan and terror, under Singh the chickens have come home to roost. Vajpayee’s blunders — of which Kandahar remains a bleeding shame — have been more than matched by Singh’s bungles, including his surprise action on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 in declaring the sponsor of terror, Pakistan, as a victim of terror like India. To consummate that policy somersault, he established a still-existing joint anti-terror mechanism — a case of unforgettable naïveté, akin to police setting up joint investigations with the mafia.

The advent of fidayeen attacks happened under Vajpayee. The manner Vajpayee fought the Kargil War — entirely on Indian territory, on the enemy’s terms — emboldened the invading state to launch fidayeen terrorism no sooner than that conflict had started winding down. Kargil was followed by Kandahar, after which terrorism morphed from hit-and-run strikes to daring assaults on military camps, major religious sites and national emblems of power. But under Singh, suicide attacks have qualitatively escalated to such an extent that India has come under a terrorist siege.

Singh now has his own buddy in place of the home minister who was eased out as a scapegoat. Singh expects P. Chidambaram to bring down terrorism the way he brought stock prices crashing down. The new incumbent has told Parliament: “We have to take hard decisions”. But since Chidambaram has announced no hard decision thus far, citizens may wonder whether he too is looking to the international community.

Let’s be clear: Had India’s leaders not ignored institutionalized policymaking in favour of an ad hoc, personality-driven approach, not repeated the very mistakes of their predecessors and not insisted on learning on the job, the terrorism problem would not have become so acute. In the manner a fish rots from the head down, the rot in India is at the leadership level.

Just the way Pakistan goes through the motions of cracking down on its terror groups, New Delhi responds to each terrorist strike in a perfunctory or mechanical way, without commitment or resolve. And just as Pakistan has a track record of easing up on its terror groups when the spotlight is off, India’s leaders (dubbed “state non-actors”) go back to business as usual no sooner than a terrorist attack has begun to fade from public attention.

While Pakistan is guilty of sponsoring terror, India’s leadership is guilty of encouraging terror and making the country an easy prey. Make no mistake: If Pakistan is to dismantle its state-reared terror complex, India’s leaders will have to first dismantle their terror-emboldening outlook.

(c) Hindustan Times.

Defensive measures alone won’t suffice

Terrorism 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. An excess emphasis on defensive measures would only play into the terrorists’ designs to instil a siege mentality.

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, December 20, 2008

For nearly a millennium, India was repeatedly invaded, raped and subjugated by those who came primarily to plunder its wealth, with some staying on to rule by conquest. Now again, raiders from the northwest are repeatedly assaulting India, not to cart away its riches but to undermine its rising economic strength after a long historical period of humiliation. That is why India’s commercial capital has been repeatedly attacked by the raiders, who have chosen their targets there carefully — from the stock exchange and financial institutions in 1993 and city trains in 2006 to its landmark luxury hotels in 2008.

That India is an island of stability, economic growth and democratic empowerment in a sea of turbulence stretching from Jordan to Malaysia also makes it a magnet for terrorists from a particular quasi-failed state that seems intent on taking India down with it as it sinks. Such is the tyranny of geography that India is wedged in an arc of failing or authoritarian states that try, in different ways, to undermine its secular, multiethnic, pluralistic character.

Pakistan-based jihadist groups are now carrying out increasingly daring assaults deep across the border. Compounding that threat is the fact that Pakistan is not a normal state but the world’s Terroristan. For the foreseeable future, it will remain the epicentre of global terrorism, with India bearing the brunt.

The big question thus is whether India will keep running to the U.S. for help and sympathy after each terror attack or — despite a growing congruence of Indo-American interests — wage its own fight in a credible, coherent and deterrent fashion. India has been too interested in collecting and presenting evidence of Pakistan’s terror links to the outside world than in initiating its own steps to effectively combat terrorism.

Stemming terrorism demands at least four different elements — a well-thought-out strategy, effective state instruments to implement that strategy, a credible legal framework to speedily bring terrorists to justice, and unflinching political resolve to stay the course. India, unfortunately, is deficient on all four.

It has no published counter-terror doctrine. Furthermore, not only is there no political will, the Indian system has also become so effete that the state instruments are unable to deliver results even on the odd occasion when the leadership displays a spine to act. Nowhere is India’s frailty more apparent today than on internal security, which historically has been its Achilles heel.

If the government did one thing right during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, it was to stick to its newly declared doctrine foreswearing negotiations with hostage-takers. By ordering commando assaults on the terrorists holed up in Mumbai’s two luxury hotels and Jewish Centre, the government denied them and their sponsors the opportunity to help focus international spotlight on a plethora of demands — from the release of “mujahideen” from Indian jails to some Kashmir-related ultimatum. That commendable decision, more importantly, spared the country the humiliation of being held hostage for days on end.

The frontal commando storming of the besieged sites took the terrorists by surprise and forced them to defend themselves, thus helping limit the number of fatalities. Otherwise, the four terrorists in the Taj hotel, for example, would have killed far more than the 32 people they did, many in the initial minutes of their attack. Despite the considerable and extended investments that went into training the attackers, including in imparting military-style amphibious assault skills, the terrorist operation did not go as well as had been plotted by the Pakistan-based masterminds. The capture alive of one of the suicide attackers also helped unravel the plot.

More broadly, one problem is that India is always trying to prevent a repeat of the last attack rather than seeking to forestall the next innovative strike. Almost every major terrorist strike against an Indian target since the 1985 midair bombing of the Air-India Kanishka jetliner has involved novel methodology. The likelihood of a repeat attack by terrorists arriving on inflatable dinghies and striking luxury hotels is thus close to zero. Yet, in a manner akin to closing the barn doors after the horses have bolted, security cordons now ring luxury hotels and resources are being invested in setting up a coastal command.

It is the refusal to think ahead and try and anticipate how and where terrorists would strike next that results in India being taken by surprise again and again. The aim should be to stay at least a few steps ahead of the terrorists, rather than to prevent the last type of attack through beefed-up security. Heavy security at hotels, railway stations, high-rise buildings, malls, etc. will still leave open other targets for innovative terrorist strikes but help portray the country as beleaguered.

Make no mistake: Improved maritime patrols, better police training and preparedness, a new federal agency for investigations, regional commando commands and intelligence revamp — although necessary — are all defensive measures. However well designed and put into practice, such steps by themselves cannot stop terrorist strikes. Yet, in the aftermath of the Mumbai strikes, the government is overly focusing on such defensive mechanisms.

The proposed National Investigative Agency and a strengthened Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act seek to plug some glaring weaknesses. But in a country where, despite the rising incidence of terrorism, not a single terror-related case has been successfully prosecuted in many years other than the one involving the attack on Parliament, the setting up of a new agency can hardly bring much cheer. Also, it doesn’t show India’s leaders in good light that more than 15 years after investigators established clear links between Dawood Ibrahim and the 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai, they do little more than periodically complain that he remains ensconced in Pakistan.

Worse, terrorism has been treated as a law-and-order issue requiring more policing, training and hardware. To regard terrorism as a law-and-order problem is to do what the terrorists want — to sap your strength. No amount of security can stop terrorism if the nation is reluctant to go after terrorist cells and networks and those that harbour extremists.

Against an invisible enemy, defensive mechanisms can only have limited utility. To stay a sitting duck against the sly, murderous extremists is to risk not only the lives of innocent people, but also political and psychological damage to the national psyche.

Defensive measures, in any event, can be meaningful only if they are accompanied by a proactive component that entails going after the terrorists before they strike. That means, among other things, hounding, disrupting and smashing their cells, networks and safe havens; destroying their local network;, cutting off their funding; and imposing deterrent costs (through overt or covert means) on those that promote, finance or tolerate terrorist activity.

Merely to step up defensive measures and build higher fences and VVIP security is to play into the terrorists’ designs to bring India under a terrorist siege. The more India has been terrorized in recent years, the more it has betrayed a siege mentality. Every time India is tested by terror, it characteristically responds by talking tough but doing nothing — the trait of a battered victim.

For India, terrorism is an existential battle that will determine whether it stays a free, secular, united state. India’s counteraction has to be at multiple levels: domestic policy (formulating a credible counter-terror strategy); legal (forming a political consensus in support of special laws that carry adequate safeguards); law enforcement (identifying and destroying terrorist sleeper cells in cities); intelligence (building assets so as to operate behind “enemy” lines and target a particular car, cell or haven at an opportune moment); strategic (keeping terrorist patrons on tenterhooks); deterrent (imposing calibrated costs on the masterminds); and public relations. It is odd, for example, that sections of the foreign media continue to misleadingly label the predominantly Punjabi, "global jihad"-spouting Laskar-e-Taiba as a “Kashmiri separatist group” without New Delhi mounting any effort to make such news organizations face up to simple facts.

Against external sponsors of terror, a range of discreet options are available to India, including diplomatic, economic and political. Between the two extremes — inaction and military action — lie a hundred different options. These are options that no nation discusses in public. Rather they must be weighed in private and exercised quietly.

The key point is that terrorism cannot be fought as a law-and-order problem. The only way to stem that scourge is to develop a concerted, comprehensive approach that blends different elements into a single, pointed, sustained campaign. To fight the unconventional war being waged against it, India perforce needs to employ a range of unconventional tools to strike at the heart of terrorist networks and disrupt their cohesion, operational capacity and logistic support.

The writer is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

(c) Copyright 2000 – 2008 The Hindu

Attack, then demand bribes

The Indian leadership’s naïveté is more than matched by the rascality of the Pakistani military establishment, which demands a bribe for every move on its part — generous US aid flow to help rein in the Taliban, and a Kashmir resolution to sever its institutional support to India-directed terrorism.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, December 17, 2008

 “Terrorists are still coming in from Pakistan”, India’s lumbering external affairs minister lamented in Parliament last week. India can be sure terrorists will keep arriving from across the borders, emboldened as they and their patrons would be from New Delhi’s pusillanimity in not taking the smallest of small steps against Pakistan even as a token expression of India’s outrage over the Mumbai assaults by 10 terrorists — all from Pakistan’s Punjab province.

After every major terrorist assault, India can expect — as has been the case since the Mumbai attacks — visits by high-ranking public figures from overseas who will offer loads of sympathy, heartily pat the septuagenarians and octogenarians governing India for their restraint, and then peddle their eclectic wares — from seeking access for their police to investigate terrorist strikes in India and question arrested suspects, to urging New Delhi to use the latest tragedy to resolve the Kashmir issue with Pakistan.

The visitors are not stupid not to know that cross-border terrorism would not end even if India were to offer Kashmir on a platter to Pakistan. After all, the self-declared mission of the Lashkar-e-Taiba — still actively aided by the Pakistani intelligence — is “global jihad”, with the specific goal to set up a caliphate across southern, central and southeastern Asia. And as was shown by the 1999 Kargil invasion, when Pakistani Army regulars encroached masquerading as “mujahideen”, a thin line can separate the military establishment from its pet terror groups.

India’s becoming an easy prey for terrorists is linked not to the Kashmir issue but to its effete leadership, which won’t impose any costs on the sponsors of terror, yet unabashedly appeals to other states to fight India’s war on terrorism. Unable to think and act strategically, the leadership has helped turn India into a classic lamb state that can be continually gored without fear of retribution. Tellingly, if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has made any vow after Mumbai, it is — to quote his words in Parliament — “to galvanize the international community into dealing sternly and effectively with the epicentre of terrorism which is located in Pakistan”.

Making the most of such bloated Indian expectations, the visiting dignitaries seek to push their countries’ own geopolitical agendas, centred on narrow tactical considerations than on a larger strategy to deracinate Pakistan’s jihad culture. In being guided by politically expedient considerations, however, they play right into the hands of the extortionist Pakistani military and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

At the crux of the problem are the bribes the Pakistani military establishment openly seeks from the international community for any move on its part:

·         To help rein in the Taliban — which it continues to bolster while pretending to be an ally in the US-led war on terror — it demands generous US military aid, although it has already diverted (according to American admissions) much of the received assistance to beef up forces against India.

·         To sever its institutional support to India-directed terror groups, it demands a resolution — to its satisfaction — of the intractable and unsolvable Kashmir dispute.

·         Having stunted nation-building and turned Pakistan into the world’s Problemistan, it now warns the Pakistani state would implode unless the US continues its aid flow, totalling nearly $2 billion a year.

·         To patrol Pakistan’s own border with Afghanistan, it demands — and gets — a special US payment of around $100 million a month.

·         It scripts terror attacks in India and then immediately spotlights the Kashmir issue. The Mumbai attackers could have learned their amphibious assault skills only from military handlers, not non-state actors. Yet, shortly after the Mumbai assaults, Pakistan told the UN Security Council that, “The best outcome of the tragedy would be the resolution of the issue of Kashmir”.

Given the ruthlessness with which the military-style terrorist assaults were executed, the capture of one supposed suicide attacker alive and the relatively moderate death toll of 32 in the Taj Mahal Hotel and 33 in Oberoi-Trident (more civilians died at a major train station than at either of the two besieged hotels) indicate the operation did not go the way it had been planned by the masterminds in Pakistan. Had New Delhi not ordered the commando storming but gone in for negotiations, the four terrorists in the Taj and the two each at the Oberoi-Trident and the Jewish Centre would have held India hostage for days on end while putting the international spotlight on a plethora of demands — from Kashmir to jailed terrorists in India.

The real issue is not Kashmir but the Pakistani military, which, after six decades of direct and indirect rule, has become too fat to return to the barracks. Indeed, it won’t fit in the barracks. To retain its power and prerogative in society, the military needs the India-threat bogey. The military genuinely believes that a Pakistan stripped of its core cementing element — eternal enmity with India — would be reduced to a battlefield for its five feuding ethnic groups. It has thus kept alive the Kashmir issue.

Had India been an irredentist state, seeking to reclaim the Kashmir territories now held by Pakistan (35 per cent) and China (20 per cent), the Pakistani military may have been justified in projecting an India threat. But India is for maintaining the territorial status quo — a position not acceptable to the Pakistani military, which over the years has sought to change the status quo through open war and now unconventional conflict.

In recent years, India has worked with Pakistan to create a virtually borderless Kashmir to help facilitate the free movement of people, goods and services. New transportation links have been established as a first step. Given that Kashmir’s division into Indian, Pakistani and Chinese parts cannot be undone, what does a “resolution” of the Kashmir dispute entail beyond such steps?

The blunt truth is that Kashmir is not the cause but the symbol of India-Pakistan differences, which are rooted in history and the politics of revenge, besides epitomizing competing worldviews and a divide along civilizational fault lines.  As General Pervez Musharraf candidly put it in a 1999 speech, Pakistan’s low-intensity war with India would continue even if the Kashmir issue were magically resolved. The military for long has fancied India’s Balkanization as Pakistan’s salvation.

The way out of this situation is for the US, Britain and others to help empower Pakistan’s civilian government, which today is neither in charge of the country’s national-security apparatus nor in a position to stop the Army’s meddling in foreign policy. To pressure the victim, India, to pander to the Pakistani military’s insatiable demands on Kashmir is to promote greater roguishness and to overlook the fact that the Pakistani Army is waging a mortal combat with the Indian republic.

But why blame international figures when India’s own leaders fail to grasp the nature of the mortal combat? India’s leadership deficit is manifest from the innocent pleas to Pakistan, including the extradition of 42 fugitives and the dismantlement of the state-run terrorist infrastructure.

Which Pakistan is going to do that? The powerless civilian government? The Janus-faced military establishment? Did the latter set up the terror complex to wage a war of a thousand cuts against India or to dismantle it at the enemy’s bidding? If they really wish to bring that establishment to heel, what costs are India’s leaders ready to impose?

(c) The Asian Age, 2008.

Television footage of the landmark Taj Mahal Hotel in flames and a 24-hour gun battle inside Mumbai’s other renowned hotel, the Trident-Oberoi, may have sent shivers down the spines of international investors and tourists, but it also laid bare the new face of terror. The brazen Mumbai terrorist assaults, which bear the hallmarks of Al Qaeda, are just the latest example of how the world’s largest democracy is increasingly coming under siege from the forces of terror. They also serve as a reminder to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama that even as he seeks to deal with the financial meltdown, the global war on terror stands derailed, with the scourge of terrorism having spread deeper and wider.

International terrorism threatens the very existence of democratic, secular states. Yet the U.S. occupation of Iraq not only helped fracture the post-9/11 global consensus to fight terror, but also handed a fresh cause to Islamists and gave a new lease of life to Al Qaeda. The Obama administration will need to bring the anti-terror war back on course by building a new international consensus and focusing on rooting out terrorist sanctuaries in the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt, the epicenter of international terror.

It will, of course, require a sustained international campaign to eliminate the forces of jihad that pursue violence as a sanctified tool of religion and a path to redemption. The challenge is also broad: The entire expanse from the Middle East to Southeast Asia is home to Islamist groups and troubled by terrorist violence, posing a serious challenge to international and regional security.

But as the Mumbai strikes show, India–because of its location next to the Pak-Afghan belt and its eyesore status for jihadists as the only real democratic, secular state in the arc stretching from Jordan to Malaysia–will stay on the frontline of the fight against global terror. To unravel the Indian republic, the jihadists have sought to undermine its rising economic strength by repeatedly making its financial capital their target since 1993, choosing to carry out their latest strikes at a time when foreigners already have been heavy sellers of Indian equities, and Obama is inheriting problems of historic proportions.

The question India needs to ask itself is: Why has it turned into a laboratory for international terrorists, who try out new techniques against Indian targets before seeking to replicate them in other pluralistic states? Innovative strikes carried out against Indian targets first and then perpetrated in the West include attacks on symbols of state authority, midair bombing of a commercial jetliner and coordinated strikes on a city transportation system. Now, the jihadists have innovatively carried out a series of horrific assaults in Mumbai that are not only unmatched in scale and daring since 9/11, but also set up a model for imitation elsewhere.

What India needs is a credible counterterror campaign. But what its harried citizens get after each major terrorist attack are stock platitudes, such as a commitment to defeat the designs of terrorist forces. Empty rhetoric is eating into the vitals of internal security. Indeed, after the government’s ritual condemnation of each attack and the standard promise to defeat terror, India puts the strikes behind it and goes back to what now defines it–partisan politics and scandal. That is, until terror strikes again. Worse, the fight against terror has been increasingly politicized and got linked to communal, electoral and vote-bank considerations.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the privately-funded Center for Policy Research, New Delhi.

http://www.forbes.com/home/2008/11/27/india-mumbai-terrorism-oped-cx_bc_1127chellaney.html

A Question of Survival

Brahma Chellaney

India Today, November 17, 2008

The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power

Tariq Ali

London: Simon & Schuster £12.99

At a time when Pakistan is sinking, with its economy tottering on the brink of bankruptcy and its Talibanization spreading, the book raises fundamental questions about that country’s direction. The London-based Tariq Ali is anything but optimistic about Pakistan’s ability to come to grips with its existential challenges. Ali’s first Pakistan book had prophetically predicted the country’s break-up just two years before East Pakistan seceded. His second study, published during General Zial ul-Haq’s dictatorial rule, was titled, “Can Pakistan Survive?”, a question provocative enough to prompt Islamabad to do what it did with his first book — ban it. Now, in his third book, Ali raises the tantalizing question whether Pakistan can be “recycled”. By that he means whether there could be a social and political revival in “a land of perpetual dictatorships and corrupt politicians”.

            More than six decades after it was created, Pakistan remains in search of a national identity. The questions about its future indeed have become more pressing, with many wondering whether it will be able to pull back from the brink. Between Ali’s second and third Pakistan books, the country has gone from being a regional concern to being a threat to international security. Today, Pakistan is disparaged as “Problemistan”, “Terroristan” and “Al Qaidastan”, with outgoing U.S. President George W. Bush calling it “wilder than the Wild West”. By setting up state-run terrorist complexes, Pakistan became its own enemy — and victim. The military’s domination of the country — which Ali repeatedly brings out — has been shaken but not shrunk with the installation of a civilian government following elections that the author says “were cautiously rigged to deny any single party an overall majority”.

            The book, however, is largely about America’s long-standing interventionist role in Pakistan that has helped create, according to Ali, a “U.S.-backed politico-military elite” out of sync with the masses. His thesis is that Pakistan’s problems today “are a direct result of doing Washington’s bidding in previous decades”. To be sure, a succession of U.S. presidents, giving primacy to narrow, short-term geopolitical interests, have helped fatten the very institution that constitutes the core problem — the Pakistan military. Because the U.S. is distant, they thought the fallout of their policies would be largely confined to the region. Then came the blowback from 9/11 and the subsequent events — a reminder that U.S. policy would reap what it had sowed. But has U.S. policy learned anything? As Ali reminds his readers, the U.S.-brokered deal with Benazir Bhutto was really designed to help the despotic Pervez Musharraf stay on as president. The continuing supply of offensive, India-directed weapon systems shows that U.S. policy remains wedded to the Pakistani military because it employs Pakistan as a gateway to combat operations in Afghanistan, a potential base against Iran and a vehicle for other geopolitical objectives.

            But can all of Pakistan’s ills be blamed on U.S. policy? The book is less clear on that score. In its 61-year history, Pakistan has already had four military takeovers and four Constitutions. Benazir’s murder was a horrific reminder that unravelling Pakistan’s jihad culture won’t be easy but is essential. Neither the war on international terror can be won nor Afghanistan be pacified without de-radicalizing Pakistani society and truly democratizing its polity. Ali argues Pakistan needs to break free from U.S. “satrapy”. But the next U.S. president is likely to pursue a more-activist Pakistan policy. Political expediency will continue to guide U.S. policy, not long-term considerations. For example, Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus wants to do in Afghanistan what he has showcased in Iraq — buy up tribal warlords and insurgent leaders. Disregarding the fact that the Taliban ideology poses a bigger long-term threat than even Al Qaeda, Petraeus has said he is looking for ways to negotiate with and co-opt local Taliban chieftains. India will be left to bear the brunt of an enduringly Talibanized Pakistan and Afghanistan.

            Ali, as a gutsy, forthright writer, has written an engrossing account of Pakistan’s travails since birth. The book’s main failing is its poor structure, with some sections disjointed and arguments rambling. Besides better editing, it could have benefited from fact-checking to eliminate mistakes like the “1959 India-China war”. Yet, this book will rank as one of the most-objective accounts of Pakistan’s troubled history.

The Road to Terroristan

Brahma Chellaney, India Today, July 31, 2008

Descent Into Chaos

Ahmed Rashid

(Allen Lane)

This book is more about Pakistan’s tumble into chaos than about Afghanistan’s continuing bedlam. Central Asia appears only in passing, despite its subtitle, “How the War Against Islamic Extremism is Being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia”. Written in the narrative style of a reporter, the book recounts the events and actions that have earned Pakistan disparaging labels like “Problemistan”, “Terroristan” and “Al Qaidastan” — epithets that underline its potential threat to global security.

Jihad culture is now deeply woven into Pakistan’s national fabric. Unravelling it won’t be easy. But it is essential for regional and global security. Pakistan remains a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terrorism. India has officially blamed “elements in Pakistan” for the deadly bombing at its embassy in Kabul.

The book is well-timed, with growing recognition among U.S. analysts of the need for a broader, post-Iraq focus on Pakistan and Afghanistan — a theme central to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s foreign-policy agenda. The book indeed is a trenchant compendium of the Bush administration’s blunders that have undermined the global war on terror and helped fan Islamic extremism. Its author is well-known for a previous, equally well-timed book on the Taliban, published just before 9/11.

Rashid, one of Pakistan’s most-respected journalists, has an unusual background: As a youth, he spent 10 years as a guerrilla fighter and underground revolutionary in the hills of Baluchistan. When the April 1978 Marxist coup occurred in Afghanistan, Rashid was living in exile in Kabul. His mutinous credentials and Afghan links subsequently helped him as a writer to gain access to the Taliban.

Rashid’s objectivity stands out in his latest book. He is unsparingly critical of the Bush administration’s indulgent approach toward Pervez Musharraf in the years the general ran a one-man dictatorship. While then Secretary of State Colin Powell “liked Musharraf enormously and had developed a close relationship with him”, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was reluctant to “put pressure on Pakistan”. Such lenience spilled over into President Bush’s second term, according to Rashid, even as the Pakistan military and its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency aided and abetted the Taliban and the Islamist groups waging a terror campaign against India. The 2003 Iraq invasion only helped derail the war on terror. “Ultimately the strategies of the Bush administration have created a far bigger crisis in South and Central Asia than existed before 9/11”, Rashid writes. “There are more failing states in the Muslim world, while Al Qaeda has expanded around the world”.

Hobbled by a domineering military, militant Islam, endemic corruption and dependency on foreign aid, Pakistan remains a main breeding ground of global terror and the likely hideout of the most wanted terrorists, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri. Yet, as Rashid says, “the Taliban are now expanding in Pakistan much faster than anyone could have imagined”. Pakistan’s success in meeting its central challenge — to move away from militarism and extremism, and toward a stable, moderate state — hinges on “the army and the ISI being pressured or persuaded to give up their twisted logic of insecurity, national pride and expansion in the region, [so as] to help sort out the country’s problems, and to be good friends to Pakistan’s neighbours, instead of constantly trying to undermine them. The army’s insecurity, which since 1947 has essentially bred a covert policy of undermining neighbours, has now come full circle, for Pakistan’s very future is at stake as extremists threaten to undermine Pakistan itself”. 

While such writings clearly do not sit well with the military establishment, with the author disclosing that he was once summoned by Musharraf and warned to stop writing about the ISI’s continuing assistance to the Afghan Taliban, Rashid at times is unable to rise above Pakistani prejudices against India in his book, alleging for example “the systematic use of rape as a weapon of terror by Indian soldiers” in Kashmir. He also equates Indian intelligence with the ISI in waging “a non-stop proxy war”.

The book’s main weakness, however, is that it is neither investigative nor scholarly but mainly a collation of events of recent years, up to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. The author narrates some events at length but other equally significant developments are inexplicably ignored or under reported. For instance, he dismisses the Kargil War in one sentence but spends several pages on the highjacking of Flight IC-814. Still, the book overall is good and worth reading. It rightly argues that without elimination of Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, Afghanistan cannot be pacified.