Brahma Chellaney
The Economic Times, May 24, 2011

Pakistan, the world’s leading terror sponsor and haven, loves to calls itself a victim of terrorism, with President Asif Ali Zardari going to the extent of saying his country is “perhaps the world’s greatest victim of terrorism.” More than $3.2 billion in annual U.S. aid has not been enough to persuade Pakistan to sever its rogue links with terrorists or slow down its rapidly expanding rogue nuclear-weapons programme. Instead, Pakistan has created a convenient narrative of victimhood at home to help cloak its self-deception.

The terrorist assault on Pakistan’s main naval air base is a chilling reminder that those who play with fire will get burnt and, ultimately, be consumed by fire. The attack was carried out in the coldblooded, professional style taught by Inter-Services Intelligence to its proxies, including those that struck Mumbai in November 2008. Having created a terrorist manual and a sprawling terror infrastructure, the Pakistani military and its spy agency are now reaping a bitter harvest.

The Pakistani Taliban, which staged the attack on the naval base in Karachi, is the illegitimate child, like the Afghan Taliban, of the Pakistani military establishment. The difference is that the Pakistani Taliban has become the principal nemesis of the Pakistani military, whose favourite proxies now are the Afghan Taliban headed by the one-eyed Mullah Omar, Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of the eponymous network aligned with the Afghan Taliban, and Hafiz Saeed and his Laskhar-e-Taiba.

While continuing to provide succour and sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani military has waged offensives in Bajaur, Mohmand, Buner and other tribal districts against the Pakistani Taliban. It was at Pakistan’s instance that a U.S. missile strike killed that group’s chief, Baitullah Mehsud, in August 2009 — a slaying that prompted his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, to orchestrate a suicide bombing of a CIA base in southeast Afghanistan in late 2009 that killed five agency officers and two American contractors.

The more the Pakistani military has gone after the Pakistan Taliban, the more the latter has retaliated against the former, staging daring attacks on Pakistani military and ISI facilities across the country, including on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi in 2009.

More important, these attacks, including the latest, have been aided by elements within the Pakistani military establishment. Without such insider support, the attackers simply would not been able to deeply penetrate the naval air base, easily locate key targets, and systematically wreck installations and aircraft, including two P-3C maritime surveillance planes. The P-3C aircraft, along with Harpoon anti-ship missiles and F-16s, have been supplied by the U.S. to help counterbalance conventional Indian military power.

The insiders’ role highlights a larger concern — the jihadist threat to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons (its “crown jewels”) comes not from non-state actors but from within the jihadist-infiltrated military, nuclear and intelligence establishments. In fact, the more Pakistan has begun to look like a failing state, the more it has accelerated its nuclear-weapons programme.

Nuclear weapons are for deterrence, they are not an answer to failed national-building, which is what Pakistan confronts. Yet Pakistan values nuclear weapons more for their political utility than their military utility.

Let’s be clear: Nuclear weapons have not prevented Pakistan’s slide into a jihadist dungeon. Nor can they stop Pakistan from imploding. Today, the very viability of Pakistan as a nation-state is at stake. In its existing frontiers, Pakistan has proven an ungovernable and unmanageable state.

China and the U.S., however, continue to prop up the Pakistani state in different ways. A reminder of that was the presence at the Karachi naval base of six Americans and 11 Chinese aviation engineers who escaped unharmed during the terrorist assault.

To ensure that the Pakistani state does not unravel, the U.S. has kept sending more money to Islamabad, turning it into the largest recipient of American aid in the world.

China has played a more dubious game. This is best illustrated by its actions in the aftermath of the Osama bin Laden affair, which caught the Pakistani military with pants down. To blunt U.S. pressure on Pakistan and tie down India, it has decided to gift Islamabad a second batch of 50 JF-17 fighter jets and agreed to run Gwadar port, which Pakistan now says will double up as a Chinese-built naval base. After repeated denials by Islamabad and Beijing that the Gwadar project had any military or strategic significance, the mask has finally fallen.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut (Harper, New York) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming).

(c) Economic Times, 2011.

A fundamental shift in the failed U.S. policy approach that has inadvertently turned Pakistan into Ground Zero for global terrorism seems unlikely despite the bin Laden affair.

Brahma Chellaney
The Hindu, May 6, 2011

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

While Americans rejoice over the daring helicopter assault that killed Osama bin Laden in his hideout in Abbottabad — the cradle of the Pakistan army — U.S. policy must recognize how its failed approach on Pakistan has inadvertently made that country Ground Zero for global terrorism. Rather than helping to build robust civilian institutions there, the U.S. has invested heavily in the jihadist-penetrated Pakistani military establishment. After dictator Pervez Musharraf was driven out of office, the new Pakistani civilian government ordered the ISI — the only spy agency in the world charged with sponsoring international terrorism — to report to the interior ministry, but received no support from the U.S. for this effort to assert civilian control, allowing the army to quickly frustrate the move.

No sooner had U.S. President Barack Obama assumed office than he implemented a military surge in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, however, he implemented an aid surge, turning it into the largest recipient of American aid. This only deepened U.S. involvement in the wrong war and emboldened Pakistan to fatten the Afghan Taliban, even as sustained U.S. drone and other attacks in Waziristan continued to severely weaken the already-fragmented Al Qaeda.

Make no mistake: the scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates more from the country’s Scotch whisky-sipping generals than from the bead-rubbing mullahs. It is the self-styled secular generals who have reared the forces of jihad. Yet, by passing the blame for their ongoing terrorist-proxy policy to their mullah puppets, the generals made many in the U.S. believe that the key was to contain the religious fringe, not the puppeteers. In fact, Pakistan’s descent into a jihadist dungeon occurred not under civilian rule, but under two military dictators — Zia ul-Haq who nurtured and let loose jihadist forces, and Musharraf who took his country to the very edge of the precipice.

The bin Laden affair spotlights a fundamental reality — the fight against international terrorism cannot be won without demilitarizing and de-radicalizing Pakistan, including rebalancing civil-military relations there. Without reform of the Pakistani army and the ISI, there can be no end to transnational terrorism — and no genuine nation-building in Pakistan. How can Pakistan be a “normal” state if its army and intelligence agency remain outside civilian oversight and decisive power remains with military generals?

According to classified U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari told U.S. Vice President Joe Biden of his fear that the Pakistani military might “take me out.” And the United Arab Emirates’ foreign minister told U.S. special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke in early 2010 that Zardari had asked “that his family be allowed to live in the UAE in the event of his death.” In such a deviant setting, the risks that jihadists within the military could gain control of Pakistan’s arsenal of nuclear and biological weapons are real.

History attests that decisive opportunities rarely repeat themselves. The U.S. let go of one historic opportunity to help bring the ISI under civilian oversight in July 2008 when, in the aftermath of a dictator’s ouster by people’s power, it did not back the new government’s decision. Now, with the military establishment’s complicity in sheltering bin Laden laid bare, the U.S. has a chance to force reforms on the defensive Pakistani generals by holding out the threat of punitive sanctions and stepped-up drone strikes.

Yet it is very likely the U.S. will miss this opportunity too. After all, what is logical may not be practical at the altar of political expediency.

The U.S. has long been aware of Pakistan’s Janus-faced approach to fighting terrorism, and the discovery of bin Laden’s years-long residence in the shadow of Pakistan’s premier military academy has given Washington fresh evidence of Pakistani duplicity and aroused its anger but without affecting the fundamentals of U.S. policy. That the U.S. has little trust in the Pakistani army and ISI became evident when it deployed a number of CIA operatives, Special Operations forces and contractors deep inside Pakistan without the knowledge of Pakistani authorities — a deployment that triggered the showdown over Raymond Davis but helped open the trail to bin Laden. Indeed, in a damning statement, the CIA director said the Pakistanis were given no advance knowledge of the raid because they might have tipped bin Laden off.

Washington has enough evidence of the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and the cosy relationship between state and non-state actors there. The problem is that U.S. policy continues to be driven by short-term regional interests, in which Pakistan remains central to facilitating a U.S. military exit from Afghanistan, shaping the post-2014 Afghan political landscape, and aiding U.S. squeeze of Iran. In fact, Obama’s narrowing of the Afghan war goals has made the U.S. only more dependent on Pakistan.

By moving away from the Bush-era counterinsurgency strategy toward limited objectives centred on political reconciliation with the Afghan Taliban and ending all combat operations by 2014, Obama now needs the Pakistani generals to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table. After all, these generals provide a haven to the top Afghan Taliban leadership, besides allowing Taliban fighters to use Pakistan as a sanctuary from which to launch cross-border attacks. A face-saving U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is simply inconceivable without Pakistani cooperation.

After bin Laden’s elimination, pressure is already growing on the U.S. and its NATO allies for a quicker withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, making the Pakistani generals an even more critical factor in facilitating America’s reconciling with the Taliban. Although the Taliban was ISI procreation, its birth in the early 1990s was midwifed by the CIA. This is the reason why Washington fervently believes reconciliation with an estranged ex-ally is possible. And this is also the reason why — despite its main foe on the Afghan battlefield being the Taliban, not Al Qaeda — the U.S. military never attempted to wipe out the Quetta shura, eschewing any drone or commando strikes to decapitate the Afghan Taliban.

Significantly, just two-and-a-half months ago, the U.S. publicly eased its terms for reconciliation with the Taliban shura, dropping three key preconditions — renounce violence, embrace the Afghan Constitution, and snap links with al-Qaeda. What were preconditions were turned into “necessary outcomes of any negotiation.” The U.S. National Security Council then formally endorsed the new reconciliation strategy, which offers the Taliban power sharing in Afghanistan. No less significant is that America’s new Af-Pak envoy, Marc Grossman — despite the U.S. outrage over the bin Laden affair — travelled to Islamabad this week and reached agreement to set up a U.S.-Pakistani-Afghan “core group for promoting and facilitating the process of reconciliation and peace in Afghanistan.”

Obama actually believes that bin Laden’s killing serves as a potential catalyst to soften the Pakistani generals and the Taliban shura so as to clinch a peace deal, besides providing an opportunity to quickly conclude a post-2014 Permanent U.S. Bases Agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Obama indeed is set to announce a substantial reduction in U.S. forces starting this summer.

In this light, far from unravelling the remaining threads in the strained U.S.-Pakistan relationship, the bin Laden affair is likely to prove a temporary setback, even if a serious one. Some heads in the Pakistani military establishment may roll to placate Washington, with the blame being conveniently put (as in the past) on rogue elements within what itself is a rogue agency — the ISI. Washington may brandish new sticks, but carrots would still weigh more, with U.S. policy doling out further multibillion-dollar awards to Islamabad. British Prime Minister David Cameron has candidly said that it is “in our national interest” not to have “a flaming great row with Pakistan over this” but rather to “engage with Pakistan.” And Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser has pledged that Pakistan will remain a critical partner in the U.S. counterterrorism strategy.

Narrow geopolitical interests thus are likely to trump the imperative for externally supported Pakistani reforms to help cut the ISI down to size, loosen the military’s vice-like grip on power, rein in militant Islamist groups, and build a moderate, stable Pakistan.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut (Harper Paperbacks, New York) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming).

(c) The Hindu, 2011

The Geopolitical Message from Libya

Brahma Chellaney
Column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate

Will “mission creep” in the West’s intervention in Libya end up creating, inadvertently, a jihadist citadel at Europe’s southern doorstep?

Of course, the Western powers must be applauded for their efforts, with the support of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, to prevent a slaughter of Libya’s civilian population. The democratic world should never stand by idly while a tyrant uses military force to massacre civilians. But, if despots are to be deterred from untrammeled repression, any intervention — whether military or in the form of economic and diplomatic sanctions — must meet the test of impartiality.

The current political upheaval in the Arab world could transform the Middle East and North Africa in the same way that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 fundamentally changed Europe. Indeed, 1989 was a watershed, producing the most profound global geopolitical changes in the most compressed timeframe in history. But, in the decades since, the Arab world’s rulers, regimes, and practices seemed to have remained firmly entrenched.

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama claimed in a famous essay that the Cold War’s end marked the end of ideological evolution, “the end of history,” with the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Yet, two decades on, the global spread of democracy has been encountering increasingly strong headwinds. Only a small minority of states in Asia, for example, are true democracies.

In fact, a new bipolar, Cold War-style ideological divide has emerged. The rise of authoritarian capitalism — best symbolized by China, but also embraced by countries as disparate as Malaysia, Singapore, Kazakhstan, and Qatar — has created a new model that competes with (and challenges) liberal democracy.

The popular upsurge in the Arab world shows that democratic empowerment hinges on two key internal factors: the role of security forces and the technological sophistication of the state’s repressive capacity. In recent weeks, security forces have shaped developments in different ways in three Arab states.

Yemen’s popular uprising has splintered the security establishment, with different military factions now in charge of different neighborhoods in the capital, Sana. In Bahrain, by contrast, the monarchy has used the foreign Sunni mercenaries that dominate its police force to fire on demonstrators, who are predominantly Shia.

In Egypt, it was the military’s refusal to side with former President Hosni Mubarak that helped end his 30-year dictatorship. Long used to wielding power, the military had become increasingly wary of Mubarak’s efforts to groom his son as his successor. Yet today’s heady talk of freedom cannot obscure the reality that the people’s “revolution” has so far led only to a direct military takeover, with the decades-old emergency law still in force and the country’s political direction uncertain.

As for the second key internal factor, a state’s ability to police mobile and electronic communications and Internet access has become as important as jackboots and truncheons. China, for example, is a model of despotic efficiency: its internal-security system extends from state-of-the-art surveillance and extralegal detention centers to an army of paid informants and neighborhood patrols that look out for troublemakers.

In response to calls by some overseas Chinese for people to gather on Sundays at specific sites in Shanghai and Beijing to help launch a molihua (jasmine) revolution, China has revealed a new strategy: preemptively flood the protest-designated squares with police to leave no room for protesters. More importantly, as the world’s leader in stringent, real-time censorship of electronic communications, China is strongly placed to block any Arab contagion from reaching its shores.

External factors are especially important in smaller, weaker countries. Nothing illustrates this better than Bahrain, where Saudi Arabia — which has contributed more than any other country to the spread of global jihad — sent forces under the Gulf Cooperation Council banner to crush peaceful protests. Indeed, Saudi Arabia’s effort to prop up the Bahraini regime parallels the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 to bolster a besieged allied regime — an invasion that led to the multibillion-dollar, CIA-scripted arming of Afghan rebels and the consequent rise of transnational Islamic terrorists.

Libya, too, is a weak, divided country. Indeed, with the CIA conducting covert operations inside Libya and aiding the rebels there, the danger is that the West could be creating another jihadist haven. After all, the broadening of the NATO-led mission from a limited, humanitarian goal to an all-out assault on Libya’s military signals to some Arabs that this war is really about ensuring that the region does not slip out of Western control. The intervention has seemingly been driven by a geopolitical imperative to bottle up or eliminate Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi so that his regime cannot exploit the political vacuum in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia.

While it is now clear that much of the Arab world is in transition, the end point is not yet clear. But Barack Obama’s administration apparently has concluded that Arab monarchs are likely to survive, whereas Arab presidents are more likely to fall, and that it is acceptable for the United States to continue to coddle tyrannical kings.

Unfortunately, this double standard sends a message that democratic empowerment in any society is possible only if it is in the interest of the great powers. No one has a greater interest in broad acceptance of this noxious idea — that promotion of human freedom is nothing more than a geopolitical tool — than the world’s largest, oldest, and most powerful autocracy, China.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India, and Japan (Harper Paperbacks, 2010) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, 2011).

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.

Saving civilians: Murky geopolitics

The mission creep in the Western military intervention in Libya shows how narrow geopolitical interests, even at the risk of creating another Iraq or Afghanistan, are driving a professed humanitarian campaign.

Brahma Chellaney
The Hindu, April 6, 2011

From initially seeking to protect civilians to now aiming for a swift, total victory in Libya, the mission creep that has characterized the Western powers’ military attack raises troubling questions about their Libyan strategy and the risk that it could end up creating a jihadist citadel at Europe’s southern doorstep. After having tacitly encouraged and endorsed the Saudi military intervention in Bahrain to crush peaceful protests against a totalitarian monarchy, the military intervention in a tribally divided Libya indeed has helped highlight a selective approach to the promotion of freedom and the protection of civilians — an approach reinforced by these powers’ continuing support to other Western-backed Arab regimes that have employed disproportionate force to quell popular uprisings or unrest.

Ivory Coast — where rampant abuses and widespread killings have led about one million residents to flee Abidjan city alone — was clearly a more pressing case for international intervention than Libya, given strongman Laurent Gbagbo’s months-old defiance of the United Nations writ. But because Ivory Coast lacks strategic importance or oil, the exodus of Ivorians to Liberia and the influx of Liberian mercenaries continued unchecked, triggering civilian massacres.

The political upheaval in the Arab world is tectonic in nature, with the potential to transform the Middle East and North Africa in the same way as the 1989 Berlin Wall’s fall fundamentally changed Europe. Indeed, 1989 was a watershed, producing the most-profound global geopolitical changes in the most compressed timeframe in history. But the Arab world, with the same regimes and practices firmly entrenched for decades, had escaped change. Now, the tumult represents a belated reaction — a yearning for change that signals a grassroots democratic awakening.

But will this awakening lead to democratic empowerment of the masses? After all, there is a wide gulf between democratic awakening and democratic empowerment. The air of expectancy in the Arab world today parallels the new hope that emerged in the East bloc in 1989. Yet history rarely moves in a linear or predictable fashion. While it is now clear that much of the Arab world is in transition, the end point is not yet clear.

In 1989, an American scholar, Francis Fukuyama, smugly claimed in a famous essay that the Cold War’s end marked the end of ideological evolution, “the end of history,” with the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Yet two decades after the Cold War’s end, the global spread of democracy is still encountering strong headwinds.

Latest developments indeed are a reminder that democratic empowerment hinges on complex factors in any society — both endogenous and exogenous. Internally, two factors usually hold the key: the role of security forces, and the technological sophistication of an autocracy’s repressive capacity.

In recent weeks, security forces have helped shape developments in different ways in three Arab states. While the popular uprising in Yemen has splintered the security establishment there, with different military factions now in charge of different neighbourhoods in the capital Sanaa and the United States seeking to replace the Yemeni president with his No. 2, the Bahraini monarchy has employed foreign Sunni mercenaries that dominate its police force to fire on the predominantly Shiite demonstrators.

In Egypt, it was the military’s refusal to side with Hosni Mubarak that helped end that ex-air force commander’s three-decade-long dictatorial rule. The military, long part of the political power structure, had become increasingly wary of Mubarak’s efforts to groom his son as his successor. Today, the heady talk of freedom cannot obscure the reality that the people’s revolution in Egypt thus far has spawned only a direct military takeover, with the 30-year emergency law still in force and the country’s political direction uncertain. Although the ruling military council has scheduled parliamentary elections in September, the fact is that in no country has the military voluntarily ceded power without mass protests or other pressures.

As for the second key internal factor, an autocracy’s ability to police cellphone calls, electronic communications and Internet access has become as important as jackboots and truncheons. The use of social networking sites and instant messaging to organize mass protests has made a nation’s capability to enforce stringent, real-time censorship of electronic communications critical.

External factors are especially important in small or internally weak countries. The House of Saud sent forces into Bahrain under the Gulf Cooperation Council banner to crush peaceful protests, yet it is civil war-torn Libya that became the target of a Western military attack. The blunt fact is that no nation has contributed more to the spread of global jihad than Saudi Arabia. Indeed, this terror-bankrolling state’s military intervention to prop up the Bahraini regime parallels the 1979 Soviet intervention to bolster a besieged Afghan regime in Kabul — an invasion that led to the multibillion-dollar, CIA-sponsored arming of Afghan rebels and the consequent rise of transnational Islamic terrorists, including Al Qaeda.

Yet today, with the CIA conducting covert operations inside Libya and aiding rebels, Washington is in danger of coming full circle, having failed to learn from past mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq, where quick initial military victories proved deceptive.

The broadening of the Libya intervention from a limited, humanitarian mission to an all-out assault on the Libyan military suggests that this war is really about ensuring that the Arab world does not slip out of Western control. The intervention has seemingly been driven by a cold geopolitical calculation: to bottle up or eliminate Muammar Qaddafi so that his regime doesn’t exploit the political vacuum in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia. Yet few have examined the costs that democracies are being made to pay — in the form of rising Islamic extremism and terrorism — for the overpowering U.S. intent to have only puppet Arab regimes, an objective that has fostered an alliance with inimical Wahhabi forces.

At a time when America needs comprehensive domestic renewal, it has slid — under a president who won a Nobel peace prize in his first year in office — into a third war when the other two wars already carry an aggregate $150-billion annual price tag. A quick military victory in Libya is what Barack Obama badly needs to reverse his declining popularity at home and win re-election.

But even if the Qaddafi regime collapses quickly under the mounting military attacks, recreating a unified, stable Libya free of Islamist groups may prove difficult. Saddam Hussein’s ouster by the invading U.S. forces did not secure the desired political objectives; rather a once-stable, secular Iraq has been destabilized, radicalized and effectively partitioned. With Libya set to become Obama’s Iraq, a plausible scenario there is a protracted stalemate, coupled with a tribally partitioned country.

The paradox is that while aiding Libyan contras even at the risk of creating another Afghanistan, the U.S. is desperately seeking a deal with medieval forces — the Taliban — to stave off certain defeat in the decade-long Afghan war. U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates recently rebuked allies for effectively abandoning the Afghan war. Why blame allies when the U.S. itself has abandoned the goal of victory and now seeks only a face-saving exit? And even as the U.S. fires hundreds of missiles at Libyan targets, its policy on Pakistan — the main sanctuary for transnational terrorists — is crumbling, with Washington clueless on how to stem the rising tide of anti-Americanism in a country that is now its largest aid recipient.

Still, with popular revolts sweeping much of the Arab world, the White House has concluded that Arab monarchs are likely to survive, whereas Arab presidents are more likely to fall, and that it is acceptable for the U.S. to continue to coddle tyrannical kings. The effort to draw specious distinctions between “good” or valuable despots and “bad” or discardable despots is redolent of the manner in which the arming of “good” contras has exacted heavy international costs.

If tyrants are to be stopped from unleashing untrammelled repression, any international intervention — whether military in nature or in the form of economic and diplomatic sanctions — must meet the test of impartiality.

The resort to different standards and practices in the name of promoting human freedom, unfortunately, sends the message that any society’s democratic empowerment is possible only if it jibes with the great powers’ geopolitical interest. The fundamental issue is whether there should be a rules-based international order or an order pivoted on military might and driven by narrow, politically expedient interests of the most powerful.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut (Harper Paperbacks) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming).