North Korea and Pakistan: Nuclear Rogue Mates

Posted on June 3, 2009 by Chellaney

The nuclear nightmare

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times, June 3, 2009

North Korea and Pakistan present unique nuclear-proliferation risks because they challenge the very premise on which the international anti-proliferation measures have been built.

While North Korea is often compared with Iran, the challenge it poses is more akin to Pakistan’s. Both Pakistan and North Korea are actual proliferation threats as opposed to Iran’s potential proliferation challenge. But while North Korea is a growing regional threat, Pakistan — with its expanding nuclear armory, terrorists and jihadist-infiltrated military and nuclear establishments — presents itself as an international nightmare.

In the past, these two countries have clandestinely bartered Pakistani uranium-enrichment knowhow for North Korean missile technology. Today, they are showing that the nuclear abolition debate is not germane to the key proliferation challenges in Asia, even if movement on the stalled disarmament process helps reduce incentives to proliferation in some other cases.

The present global anti-proliferation measures are tied to three key elements: The continued stability and credibility of the nonproliferation regime; the exercise of punitive power, when necessary, to enforce observance of global norms and rules; and the raising of costs for proliferators.

The outlook of North Korea and Pakistan, however, is founded on a fundamentally antithetical premise, which can be summed up as: Threaten to fail, then reap rewards.

For these two dissimilar nations, potential state failure actually serves as an incentive to extort ransom money internationally. Both have assiduously sought to leverage their weakness into strength diplomatically, with Pakistan more successful than North Korea. "We’ll fail if you don’t come to our support" is their refrain. That is another way of saying: "Pay up or face the consequences."

In that light, it is proving very difficult to hold them to any international standards.

In fact, Pakistan’s success in extracting ever-more international aid has only emboldened North Korea to follow suit. Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test — its second in less than three years — is a desperate move to garner international aid.

If Islamabad can play nuclear poker to shield its export of terrorism and still get rewarded with $23.6 billion in international aid commitments just in the last six months ($5.5 billion of which came at the April donors conference in Tokyo), Pyongyang reckoned it could stage its own nuclear-and-missile show to draw the world’s attention.

While vowing to "take action" against North Korea over its test, U.S. President Barack Obama has set out to make Pakistan the single largest recipient of U.S. assistance in the world, leaving Israel and Egypt behind in the aid sweepstakes.

When Pakistan rakes in a windfall, North Korea can hardly be faulted for using the possibility of becoming a failed state as a means to collect some small change.

If Obama thought that succumbing to Pakistani demand would set no international precedent, North Korea’s ailing "dear leader" has made sure the chickens will come home to roost in Washington.

Even as America worries about Iran’s potential nuclear-weapons capability, its handling of the actual problem thrown up by Pakistan’s military-controlled weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and military-nurtured terrorists threatens to send the wrong signal to Tehran. According to a just-released Congressional Research Service report, Pakistan has approximately 60 nuclear warheads. It also has biological weapons, including pathogens no less dangerous than the H1N1 virus

Bountiful U.S. aid, in fact, is allowing Pakistan to divert more of its scarce resources to expand WMD capability, as illustrated by the two new plutonium-production reactors now under construction in Khushab with Chinese assistance. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chie’s of Staff, has been constrained to acknowledge at a May 14 congressional hearing that there is evidence showing Pakistan is expanding its nuclear arsenal.

Existing WMD in a country with jihadists are a matter of deep global concern; an expanding arsenal makes the scenario terrifying.

America has little incentive to start the flow of major international aid to North Korea, which, as U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates admitted recently at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, poses no direct military threat to the U.S. at present. Strategically, North Korea is of little positive value to U.S. policy.

By contrast, China over the decades has maintained close ties with Pyongyang and Islamabad and, besides providing direct WMD aid to both, may have even encouraged North Korean-Pakistani technology exchanges. But Beijing lacks the leverage to control their steps and gets surprised now and then by their actions, as exemplified by the latest North Korean nuclear and missile testing.

More broadly, the traditional carrots-and-sticks approach of the nonproliferation regime has been derailed by the North Korea and Pakistan cases. The derailment happened because the punitive component was rendered blunt by the continuing intent of the major geopolitical players not to let North Korea or Pakistan become a failed state.

So, the more North Korea and Pakistan appear likely to become failed states, the more it becomes evident that the international response is constrained by the objective not to let them fail. The international approach toward them thus is to bark but not to bite.

In dealing with North Korea, China, Russia, the United States and Japan do not want to go so far as to cause the collapse of the regime. Although not necessarily motivated by the same interest, these powers are not geopolitically ready for Korean reunification, which will be a logical corollary to the regime collapse in Pyongyang. South Korea, too, is not prepared for that development because it would unleash a torrent of refugees and saddle Seoul with colossal reunification costs, as the continuing domestic costs of German reunification attest. So, not wanting the Stalinist North Korean state to unravel, the external players do little more than pass tough resolutions or statements.

Pakistan, for its part, has for long served as a useful pawn in Chinese and American policies. It remains Beijing’s "all-weather ally," although its utility to U.S. policy has eroded to the extent that today it appears more of a strategic liability than an asset. Yet the old mind-set in Washington has not sufficiently changed. As a result, the deeper Pakistan has dug itself into a jihadist dungeon, the more the U.S. has gotten involved in that country. Such growing involvement, far from serving U.S. interests, has fueled an Islamist backlash in Pakistan, where anti-American sentiment is among the strongest in the world and where America is unfairly blamed for everything.

Washington also does not face up to another reality: Pakistan’s political border with Afghanistan has ceased to exist in practice. The so-called Durand Line — a British-colonial invention that left the large Pashtun community divided into two — now exists only in maps. Its disappearance is irreversible. Given that reality, how can U.S. policy expect to prop up the Pakistani state within political frontiers that, in part, no longer exist?

It is sad but true: The only way the international community can regain leverage against North Korea and Pakistan is to unflinchingly pursue a forward-thinking nonproliferation course that is not constrained by the specter of state collapse. That means standing up to them to disable their nuclear terror.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan" (HarperCollins).

The Japan Times: Wednesday, June 3, 2009

How U.S. policy on Pakistan has encouraged North Korea

Posted on May 26, 2009 by Chellaney

More terrorists per square mile

Pakistan’s success in employing nuclear blackmail to extort growing international aid has only emboldened North Korea

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, May 27, 2009

The deeper Pakistan has dug itself into a jihadist dungeon over the past decade and more, the more the US has gotten involved in that country, including in propping up its tottering economy through generous aid, macro-managing Pakistani politics and mollycoddling the powerful military. This political approach contrasts starkly with the current stepped-up US military approach in Afghanistan, exemplified by a troop “surge”.

By fighting the wrong war, the US risks losing the battle against Islamists and transnational terrorists. The real war needs to be fought in Pakistan.

The 2001 U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan was intended to deny that landlocked country’s lawless regions as a base for transnational terrorists. To a large extent, that goal has been realized, despite the threat from a resurgent Taliban. Today, the main global-terrorist base is not Afghanistan but Pakistan. Support and sustenance for Afghan militants also comes from inside Pakistan, which — according to the co-author of President Barack Obama’s “Afpak” strategy review, Bruce Riedel — “has more terrorists per square mile than anyplace else on earth” and a nuclear armoury “growing faster than anyplace else on earth.”

Still, while revving up its war machine in Afghanistan, America pursues a dubious political strategy in Pakistan, best illustrated by its new $7.5 billion aid package to win hearts and minds in a country that resembles a Molotov cocktail waiting for a match. Even as the US seeks to bribe the Pakistani military to stop providing succour and sanctuary to militants along the Afghan frontier, the major terrorist safe havens remain deep inside Pakistan, not at its borders. And while it frets over the Pakistani Taliban, the scourge of Pakistani terrorism still emanates from military generals who reared the forces of jihad.

Pakistan’s success in employing blackmail to extort ever-more ransom money has only emboldened North Korea to follow suit. Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test is a desperate move to garner international aid. If Islamabad can play nuclear poker to shield its export of terrorism and still get rewarded with $23.6 billion in international aid commitments over the past six months, Pyongyang reckoned it could stage its own nuclear show to draw the world’s attention. When Pakistan’s threat to become a failed state rakes in a windfall, North Korea can hardly be faulted for using the same menace to collect some small change.

If Obama thought that succumbing to Pakistani blackmail would set no international precedent, North Korea’s ailing “dear leader” has made sure the chickens will come home to roost in Washington. And even as America worries about the potential proliferation problem posed by Iran, its handling of the actual problem thrown up by Pakistan’s military-controlled weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and military-nurtured terrorists threatens to send the wrong signal to Tehran. Munificent US aid, in fact, is allowing Pakistan to divert more of its scarce resources to expand WMD capability.

Today, no country challenges international security like Pakistan. Obama cannot hope to secure a US ticket out of Afghanistan without dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for Afghan militants. As Stephen Hadley pointed out just before leaving office as the US national security adviser, “You can’t really solve Afghanistan without solving Pakistan”. Yet Obama has no real strategy to uproot Pakistan’s terror complex other than to entice the Pakistani military establishment with larger funds and more weapon transfers — inducements that it will gladly grasp, only to continue aiding extremists. Obama’s Pakistan strategy indeed can be summed up in just four words: More of the same.

Actually, it is more of what hasn’t worked in the past. In making Pakistan the largest recipient of US aid in the world, Obama has set out to replicate the past failed approach on a bigger scale. His administration has even managed to dissuade Congress thus far from imposing any rigid condition on the unprecedented $10.5-billion aid for Pakistan — the first $2-billion tranche of which already has been cleared for release. Throwing more money at Islamabad, pampering the Pakistani army and intelligence, and undermining Pakistan’s elected leaders (with Obama publicly excoriating President Asif Ali Zardari’s fledgling government as “very fragile,” ineffectual and unable “to gain the support and loyalty” of the Pakistani people) are examples of more of the same in US policy.

How can Pakistan become a “normal” state if US policy encourages its military, intelligence and nuclear establishments to stay not accountable to the elected government? As long as the army continues to hold the real power and the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) remains unreformed, Pakistan is likely to stay a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terrorism. Yet the Obama strategy relies on these very institutions for gains on the Afghan battlefield. By publicizing his intent to exit Afghanistan, Obama, however, has undercut his own objective. Now the Pakistani military and its progeny, the Taliban, will prefer to just wait out the Americans to reclaim Afghanistan.

The choice before Washington is to stop treating Pakistan as its favoured pawn or risk letting its egregious policy egg on other renegade nations. The right course is to cut the Pakistani military establishment down to size by actively assisting the country’s elected leaders to undo policies and mindsets implanted by a succession of army rulers. The civilians in office today take all the blame but do not have the power to deliver. The emergence of a fully empowered civilian government and robust civil society will foster democracy, marginalize radicals and bring Pakistan back from the brink.

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

Safeguarding Pakistan’s WMD from jihadists within

Posted on May 24, 2009 by Chellaney

Insider threat to Pakistan’s ‘crown jewels’

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, May 25, 2009

The real threat of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan’s weapons of mass destruction comes from jihadists within the military, intelligence and nuclear establishments, not from the Taliban.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently warned of the “unthinkable” in Pakistan: Islamists getting “the keys to the nuclear arsenal.” So, does the United States have a contingency plan to forestall that and, if so, can the plan work, given the record of American policy on Pakistan thus far?

Pakistan’s nuclear-stockpile security is handled by the so-called Strategic Plans Division, with a special, 1,000-troop unit. But as Ms Clinton acknowledged, the Pakistani nukes are “widely dispersed,” with the storage sites extending beyond the Punjab heartland to the Sind and Baluchistan provinces. Add to that America’s admittedly limited knowledge on the location of these sites. The U.S. may thus have few good options to pre-emptively seize the nuclear arms before an Islamist takeover of Pakistan.

To be sure, the Strategic Plans Division — the keeper of the country’s nuclear secrets — is headed by a U.S.-backed general, Khalid Kidwai, who was held in India as a prisoner of the 1971 war and released following the 1972 Shimla Agreement. Mr. Kidwai has headed the SPD ever since it was created after the 1998 nuclear tests.

It was on Mr. Kidwai’s watch that the infamous A.Q. Khan-led nuclear-smuggling ring remained in operation. How reassuring is that fact? Indeed, it was Mr. Kidwai whom military ruler Pervez Musharraf used to extract a tutored confession from Khan so that the entire blame for the illicit nuclear ring could fall on a single individual, sparing the military establishment — a charade the Bush administration readily went along with.

To tamp down growing international concerns over the safety of Pakistan’s “crown jewels” and to win congressional passage of his record-level aid package for Pakistan, U.S. President Barack Obama said on April 29: “I’m confident we can make sure that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure, primarily, initially, because the Pakistani army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands.” Mr. Obama’s confidence is rooted unbelievably in his belief that the jihadist-penetrated Pakistani army is taking cognizance of such perils. In fact, he suggested Washington still trusts the Pakistani army with custodial control of nuclear assets, thereby compounding the simultaneous insult he hurled at President Asif Ali Zardari’s elected government in calling it “very fragile,” ineffectual and unable “to gain the support and loyalty” of the Pakistani people.

Mr. Obama’s comments, made just before he received Mr. Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai for a trilateral meeting, drew attention to the long-standing U.S. policy partiality for Pakistani generals at a time when the real Islamist-takeover threat comes from jihadists within the increasingly radicalized Pakistani military. Rather than help build robust civilian institutions, Washington for five decades propped up military rulers and still continues to pamper the Pakistani military establishment, best illustrated by the fresh $3-billion military aid package and new joint cooperation between the CIA and the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

Pakistan’s descent into a jihadist dungeon tellingly occurred not under civilian rule but under military rule. Also, before Musharraf’s nearly nine-year dictatorship, few in the world looked at Pakistan as a failing state.

Today, how can Pakistan become a “normal” state if its military, intelligence and nuclear establishments remain outside civilian oversight, with the decisive power still with the army? Yet when the new civilian government ordered the ISI last July to report to the Interior Ministry, it did not receive support from Washington, allowing the army to quickly frustrate the move. The command and control over Pakistan’s nuclear assets vests with the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, with Mr. Zardari just the titular chair of the National Command Authority, dominated by military and intelligence leaders.

In such an aberrant setting, can the U.S. really hope to prevent jihadist control of Pakistan’s arsenal of nuclear and biological weapons, including pathogens no less dangerous than (as Senator Richard Lugar pointed out) the H1N1 virus? Bountiful U.S. aid indeed permits Pakistan to plough more of its domestic resources into weapons of mass destruction (WMD), as exemplified by the two new plutonium-production reactors under construction at Khushab. Existing WMD in a country teaming with jihadists are a matter of deep global concern; an expanding arsenal makes the scenario nightmarish.

Let’s just say it: The U.S. first allowed Pakistan to acquire the nuclear bomb by turning a blind eye to its illicit procurement of blueprints and items during the 1970s and 1980s. Then, when the clandestine nuclear importers morphed into covert nuclear exporters, the U.S. admittedly failed to detect their proliferation activities for 16 long years. Worse still, as shown by A.Q. Khan’s release from house arrest and the collapse of international investigations, Washington has not been interested in fully investigating that ring or in bringing its ringleaders to justice.

Khan’s discharge followed Switzerland’s release of the two Tinner brothers who, along with their father, were important conduits in the Pakistani ring. One of the brothers, Urs Tinner, has acknowledged working undercover for the CIA. In fact, the CIA shielded A.Q. Khan for long. As the former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers has revealed, the CIA protected Khan from arrest and prosecution in Europe in 1975 and 1986.

Today, with Pakistani officials doggedly deflecting U.S. requests for details, CIA director Leon Panetta has acknowledged that America lacks “the intelligence to know” where all of Pakistan’s nuclear-storage sites are located. Although the U.S. has provided some $100 million worth of technical assistance to Islamabad under its International Nuclear Materials Protection and Cooperation programme, American personnel have been denied access to most Pakistani nuclear sites.

Although it has refused to sell “Permissive Action Links” (PALs) — primary electronic locks embedded in weapon design — America has helped Pakistan design a system of controls, barriers and sensors, including improvised secondary-locking devices added to already-built weapons. But rather than let Americans enter its sites, Pakistan sent its personnel for on-site training in America. Put simply, the U.S. has not been allowed to see how its money has been used in practice.

Modern security and accounting systems, in any event, can be of little value in the face of insider threats. The real threat of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan’s WMD comes not from jihadists outside, but from jihadists within the system — specifically, from the jihadist-infiltrated military, intelligence and nuclear establishments. Yet, with the Obama administration hyping the Pakistani Taliban threat to win early congressional passage of record-level aid for Islamabad, international concerns have centred on outsider threats. The Taliban, either in Pakistan or Afghanistan, has not been active outside the Pashtun regions, and there is no evidence of any nuclear assets being present in the troubled Pakistani Pashtun areas.

Actually, Pakistan has emulated India’s example in storing nukes in disassembled form, with the warheads and delivery vehicles stowed in separate facilities. For outsiders to acquire even one complete bomb, capture of at least two facilities would be necessary, along with the expertise to mate the fissile “core” and trigger with the delivery vehicle. This is unlikely to happen without military generals and other senior insiders actively colluding with the outsiders.

Insider threats indeed have repeatedly been exposed — from the ring that sold centrifuge technology and bomb designs to the jihadist charity set up by two senior nuclear scientists, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majeed. Mahmood, who once served as A.Q. Khan’s boss and designed the first Khushab reactor, advocated that the Pakistani nukes were the property of the whole ummah and, therefore, Pakistan had a duty to share nuclear technology with other Muslim states. Weeks before 9/11, “Mahmood and Majeed met with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan,” then CIA chief George Tenet writes in his memoirs, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA. “There, around a campfire, they discussed how Al-Qaeda should go about building a nuclear device.”

Pakistan serves as a reminder that programmes to screen and monitor personnel can mean little when jihad-spouting personnel abound in the military and nuclear establishments. Such personnel are potential sleepers for extremist groups.

Safeguarding WMD demands a stable, moderate Pakistan. That, in turn, calls for sustained international political investment in building and strengthening civilian institutions. But is that possible without a clear break from politically expedient U.S. policies that continue to prop up a meddling army, fatten the ISI and encourage the military, intelligence and nuclear establishments to stay not accountable to the elected government? Even Secretary Clinton was constrained to admit that “our policy toward Pakistan over the last 30 years has been incoherent.” The most likely scenario of Pakistani WMD falling into Islamist hands is an intra-military struggle in which the jihadists gain ascendancy.

The real war needs to be fought in Pakistan, not Afghanistan

Posted on May 24, 2009 by Chellaney

U.S. fighting the wrong war

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

The deeper Pakistan has dug itself into a jihadist dungeon over the past decade and more, the more the United States has gotten involved in that country, including in propping up its tottering economy through generous bilateral and international aid, macro-managing Pakistani politics and pampering the powerful, meddling military establishment.

This political approach contrasts starkly with a stepped-up military approach in Afghanistan, where currently the U.S. focus is on a troop "surge" and the establishment of local-level civil militias.

The blunt truth is that the U.S. is fighting the wrong war. As a result, it is in danger of losing the fight against Islamists and transnational terrorists. The real war needs to be fought in Pakistan, in defense of international peace and security.

The 2001 U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan was intended to deny use of that landlocked country’s lawless regions as a base by al-Qaida and other transnational terrorists. To a large extent, that goal has been realized, despite the threat from a resurgent Taliban.

Today, the main base of international terrorists is not Afghanistan, but Pakistan. Support and sustenance for Afghan militants also comes from inside Pakistan. According to Bruce Riedel, the coauthor of U.S. President Barack Obama’s review of Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, Pakistan "has more terrorists per square mile than any place else on Earth, and it has a nuclear-weapons program that is growing faster than anyplace else on Earth."

Yet, while waging war in Afghanistan, the U.S. pursues a dubious political strategy in an increasingly radicalized Pakistan, best illustrated by the new American $7.5 billion aid package to win hearts and minds in a country that now looks like a Molotov cocktail waiting for a match. Even as the U.S. seeks to bribe the Pakistani military to stop providing succor and sanctuary to militants along the Afghan frontier, the major terrorist safe havens remain deep inside Pakistan, not at its borders. The scourge of Pakistani terrorism still emanates not so much from the Islamist mullahs as from military generals who reared the forces of jihad.

The success of the ongoing induction of 21,000 additional American troops in Afghanistan will depend on the battlefield in another country — a battlefield where America’s role is largely political.

It is also apparent that the U.S. military cannot secure a ticket out of Afghanistan without first dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for the Taliban and other Afghan militants.

Yet, Obama has no real strategy to uproot Pakistan’s military-reared terror infrastructure other than to entice the Pakistani Army and intelligence with larger funds and more weapon transfers — inducements that they will gladly grasp, only to continue aiding extremists.

Obama’s Pakistan strategy indeed can be summed up in just four words: More of the same. Actually, it is more of what hasn’t worked in the past. Unsuccessful U.S. policies over the years have helped produce a terrifying mess in Pakistan.

Even U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was constrained to admit on May 19 that "our policy toward Pakistan over the last 30 years has been incoherent. I don’t know any other word to use."

Still, Obama is seeking to replicate the failed approach of the past on a much-bigger scale, as exemplified by his plan to make Pakistan the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world without setting clear benchmarks for judging progress. In fact, his administration has been successful in dissuading Congress thus far from imposing any rigid condition on the new record-level aid for Pakistan, the first $ 2 billion tranche of which already has been cleared for release.

Bountiful U.S. aid indeed permits Pakistan to plow more of its domestic resources into weapons of mass destruction (WMD), as exemplified by the two plutonium-production reactors now under construction at Khushab. Existing WMD in a country teeming with jihadists within and outside the system are a matter of deep global concern; an expanding Pakistani arsenal makes the scenario nightmarish.

Throwing more money at Islamabad, pampering the wielder of real power — the military — and undermining Pakistan’s elected leaders (with Obama publicly excoriating President Asif Ali Zardari’s fledgling government as "very fragile," ineffectual and unable "to gain the support and loyalty" of the Pakistani people) are examples of why the new administration is offering more of the same in U.S. policy. To persuade the Pakistani military against helping the Taliban and other militants, Washington is paying billions of dollars in additional ransom money, with no assurance that such payouts will make any difference.

How can Pakistan become a "normal" state if U.S. policy does not seek to make its military, intelligence and nuclear establishments accountable to the elected government? Indeed, as long as the decisive power continues with the military, and the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency remains "a state within the state," Pakistan is likely to stay a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terrorism.

Yet the Obama strategy relies on these very institutions for gains on the Afghan battlefield. By publicizing his intent to exit Afghanistan, Obama, however, has ensured that U.S. forces will get no genuine cooperation from the Pakistani Army and ISI. Now these two institutions and their progeny, the Taliban, will prefer to just wait out the Americans to reclaim Afghanistan.

It is past time Washington began squeezing the Pakistani military establishment and actively assisting the country’s elected leaders to assume full powers and undo policies and mind-sets deeply implanted by a succession of military rulers. The civilian government today takes all the blame but does not have the power to deliver.

The emergence of a fully empowered civilian government and a robust civil society will foster democracy, marginalize radicals and bring Pakistan back from the brink.

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

The Japan Times: Saturday, May 23, 2009

Doomed to fail

Posted on May 19, 2009 by Chellaney

The march of folly: Obama’s four-word Afpak strategy

In its first foreign-policy test, the new Indian government will have to contend with pressing U.S. proposals that India assist Obama’s politically expedient “Afpak” strategy, which actually threatens to bring Indian security under added pressure

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, May 20, 2009

Now that the national election is over, Indian diplomacy will face demands to aid US President Barack Obama’s strategy on Afghanistan-Pakistan (“Afpak”). To win greater Pakistani military cooperation on the Afghan frontier, Obama is seeking New Delhi’s assistance on at least two fronts — border-troop reductions and a resumption of “peace” talks with Islamabad.

India can assist to the extent that its own interests are safe. India has no offensively-configured troop formations along the Pakistan border, and any cut in border deployments must not provide the Pakistani military an opening to infiltrate more armed terrorists into India. New Delhi has no quarrel with Pakistan’s fledgling civilian government, but a renewed bilateral dialogue can be meaningful only if Islamabad goes beyond cosmetic measures against its military-nurtured, India-directed Punjabi terror groups, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad.

The Obama team also had sought an easing of Pakistani concerns that India is seeking to encircle Pakistan through its role in Afghanistan. But Obama’s special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, has rubbished Pakistani claims of Indian intelligence operations there, saying that contrary to the alleged presence of “hundreds” of Indian operatives in Kandahar, his inquiry revealed that the Indian consulate there has merely “six or eight people”. India has a major stake in the future of Afghanistan and will stay an important player there. This is exemplified by the constructive role it is currently playing to help rebuild that landlocked country through a $1.2 billion aid programme.

The real issue is Obama’s Afpak approach. For a president elected on the slogan of change, his Afpak strategy hardly represents consequential change. In fact, Obama doesn’t have one integrated, comprehensive strategy but distinctly separate plans on Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Take his Pakistan strategy. It can be summed up in just four words: More of the same. Actually, it is more of what hasn’t worked in the past. Unsuccessful US policies have helped generate a terrifying mess in Pakistan, which today resembles a Molotov cocktail waiting for a match.

Yet Obama is seeking to copy that failed approach on a much-bigger scale, as illustrated by his plan to make Pakistan the largest recipient of US aid in the world without setting clear benchmarks for judging progress. In fact, his administration currently is seeking to dissuade Congress from imposing any rigid benchmark on the unparalleled aid for Pakistan.

Throwing more money at Islamabad, pampering the wielder of real power — the military — and undercutting Pakistan’s civilian leaders are examples of why Obama is offering more of the same in US policy. To persuade the Pakistani military establishment against providing terrorist succour and sanctuary along the Afghan border (but not the India frontier), Washington willingly is paying billions of dollars in ransom money, with no assurance that such payouts will make any difference.

What’s the Obama strategy on Afghanistan? Again, it can be summed up in four words: Surge, bribe and run. Obama actually has lifted this strategy lock, stock and barrel from his predecessor, but from a different theatre (Iraq), and without giving George W. Bush any credit.

Obama has set out to replicate in Afghanistan his predecessor’s experiment in Iraq. As happened in Iraq from early 2007, Obama intends to employ a military surge more as a show of force to pursue largely political objectives, especially to explore truces and alliances with tribal chieftains and insurgent leaders. Just as many Sunni tribal leaders were bought off in Iraq, the Obama plan is to cut deals with the Taliban leaders and field commanders.

For such deal-making to be successful, Obama intends to squeeze the Taliban first, including by putting 21,000 more American troops on the battlefield and taking yet another page from Bush’s Iraq experiment to establish US-funded local civil militias in every Afghan district. The first such militia unit, compromising 240 Afghans, was armed and deployed in Wardak province last month after receiving just three weeks of training.

In a country already teaming with militiamen, more militias are being set up. But just as the existing Afghan militias took to terrorism after being armed during the Ronald Reagan presidency to fight Soviet forces, the new militias will begin terrorizing local populations before long. Yet such is the rush to establish new militias that in an unusual decision to remove a wartime commander, the Obama administration last week fired the top American general in Afghanistan, David McKiernan, because he was overly cautious in creating such militias.

It is unlikely that the dubious Iraq experiment can work in Afghanistan, whose mountainous terrain, myriad tribes, militants operating from across national frontiers, patterns of shifting tribal and ethnic loyalties, low level of literacy, lack of natural resources, special status as the global hub of poppy trade and a history of internecine civil conflict set it apart from any other Muslim country. Also, unlike the internally confined Iraq conflict, the Afpak belt already is the springboard of international terrorism.

Still, Obama’s Afghanistan plan borrows so heavily from Bush’s Iraq ideas that the military general who implemented the surge-and-bribe experiment in Iraq has been pressed into service to replicate that in Afghanistan. David Petraeus, the former commander of American forces in Iraq who now heads the US Central Command, is the inspiration and leading light of the “surge, then negotiate” plan for Afghanistan. “Obama for Change” also has retained Bush’s defence secretary and rendition policy, revived Guantánamo military tribunals, flip-flopped on releasing detainee-abuse photos, and set the same year as his predecessor — 2011 — for a military exit from Iraq.

The blunt truth is that Obama doesn’t want the Afpak problem to burn his presidency the way Iraq consumed Bush’s. As a result, his aides are panning the internationally agreed goal of institution-building in Afghanistan as nation-building — a business in which the US shouldn’t get into.

Before he comes up for re-election, Obama wants to earn acclaim for ending his predecessor’s two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That objective is necessitating both a redefinition of “success” and the taking of shortcuts, as exemplified by his Afghan militia-building plan.

To compound matters, Obama has made the mistake — however inadvertently — of undercutting the legitimacy of the Afpak elected leaders. No sooner had he assumed office than his aides began calling Afghan President Hamid Karzai corrupt, incompetent and a millstone for US policy. Such talk died down when the Obama team realized there was no credible substitute to Karzai, now set to be re-elected. More surprising was Obama’s act, at the news conference marking his 100th day in office, in excoriating President Asif Ali Zardari’s government as “very fragile,” ineffectual and unable “to gain the support and loyalty” of the Pakistani people. Undermining civilian leaders is no recipe for success of a cut-and-run strategy.

Obama’s strategy essentially fails to recognize the structural character of the Afpak problem and attempts to deal with only the symptoms. Today, counterinsurgency (or “COIN” in US military jargon) has replaced institution-building and the “war on terror” in American policy. Accordingly, the Afpak strategy aims not to defeat terrorism, but to regionally contain terrorism — an approach that is set to bring Indian security under greater pressure.

While Obama cannot be faulted for wanting to exit Afghanistan, why did he have to advertise his intent? He publicly declared, “There’s got to be an exit strategy”. Now, the Taliban and their sponsors, the Pakistani military, just need to wait out the Americans to reclaim Afghanistan.

Rather than merely respond to US demands, strategic-partner India needs to be up-front on Obama’s unworkable Afpak strategy. That strategy is doomed to fail, with serious security consequences for India and the rest of the free world.

(c) Asian Age, 2009.

How not to fight international terrorism

Posted on May 14, 2009 by Chellaney

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.

Insider threat to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal

Posted on May 14, 2009 by Chellaney

Military insiders threaten Pakistan’s nuclear assets

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

Without naming the United States as his source, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said recently: "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."

To his acute embarrassment, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, soon thereafter, said the "unthinkable" could happen in Pakistan: Islamists could get "the keys to the nuclear arsenal." Which raises the question: Does America have a contingency plan to avert an Islamist takeover of Pakistan’s "crown jewels" and, if so, can it work?

Pakistan’s nuclear-stockpile security is handled by the Strategic Plans Division, which has under its command a special unit of about 1,000 troops. But as Clinton acknowledged, the Pakistani nukes are "widely dispersed," with storage sites extending beyond the Punjab heartland to Sind and Baluchistan provinces.

The U.S. appears to have few good options to pre-emptively seize the nuclear arms if a national meltdown is imminent.

To be sure, the Strategic Plans Division — the keeper of the country’s nuclear keys — is headed by a U.S.-backed general, Khalid Kidwai, who was held in India as a prisoner of the 1971 war and released after the 1972 Simla Agreement on normalizing India-Pakistan relations. Kidwai has headed the SPD ever since it was created after the 1998 nuclear tests. In other words, it was on Kidwai’s watch that the infamous A.Q. Khan-led nuclear-smuggling ring remained in operation.

Yet for Washington, Kidwai is a trusted man. It was Kidwai whom military ruler Pervez Musharraf used to extract a tutored confession from Khan so that the entire blame for the illicit nuclear ring could fall on a single individual, sparing the military establishment — a charade the Bush administration readily went along with.

To tamp down growing international concerns over the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear assets, U.S. President Barack Obama said on April 29: "I’m confident we can make sure that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure, primarily, initially, because the Pakistani Army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands."

Obama’s confidence, amazingly, is rooted in his belief that the jihadist-infiltrated Pakistani Army is taking cognizance of such perils. Indeed, by suggesting that Washington continued to trust the Pakistani Army with custodial control of nuclear assets, Obama only compounded the insult he simultaneously hurled at President Asif Ali Zardari’s elected government in calling it "very fragile," ineffectual and unable "to gain the support and loyalty" of the Pakistani people.

Obama’s comments, made just before he received Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai for a trilateral meeting, highlighted a long-standing U.S. policy partiality for Pakistani military generals, even though the real Islamist-takeover threat today comes from within the increasingly radicalized Pakistani Army.

Rather than help build robust civilian institutions, Washington propped up military rulers for five decades and still continues to pamper the Pakistani military establishment, best illustrated by the proposed $3 billion in fresh military aid over the next five years and the setting up of new cooperation between the CIA and the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

The choice in Pakistan is not between Islamists and U.S.-sponsored generals, who actually reared the forces of jihad and still nurture many jihadists. Both are a threat to international peace and security. But even as Obama is making Pakistan the biggest recipient of U.S. aid in the world, his harsh criticism of Zardari — in office for just eight months — risks undermining a fledgling civilian government and emboldening the military. Zardari is right in saying that a military coup in Pakistan, as in the past, can occur only with U.S. support, however tacit.

Pakistan’s descent into a jihadist dungeon tellingly occurred not under civilian rule but under military rule. While one military dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, let loose the jihadists he reared, another dictator, Musharraf, pushed Pakistan to the very edge of the precipice. Before Musharraf’s nearly nine-year rule, few in the world looked at Pakistan as a failing state. How can Pakistan become a "normal" state if its military, intelligence and nuclear establishments remain outside civilian oversight?

Yet when the new civilian government ordered the ISI last July to report to the Interior Ministry, it did not receive support from Washington, allowing the army to quickly frustrate the move. The command and control over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons rest with the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, as Zardari is just the titular chair of the National Command Authority dominated by military and intelligence leaders. In such an anomalous setting, can the U.S. really prevent jihadist control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal?

The U.S. first allowed Pakistan to acquire the nuclear bomb by turning a blind eye to its illicit procurement of blueprints and items from overseas. Then, when the clandestine nuclear importers in Pakistan morphed into covert nuclear exporters, the U.S. failed to detect their proliferation activities for 16 long years. Worse still, Washington has not been interested in fully investigating the very network it helped uncover or in bringing its ringleaders to justice. As a result, international investigations into that ring have collapsed and even A.Q. Khan has been freed from house arrest.

Khan’s discharge followed Switzerland’s release of the two Tinner brothers, who along with their father were important conduits in the Pakistani ring. One of the brothers, Urs Tinner, has acknowledged working undercover for the CIA. In fact, the CIA shielded A.Q. Khan for a long time. As former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers has revealed, the CIA protected Khan from arrest and prosecution in Europe in 1975 and 1986.

Today, even as Obama seeks to assure the world about Pakistani-nuclear security, his aides admit Washington does not know where all of Pakistan’s storage sites are located. Pakistani officials have doggedly deflected U.S. requests for these details.

Although the U.S. has provided some $100 million worth of technical assistance to Islamabad under its International Nuclear Materials Protection and Cooperation program, American personnel have been denied access to most Pakistani nuclear sites, even when they have made a case for on-site installation and training.

The U.S. has been loath to sell Pakistan "Permissive Action Links" (PALs) — electronic locks embedded in weapon design that have special access codes. But it has helped Pakistan design a system of controls, barriers and sensors, including improvised electronic-locking devices added to already-built weapons. But rather than let Americans enter its sites, Pakistan sent its personnel for on-site training in the U.S. on intrusion detectors, portal monitors, locks and material-accounting equipment. Put simply, the U.S. has not been allowed to see how its money has been spent.

In any event, modern security and accounting systems can be of little value in the face of insider threats. The real threat of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal comes not from jihadists outside, but from jihadists within the system — specifically, from the jihadist-penetrated military, intelligence and nuclear establishments.

Yet, with the Obama administration hyping the Pakistani Taliban threat to win early congressional passage of record-level aid for Islamabad, international concerns have centered on outsider threats. The Taliban, either in Pakistan or Afghanistan, have not been active outside Pashtun areas, and there is no evidence of any nuclear assets being present in the troubled Pashtun parts.

Pakistan has emulated India’s example in storing nukes in disassembled form, with the warheads and delivery vehicles stowed in separate facilities. For outsiders to acquire even one complete bomb, capture of at least two facilities would be necessary, along with the expertise to mate the fissile "core" and trigger with the delivery vehicle. This is unlikely to happen without military generals and other senior insiders actively colluding with the outsiders.

Then CIA chief George Tenet writes in his 2007 book, "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA," that President George W. Bush was so concerned by the charity’s activities that he directed him to fly to Islamabad. The charity was shut down and Mahmood detained.

Programs to screen and monitor personnel can achieve little when jihad-spouting personnel abound in the Pakistani military and nuclear establishments. Such personnel can serve as sleepers for extremist groups.

Safeguarding Pakistani nuclear assets from jihadists demands the creation of a stable, moderate Pakistan. That, in turn, demands sustained international political investment in building and strengthening civilian institutions. But can that happen without a fundamental break from U.S. policies that continue to prop up a meddling army, fatten the ISI and encourage the military, intelligence and nuclear establishments to stay not accountable to the elected government?

If U.S. policy remains driven by political expediency and near-term objectives, an Islamist takeover of Pakistan could result from one of two scenarios: a collapse of central authority or, more likely, an intramilitary struggle in which the jihadists gain ascendancy.

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

The Japan Times: Thursday, May 14, 2009

U.S.-India nuclear deal: Bereft of transformative power

Posted on May 1, 2009 by Chellaney

After the euphoria, the harsh reality

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, May 1, 2009

The much-trumpeted Indo-U.S. nuclear deal has failed to yield strategic benefits for India. Indeed, such is its burden that even as U.S. policy ignores vital Indian interests in the region, New Delhi stays mum.

The U.S.-India nuclear deal was promoted as a transformative initiative — one that would put the bilateral relationship on a much-higher pedestal. In his valedictory speech, President George W. Bush declared: “We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India.” By contrast, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has not made a single statement on the deal — not even to Parliament — ever since the vaunted deal came to fruition, other than to admit recently that he got his party to back the deal by threatening to resign.

Dr. Singh’s reticence has to do with the fact that the conditions and riders the U.S. Congress attached while ratifying the deal demolished the assurances he had made to Parliament. Consequently, Dr. Singh was unable to keep the promise he made to the Lok Sabha last July 22: “I will come to Parliament before operationalizing the nuclear agreement.” On several occasions before the deal was set in cement, Dr. Singh, however, had trumpeted its transformative character.

Seven months after the deal’s realization, there is no sign of its transformative power. Rather, doubts have arisen over the supposed “global strategic partnership” with America. The policy frame in which Washington is viewing India is not the larger Asian geopolitical landscape, but the southern Asian context. But even on regional matters of vital interest to India, the U.S. has sought to ignore New Delhi or pursue antithetical policy approaches. To the chagrin of Indian neocons — who ingenuously marketed the nuclear deal as a U.S. move to build India as a world power and counterweight to China — Washington has declared that its “most important bilateral relationship in the world” is with Beijing.

Those who rammed through the deal — even if it meant stunting India’s nuclear-deterrent development — blame the new U.S. administration for downgrading India’s importance and being unsympathetic to its security concerns. Actually, it’s the deal-pushers who are to blame for allowing their wishful thinking to blind them to the strategic trends that were firmly set long before Barack Obama came to the White House.

Take the China factor. America and the Soviet Union took three decades to achieve mutually assured destruction (MAD). During Bush’s presidency, America and China became locked in MAD — not in military but in economic terms. The two now are so tied in a mutually dependent relationship for their economic well-being that attempts to snap those ties would amount to mutually assured destruction. Just as the beleaguered U.S. economy cannot do without continuing capital inflows from China, the American market is the lifeline of the Chinese export juggernaut.

It was thus no surprise that Bush left the White House with a solid China-friendly legacy, best illustrated by the manner in which he ignored the Chinese crackdown in Tibet and showed up at the Beijing Olympics. It wasn’t a surprise either that Hillary Clinton paid obeisance in Beijing soon after her appointment as secretary of state, going to the unusual extent of publicly demoting human rights and emphasizing economic, environmental and security relations with China. Today, there is talk even of a US-China diarchy — a G-2 — ruling the world. The naïveté of Indian neocons was astonishing.

Take the Mumbai terrorist assaults. After Pakistan-based elements orchestrated those unparalleled attacks, two successive U.S. administrations leaned on India to refrain from imposing the mildest diplomatic sanctions against Islamabad. As Mrs. Clinton candidly admitted before a congressional panel on April 23, “We worked very hard, as did the prior administration, to prevent India from reacting.” That admission explains why Dr. Singh did not take the smallest of small steps against Pakistan — even as a symbolic expression of India’s outrage — despite saying in public that “some Pakistani official agencies must have supported” those attacks.

Take another example. India got no tangible help from the Bush or Obama administration to bring the plotters of the Mumbai strikes to justice, despite providing extraordinary access to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to independently investigate those attacks and even allowing the CIA to serve as a conduit for intelligence exchange with Islamabad. Rather, Washington wants India now to rise above the Mumbai attacks and aid Obama’s “Afpak” strategy by giving Pakistan a tranquil eastern border through troop redeployments.

The U.S. message to India is to forget Mumbai and silently suffer Pakistan’s war by terror — a message reinforced by Washington’s identification of terrorist safe havens only along Pakistan’s western border. Mrs. Clinton indeed suggested India endure more Mumbais stoically by telling Congress, “So, we do have a lot of work to do with the Indian government, to make sure that they continue to exercise the kind of restraint they showed after Mumbai, which was remarkable, especially given the fact that it was the political season.”

Take yet another case. The re-hyphenation of India with Pakistan today is complete. India now figures in U.S. calculations principally in relation to Pakistan and Obama’s new Afpak strategy. This poorly conceived strategy is doomed to fail. And its means and ends are sure to engender more terrorist attacks against India, already bearing the brunt of the blowback from past failed U.S. policies.

The re-hyphenation, however, flows not from a policy decision in Washington but from the disappearance of an optical illusion called “de-hyphenation.” As American scholars Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph have written, “For roughly 50 years, the U.S. destabilized the South Asia region by acting as an offshore balancer. Its actions allowed Pakistan to realize its goal of ‘parity’ with its much-bigger neighbour and to try to best that neighbour in several wars.” But with Pakistan’s descent into chaos and India’s economic rise, the U.S. had no choice in this decade but to advance ties with India, to quote Mrs. Clinton again, “as part of a wide-ranging diplomatic agenda to meet today’s daunting challenges topped by the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Under Bush, U.S. policy simply went from hyphenation to parallelism. That involved building strategic partnerships with and selling arms to both India and Pakistan. No sooner had Bush initiated the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP) with India in early 2004 than he caught New Delhi unawares by designating Pakistan a Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA). His push to sell weapons to India coincided with the U.S. sale of F-16s, P-3C Orions, C-130s, TOW missiles, Aerostat surveillance radars, 155mm self-propelled howitzers and Phalanx systems to Pakistan to help maintain “military balance on the subcontinent.” This decade brought U.S. success in building parallel intelligence-sharing and defence-cooperation arrangements with India and Pakistan, while supposedly pursuing “de-hyphenation.”

On Pakistan — a pawn too valuable for any U.S. administration to stop using for regional objectives — American policy has displayed continuity for long. The fact that Obama, in his first 100 days, has helped put together $15.7 billion in international aid for Islamabad shows the U.S. resolve not to allow Pakistan to fail — a country where, he admits, “we have huge strategic interests.” But it was Bush who let Pakistan rake in a terrorist windfall, as he plied it with sophisticated weapons and more than $12.3 billion in funds, notwithstanding the escalating Pakistani-scripted terror attacks in India after 9/11.

Both under Bush and Obama, the Taliban’s top Afghan leadership (living in Quetta) has received protection not just from the Pakistani intelligence, but also from the CIA, which has not carried out a single drone attack in or around Quetta so that the U.S. retains the option to cut a political deal over Afghanistan. It’s no wonder that even as the Taliban’s sway in Pakistan spreads, Robert Gates, Bush’s and now Obama’s defence secretary, has said the U.S. “would be very open” to a Swat Valley-style agreement in Afghanistan with the Taliban.

For years, the U.S. has played to India’s ego and to Pakistan’s craving for funds and weapons. Bush kept India happy with a grand partnership vision while he pandered to Pakistan’s needs. The very day Bush announced his decision to sell F-16s to Pakistan — a public slap for India — Washington patronizingly offered to “help India become a major world power in the 21st century.” This was lapped up by Indian neocons as a “tectonic shift” in U.S. policy. Similarly, Obama massaged India’s ego by declaring that Richard Holbrooke’s mission would stay restricted to the Afpak belt, only to quietly include Kashmir and India in his envoy’s agenda. Now, Centcom chief Gen. David Petraeus has undiplomatically blurted out the truth to Congress that Holbrooke’s “portfolio very much includes India,” and Holbrooke and he are in “constant touch” with Indian officials.

Deal-peddlers in India overlooked a basic fact: In the U.S., stout institutional processes of policymaking inhibit abrupt shifts, and a deal over a single issue was unlikely to yield a fundamental policy change across the board. Even a change of administration, historically, has not meant a dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy. That is why Obama, elected on the slogan of change, has thus far not delivered substantive change in foreign policy. By employing softer, more conciliatory language, Obama, however, has sought to package his talk as change by itself.

Today, while India gropes for strategic benefits from the nuclear deal, the U.S. is set to reap non-proliferation and economic benefits once international inspections begin and contracts are signed. It is unfortunate that intense partisan rancour was kicked up in India over an oversold deal, which was pushed through with no public scrutiny, although it thrusts an uneconomical energy choice and carries long-term implications.

Avert an Islamist takeover of Pakistan

Posted on April 30, 2009 by Chellaney

India is in peril. Obama is making it worse

Brahma Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney says that India is indeed ‘the sponge that protects us all’ from terrorism emanating from Pakistan. The new President’s strategy is compounding the Af-Pak problem

The Spectator, April 29, 2009

One of the most striking things about the larger Asian strategic landscape is that India is wedged in an arc of failing or troubled states. This harsh reality is India’s most glaring weakness; its neighbourhood is so combustible as to impose a tyranny of geography. Today, Pakistan’s rapid Talebanisation tops India’s concerns. After all, the brunt of escalating terrorism from Pakistan will be borne by India, which already has become, in the words of ex-US official Ashley Tellis, ‘the sponge that protects us all’.

As Pakistan has begun to sink, top US intelligence and security officials have made a beeline to India for discussions, including the new CIA director Leon Panetta (who came to New Delhi on his first overseas visit), the FBI director Robert Mueller, the joint US chiefs of staff chairman Mike Mullen and the administration’s special envoy Richard Holbrooke. The fact that President Obama, in his first 100 days, has helped put together $15.7 billion in international aid for Islamabad shows that the United States will not allow Pakistan to become a failed state.

The real threat is of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan. Yet Obama’s strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan (or ‘Af-Pak’ in Washingtonese) inspires little confidence. Throwing more money at Pakistan and keeping up the pretence that the badly splintered and weakened al-Qa’eda poses the main terrorist threat risks failure.

The Af-Pak problem won’t go away without a fundamental break from the American policies that helped create this terrifying muddle. The US military can never win in Afghanistan, or even secure a ticket out of that country as Obama wants, without first dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for the Taleban and other state-reared terror groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (the group who carried out the Mumbai atrocities) and Jaish-e-Muhammad. As Bush’s national security adviser Stephen Hadley pointed out just before leaving office in January, ‘You can’t really solve Afghanistan without solving Pakistan.’

Yet to mend a broken policy on Pakistan, Obama is doing more of what helped to create the failure — dispensing rewards upfront. He has set out to make Islamabad the biggest recipient of US aid in the world without having first defined benchmarks for judging progress. It was under his predecessor, however, that Pakistan began raking in a terrorist windfall. The Bush administration plied Islamabad with sophisticated weapons, which Pakistan wanted to match India’s arsenal, and more than $12.3 billion in funds, even as the origins of almost every major terrorist attack in the world were being traced back to Pakistan. Now, when Pakistan is most vulnerable to international pressure, including to a threat to place it on the US list of state sponsors of terror, Obama refuses to exercise leverage to bring it to heel.

No less strange is another reality: for years, the Taleban’s entire top Afghan leadership has been holed up in Quetta, in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. Mullah Muhammad Omar and other members of the Taleban’s inner shura (council) have received protection not just from the Pakistani intelligence, but also from the CIA, which has not carried out a single drone attack in or around Quetta. Washington is trying to keep open the option of cutting a political deal with them. As Obama himself has put it, ‘There’s got to be an exit strategy.’ It’s no wonder that even as the Taleban’s sway in Pakistan spreads, the US defense secretary Robert Gates declared in Krakow that the United States ‘would be very open’ to an agreement in Afghanistan similar to the one Pakistan made with the Taleban which ceded control of the Swat Valley to the Taleban. All this is music to the ears of the Pakistani military and its offspring — the Taleban.

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 others’ security and those who threaten ours. But, unfortunately, that is what the Obama administration is doing, first by drawing a specious distinction between al-Qa’eda and the Taleban, and then seeking to split the Taleban into the Afghan Taleban and Pakistani Taleban. US forces have been directed to go after the Pakistani Taleban, led by Baitullah Mehsud, even as the CIA tacitly shields Mullah Omar and company. Similarly, the United States treats Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami as good terrorists and has offered a deal to Hekmatyar, while American forces target another Afghan private army that is led by Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son. It is troubling for India that Washington continues to pretend that terrorist safe havens exist only along Pakistan’s western frontier. To this day, no senior US official has admitted that terrorist sanctuaries are present along Pakistan’s border with India.

The Obama policy also does not face up to another reality: Pakistan’s political border with Afghanistan has ceased to exist in practice. The so-called Durand Line — a British colonial invention that left the large Pashtun community divided into two — now exists only on maps. Its disappearance is irreversible. How then can the US expect to prop up the Pakistani state within political frontiers that, in part, no longer exist? In fact, the writ of the Pakistani government has ceased to run in nearly half the country. With the state withering away in the Pashtun and Baluch lands, the jihadist-infiltrated military establishment and its infamous Inter-Services Intelligence agency have chosen to cede control to proxy militant groups.

The Obama team rejects the Bush administration’s institution-building approach in Afghanistan as an attempt to create ‘some sort of Central Asian Valhalla’. Yet it has unveiled $7.5 billion in civilian aid for an increasingly radicalised Pakistan to win hearts and minds there — a Valhalla even more distant. The attempt to get the Pakistani military to focus on counterinsurgency — through a $3-billion ‘Pakistani Counterinsurgency Capability Fund’ — misses the point that what Washington calls insurgents remain prized proxies for the Pakistani generals. The premise that a US military ‘surge’ in Afghanistan can be used, Iraq-style, as a show of force to cut deals with Taleban commanders is equally flawed. This surge-and-bribe approach doesn’t account for the fact that the Afghan militants, with cosy sanctuaries across the borders, have more leeway than their Iraqi counterparts. The new strategy also ignores the reality that the Pakistani generals have little incentive to lend genuine co-operation at a time when Obama has not hidden his Afghanistan exit strategy. The generals and the Taleban just need patiently to wait out the Americans to reclaim Afghanistan.

Unwittingly, Obama’s strategy may end up repeating the very mistakes of American policy over the past three decades that have come to haunt US security and that of the rest of the free world. In seeking narrow, tactical gains, the Obama team risks falling prey to a long-standing US policy weakness: the pursuit of short-term objectives without much regard for the security of friends. It must abandon its plan regionally to contain rather than defeat terrorism, or else an Islamist takeover of Pakistan is inevitable.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/3573376/india-is-in-peril-obama-is-making-it-worse.thtml

U.S. aid to Pakistan: Spin and reality

Posted on April 25, 2009 by Chellaney

Pakistan’s terrorist windfall

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

Pakistan has long proven 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 epicenter of global terrorism — a 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 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 November 2008 Mumbai strikes, the amount of aid pledged or delivered to Pakistan has totaled a staggering $23.3 billion. This figure excludes China’s unpublicized contributions but includes the International Monetary Fund’s $7.6-billion bailout package, for whose approval the head of U.S. military’s Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus, unusually interceded with the IMF brass.

Just last week, Islamabad secured more than $5 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 that has been 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 checks" 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 deja vu. The U.S. House of Representatives’ version of this innocuously labeled 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 better accountability and on presidential certification of the Pakistani military’s assistance to help "root out al-Qaida and other violent extremists in Pakistan’s tribal regions" — the goal publicly identified by U.S. 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 during Ronald Reagan’s presidency 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 more than $12.3 billion in 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).

The Obama policy rejects the Bush administration’s institution-building approach in Afghanistan as an attempt to create "some sort of Central Asian Valhalla." Yet the new administration is seeking to pump billions of dollars of additional aid into an increasingly radicalized Pakistan to win hearts and minds there — a Valhalla even more distant. In fact, almost every Obama policy assumption in the publicly declared "AfPak" strategy has an Alice in Wonderland ring to it.

Take, for example, the decision to disburse $3 billion in military aid to Islamabad in the name of a "Pakistani Counterinsurgency Capability Fund." The attempt to get the Pakistani military to focus on counterinsurgency misses the point that what the Obama administration calls insurgents remain prized proxies for the Pakistani generals.

Or take the Obama policy premise that the U.S. military "surge" can be used, Iraq-style, as a show of force to cut deals with the "good" terrorists, especially "moderate" Taliban. This surge-and-bribe assumption overlooks the fact that the Afghan militants, with cozy sanctuaries deep inside Pakistan, have more leeway than their Iraqi counterparts and thus cannot be under pressure to cut deals with the Americans.

Also, the new rewards being doled out upfront to the Pakistani military establishment disregard the reality that the Pakistani generals have little incentive to lend genuine cooperation at a time when Obama has barely disguised his Afghanistan-exit strategy. The generals and their surrogates — the Taliban — just need to patiently wait out the American exit to reclaim Afghanistan.

The U.S. policy approach is further compounded by Washington’s squint-eyed identification of terrorist safe havens only along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, despite terrorist sanctuaries deep inside the Pakistani heartland, as well as by its long-standing pampering of the Pakistani military.

Worse still, the Obama administration 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.

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.

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

The Japan Times: Saturday, April 25, 2009