Pakistan, India and the Afghanistan War

President Obama's trip to India is something to which our ally Pakistan - on whose territory we're also conducting a war - is watching closely. Margaret Talev of McClatchy Newspapers (Obama tells India Pakistan making slow progress on terror 11/07/2010) does something too rarely seen in US reporting on the Afghanistan War. She talks about how the India-Pakistan rivalry is a central issue in it:

India and Pakistan have fought three wars since their tumultuous founding in 1947, and the animosity between the rival nuclear nations is palpable. India constantly prods the United States to take a more aggressive role in pressing Pakistan to deal with anti-Indian militants that receive sanctuary in Pakistan and blames Pakistan for the Nov. 26, 2008, attacks in Mumbai that killed 160 people.

Balancing relations between the rival powers is a delicate one for Obama. The American president needs cooperation from both countries to extricate the United States from a decade of war in Afghanistan, which has increasingly become a proxy battleground for India and Pakistan. [my emphasis]

The disputed Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, which is part of India, is the biggest contentious issue between these two powers. Pakistan views the current government in Afghanistan as pro-India. And for Pakistan, its rivalry with India over Kashmir is far more important than American preferences in Afghanistan.

Tags: afghanistan war, india, pakistan

Afghanistan and Pakistan

TX Hammes wrote about the Afghanistan War before the Presidential election (The Good War? Small Wars Journal 09/15/08):

We entered Afghanistan to destroy Al Qaeda’s operating forces and eliminate its training bases. We successfully eliminated the bases and hurt Al Qaeda badly. One reason often given for our presence in Afghanistan is that we must stabilize it as a nation so that Al Qaeda can never use it as a terrorist base again. Unfortunately, Al Qaeda has moved its forces and its bases into Pakistan. The subsequent conflict inside Pakistan is contributing to increasing instability in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and has greatly increased the strain on the Pakistani government.

Before we rush more troops into Afghanistan, we must answer basic questions about our strategy for the region and how our efforts in Afghanistan support that strategy. Good tactics and more troops are not a substitute for a strategy – and in fact can significantly raise the cost of a bad strategy. [my emphasis]

Some of the constant reports in the US press about the "instability" is Pakistan may be exaggerated. Pakistan just transitioned from years of military rule to a democracy, corrupt and plutocratic as it may be in practice. And that transition, with the competitive partisan campaign that accompanied the election, seems to be mainly what people mean about Pakistan's "instability". Although I also wouldn't want to dismiss the risks, by any means.

But Hammes' basic point still applies. Stay or go, escalate or hold steady, the Obama administration needs to come up with a definite new strategy in Afghanistan. Not just send in more troops and call it a Surge.

Joschka Fischer in his weekly column Terror in Mumbai: Pakistan wird zum Risikofaktor Die Zeit Online 01.12.2008 warns that "erweist sich Pakistan zunehmend als Zentrum eines drohenden politischen Orkans, dessen Folgen ohne eine neue internationale Zusammenarbeit kaum noch beherrschbar sein werden - dies vor allem vor dem Hintergrund, dass Pakistan eine Nuklearmacht ist." (Pakistan is increasingly looking a center of a threatening political hurricane whose repercussions can hardly be mastered without new international cooperation - all this before the background that Pakistan is a nuclear power.) By that he means that the problems of Pakistan present a challenge to the whole international community, not just the incoming Obama administration.

Fischer thinks it's unlikely that the Pakistani government as such had anything to do with the Mumbai attacks, since that would contradict Pakistan's current policy of counterinsurgency against the Pakistani "Taliban" and assisting the US with the Afghanistan War. He doesn't rule out the possibility that rogue elements in the Pakistani interlligence service, the ISI, could have played some part in the Mumbai attack.

What's particularly interesting in Fischer's column is that he places the Mumbai attacks against the background of the current world economic crisis, although he says that the attack itself has no essential basis in the economic crisis.

But, he writes, "Die gegenwärtige globale Krise wird aus guten Gründen mit der Weltwirtschaftskrise von 1929 verglichen." (The current global crisis is compared to the world economic crisis of 1929 with good reason.)

That crisis lead by various pathways to the Second World War. Fischer notes that the balance of nuclear terror between the two major nuclear powers, Russia and the United States, largely rules out such a worldwide conflagration at the present moment. But the same cannot be said of many parts of the world where local rivalries are bitter and intense even without the economic crisis. Including the tensions between the nuclear powers India and Pakistan.

Fischer also thinks that there are serious problems in Pakistan, though he talks more cautiosly about "structural instability", by which he presumably means the military's habit of taking over periodically. He writes:

Neben der Erhöhung der Militärpräsenz an der pakistanischen Grenze könnte Indien allerdings auch versuchen, dem aktuellen Beispiel der USA zu folgen. Die Vereinigten Staaten greifen Terroristen und deren Netzwerke mittlerweile militärisch auf pakistanischem Boden an. Sollte nun auch Indien dieses Recht gegenüber Pakistan für sich reklamieren, so wären die beide Nuklearmächte Indien und Pakistan ab sofort wieder am Rande eines heißen Krieges.

Pakistan entwickelt sich mehr und mehr zum größten Risikofaktor der Weltpolitik: arm, unterentwickelt, strukturell instabil, mit einer Bevölkerung von mehr als 170 Millionen Menschen, eine Brutstätte islamistischer Terroristen und Radikaler und gleichzeitig eine Nuklearmacht. Wenn dieses Land außer Kontrolle gerät, wird nicht nur Indien ein sehr ernstes Problem haben.

Die Lösung des pakistanischen Knotens vermag keine Macht der Welt mehr allein zu bewerkstelligen, auch die USA nicht. Sollte die Atommacht Pakistan endgültig als Staat zerfallen, wird es nur Verlierer geben. Angesichts dieses enormen Risikos wird die pakistanische Herausforderung zur politischen Nagelprobe für eine neue Gemeinsamkeit der Staatengemeinschaft werden. Präsident Obama ist nicht zu beneiden.

[Besides increasing its military presence on the Pakistani border, India could also attempt to follow the current example of the USA. The United States at the moment attacks terrorists and their networks at them moment on Pakistani soil. Should India also reclaim this right for itself [i.e., attack targets in Pakistan], the two nuclear powers India and Pakistan would immediately be on the verge of a hot war.

Pakistan is developing more and more to be the biggest risk factor in world politics: poor, underdeveloped, structurally unstable, with a population of more than 170 million people, a hotbed of Islamic terrorists and radicals and at the same time a nuclear power. If this country goes out of control, it's not only India that would have a very serious problem.

It may be that no power in the world is in the position to effect the solution to the Pakistani knot, not even the USA. Should the nuclear power Pakistan eventually become a failed state, there will be only losers. Taking this huge risk into account, the Pakistani challenge is becominig a key political test for a new common effort of the international community. I don't envy President Obama.]

This is another remdinder of the far-reaching implications that reckless American policies can have. It's true, the US is current firing rockets, dropping bombs and running the occasional ground operation in Pakistan, as well as similar actions Syria and Somalia, and maybe Iran. There are probably Indian politicians and military officers who would be glad to follow the American example.

If the US is going to be fighting a war inside Pakistan, we shouldn't do it by gradual mission creep, which is what Cheney and Bush - and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who will be staying in his position for a while - have been doing in Pakistan.

The maximum effectiveness in hitting Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida group came in 2001-2. Now we're fighting a war against Afghani and Pakistani insurgents. If the mission creep continues, we could wind up turning Pakistan into a failed (nuclear) state. And how long will a nuclear-armed Pakistan be willing to allow the US to carry out a war within its own borders against its own citizens? Pakistan really does have "weapons of mass destruction".

Continuing the Cheney policy of war by mission creep in Afghanistan is a really bad option.

Tags: afghanistan war, india, joschka fischer, pakistan

How many times to we have to watch this movie?

At the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Anthony Cordesman, a sober-minded, conservative military analyst, sounded the alarm. "We are running out of time," he wrote. "We currently are losing, and the trends have been consistent since 2004...we face a crisis in the field--right now." The situation, he said, is far more urgent than anything that can be solved by economic aid or nation-building efforts. "At least during 2009-10, priority must be given to warfighting needs." McKiernan, the US commander, has called for at least four more brigades, perhaps as many as 25,000 troops. He warned that the mission in Afghanistan will require a "sustained commitment" lasting many years, and the United States has announced plans to help more than double the size of the Afghan National Army (ANA), to 134,000 troops. "This is a decades-long project," says Ashley Tellis, a former National Security Council specialist on South Asia, who adds that it will take at least ten years before the United States can withdraw and let the ANA fight its own battles. "The transition alone will take a decade, until you can switch to the ANA," he says.

That's from Bob Dreyfuss, Obama's Afghan Dilemma The Nation 12/03/08. And, unfortunately, it's not a horror movie, it's reality.

My biggest worry about an Obama Presidency at this point is that they will make the mistake of simply escalating the war in Afghanistan without a definite, time-limited exit strategy. Dreyfuss' article goes into some detail about the reasons that it's an untenable goal, beyond the reasonable limits of American power.

I saw someone the other day complaining that because Obama talked about the practical consequences of foreign policy decisions, that mean he was a cynical pragmatist and not an "idealist". It was a dumb argument.

Because the costs and benefits to be reasonably expected are part of deciding whether a war makes sense or not. That's been a part of classical Just War theory since forever. And it's why, even in a necessary war, decisionmakers need a good sense of what the costs and risks are likely to be.

The Afghanistan War needs a complete bottom-up review. As Dreyfuss points out, we went into Afghanistan to neutralize (call or capture) as many Al Qa'ida cadres as we could. But Cheney and Rummy just wanted to get that mission out of the way as quickly as possible so they could invade Iraq. So the benefits we gained in terms of the original mission are questionable, although it does seem likely that the operation badly damaged Bin Laden's core Al Qa'ida organization, maybe permanently.

Now we're a good seven years and counting into the war. And we're seeing big-time mission creep. Obama's team including Gates the Holdover should be asking some serious and basic questions, among them:

Does the US have any real interest in fighting the collection of tribal warlords in Afghanistan and Pakistan that the Pentagon calls "the Taliban"?

How long will that take?

How many American troops will it require? For how long?

How much can we reasonably expect other NATO countries to contribute? And for how long?

Do we need to consider western Pakistan part of the main theater of the war?

What are the downsides to staying in Afghanistan for five, ten, 20 years?

What are the risks in continuing to fight a war in Pakistan: on the government, on the region, on the American reputation and alliances?

As Dreyfuss explains in his article, if the goal is to turn Afghanistan into a stable nation with no warring warlords and the government being both perceived as legitimate and having a monopoly of force (i.e., no private militias running around shooting up each other and the government), we're realistically talking about decades.

Or, in other words, that kind of goal would require the US to maintain something like a colonial relationship in Afghanistan for what amounts to indefinitely.

In a situation like this, the fact of the US engaging in a protracted war there is in itself damaging to our national security. At some point, and much sooner than later, the US needs to say, okay, we've done what we can do here. The costs are now exceeding the possible benefits. And here's the schedule on which we're leaving.

A mission to strike Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida group and even to install a government that would not be friendly to them made sense - in 2001. Doing what we're doing now, fighting an open-ended war against local guerrillas and warlords, is exactly the mistake the Soviet Union made there in the 1980s.

And really, our current situation is a lot like the situation the Soviets faced in 1989 in Afghanistan itself. Our casualties are rising. We have virtually no support among the population. Nor does our allied government. And unless we're ready to virtually annex the place for an indefinite period of time, we're not going to be able to accomplish much more than we have.

It's time to declare victory and take American troops out of there. Not put more in.

Dreyfuss argues that there really is a meaningful possibility for a constructive exit strategy:

India is deeply involved in Afghanistan now, and its role there is causing a degree of paranoia in Pakistan. India, along with Iran and Russia, helped oust the Pakistan-backed Taliban in 2001. India has provided $1.2 billion in aid to Afghanistan since then, and it has opened consulates in four Afghan cities that, Pakistan fears, could be bases for Indian intelligence. It is against that threat, historically, that Pakistan has supported right-wing Islamists. But India is a power with global ambitions, a thriving economy and powerful armed forces, and it is becoming clear in Pakistan that it can no longer compete with India, which is causing an outbreak of realism inside the Pakistani army. Ashley Tellis, now of the Carnegie Endowment, has had extensive contacts with Pakistan's military. "The mainstream of the Pakistani army no longer sees India as the main threat," he says. "There may be some of the far right, among the Islamists, who believe that India is the central danger." But Tellis says they are a minority. "To protect their institutional interests, they know that they must have a rapprochement with India."

The opportunity for a dialogue with elements of the Taliban and the possibility of a peace process between Pakistan and India constitute the true exit strategy for the United States in Afghanistan. But to nail down a deal with the insurgents, the United States will have to offer them what they most want, namely, a timetable for the withdrawal of US and NATO forces. "What the insurgents do seem to agree about is that foreigners shouldn't run their country, and that the country should be run according to the principles of Islam," says Chas Freeman.

Tags: afghanistan war, india, pakistan

The India-Pakistan-Afghanistan triangle

After the recent terrorist attack in Mumbai, we're seeing quite a bit of comment on whether it will affect the fight against the Taliban and Al Qa'ida - leaving aside whether we really need to be fighting the Taliban in either Afghanistan or Pakistan - by drawing Pakistani troops to the Indian border. And that could well be the case.

Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institute wrote on 09/11/08 about How 9/11 is Connected to December 13. His educated guess is that the December 13, 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament building was instigated by Al Qa'ida in order to create tensions along the Pakistan-India border and draw Pakistani troops away from trying to seal the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

It certainly did have that effect. And the two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, had conventional troops massed along their common border for around a year after that.

As Riegel writes, "The al-Qaeda is too often seen in the West only in its Middle East dimension; its roots in South Asia are often ignored or misunderstood."

And the fact that Pakistan likely sees Afghanistan more in the context of its relations with India is also little discussed, but could be as important than the troop movements, or more so. Pakistan backed the Taliban prior to 9/11/2001 because they provided "strategic depth" in the ongoing conflict with India over the Kashmir province. And they wanted to make sure that Afghanistan was not going to become an ally of India.

Right now, the Karzai government in Kabul most likely looks even more like a pro-India government to the Pakistanis than it did before.

Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay wrote in their 2003 book, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy:

Just as he had reoriented America's foreign policy agenda to focus single-mindedly on defeating terror, so Bush expected every other country to reorient its foreign policy as well. But the rest of the world had more to worry about than the terrorist attacks on the United States.

And if Pakistan decides that their need to have Afghanistan as an unquestionably reliable ally in their conflict with India is more important than the need to please the Americans, that could complicate matters inside Afghanistan even more.

Tags: afghanistan war, india, pakistan

Terrorism in India and its implications

Jo Johnson reports for the Financial Times about terrorism in India. Both his article and its title suggest that there might be more to terrorism that "the terrorists hate us for our freedom": Roots of terror lie in greed and grievance 11/27/08.

But Johnson reports that there is a danger that India will simply blame the horrible attacks this week in Mumbai on Pakistan, whether are not there is evidence of such involvement:

Manmohan Singh, who as prime minister since May 2004 has presided over a spectacular transformation of India’s global standing, was quick to blame the country’s neighbours for the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Whenever terror strikes, the Indian elite instinctively looks for scapegoats beyond its borders, almost always blaming the Pakistan-based militant groups that are opposed to the peace process between the two nuclear-armed rivals. They point out that big terrorist attacks often coincide with periods of rapprochement.

"Unless the national security adviser had told the prime minister – a circumspect man not given to rash statements – that there was evidence of foreign involvement, he wouldn’t have gone on television and said this, especially when he’s trying to work with [Pakistan president] Asif Ali Zardari," says Sumit Ganguly, professor of political science at Indiana University. "The Pakistani president has made a series of extraordinary gestures that the Indian prime minister is extremely keen on reciprocating."

But the rapidity with which India blames Pakistan or groups operating under the direct or indirect control of Islamabad’s main intelligence agency worries those who believe that terrorism on Indian soil also has indigenous roots. [my emphasis]

For news on the terror attacks, see Memeorandum.

Conservatives are fond of arguing that because many active terrorists and their leaders are not from poor backgrounds, that the effects of poverty and desperate conditions among particular populations must have nothing to do with the causes of terrorism. It's a little like arguing that because most US soldiers aren't owners of oil wells that it would be impossible for oil to be a factor in any US war.

Johnson writes:

Despite four years of turbo-charged growth, there are still hundreds of millions living in abject poverty. Of all the groups yet to benefit from spectacular growth, none, apart from so-called dalits (once known as “untouchables”) and tribals, have fared as poorly as Muslims.

Some, inevitably, succumb to the blandishments of recruiters from the country’s myriad insurgencies and extremist movements. Unless these underlying causes of India’s susceptibility to terrorism are addressed, it is possible that India’s path to superpowerdom will be bumpier than most predict.

Johnson doesn't mention it in the article. But the status of the disputed majority-Muslim Kashmir province is also a big issue for Muslims in the world, especially in South Asia. Even though most South Asians don't live in Kashmir.

Tags: india, kashmir, terrorism

Civil wars can create long-lasting messes

Kashmir

I just came across a concisely stated summary of what can happen in the wake of decolonization and civil war. It's from John Esposito's 2002 Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam:

The creation of India and Pakistan resulted in communal warfare that left millions dead. Tens of thousands of Hindus and Muslims were forced to emigrate, Hindus to India and Muslims to Pakistan. Pakistan proved equally fragile. East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) and West Pakistan were separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory. The difficulty of establishing a strong sense of nationalism in countries with such enormous ethnic, tribal, linguistic, and cultural diversity can be deduced from the fact that in both India and Pakistan the vast majority of the citizens in each country could not speak their national language (Hindi and Urdu respectively). The bloody results of colonial map making and nation creation were evident yet again in the brutal 1971 Pakistan civil war which led to the creation of Bangladesh, and in the bloody ethnic clashes that have threatened the stability of Pakistan to the present day. In Kashmir, the creation of a Muslim majority state within India resulted in wars between India and Pakistan in 1947 and 1965. Since 1987, Kashmiri separatists have been locked in a struggle against India's rule that has brought as many as 750,000 Indian troops to Kashmir to carry out a brutal war. To the present day, Kashmir continues to be a major incendiary issue in relations between India and Pakistan. (my emphasis)

Both of which are nuclear powers, I might add.

With the Iraq War in mind, the above is a reminder of (1) the unpredictability of civil wars; and, (2) the danger in outside powers coming in and stirring up a godawful mess in the first place.

In some of the worst troubles of the world today, we have the "civilizing" mission of the British Empire to thank. It was Britain with help from their imperial partner and sometime rival France that carved up the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the First World War. That particular conflict, which was largely a mindless slaughter than the European leaders should have had the decency and good sense to avoid, also brought an end to the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German Empires.

War can also have wildly unpredictable outcomes. Yet another reason to make it the "last, last, last resort" to solving conflicts, in Wesley Clark's words.

In a real sense, the ethnic/religious conflicts now shaking Iraq are in significant part due to the British schemes for divvying up the Ottoman Empire. Britain tried to maintain a permanent presence in Iraq, too. They finally got tired of the colonial war there and left. (Until that pathetic Tony Blair followed Cheney and Bush back in.)

And, of course, it was during that time that British statesmen in their wisdom made conflicting promises to the Arab and Jewish residents of Palestine. That was a major step toward the post-Second World War decision that the British made, when they finally got tired of fighting Zionist guerrillas/terrorists and left Palestine to the United Nations to solve.

We can speculate that the creation of Israel would have severely antagonized Muslims in any case. But it was Britain who largely shaped the particular form in which that conflict began after Israel was established. Now, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is s deeply-felt grievance for Muslims all over the world. We can say that's irrational. But of course it's irrational. It's religion. And emotion. And it has real effects in the world, rational or not.

Kashmir, the problem that emerged from the post-British shakeout in what are now India and Pakistan is also a major issue for Muslims, though it's virtually unknown in the United States, it seems.

I'm getting more hesitant all the time about drawing "lessons from history". I can't help but observe that Iraq War supporters would use this bit of history about India, Pakistan and Kashmir as a reason to continue the Iraq War indefinitely. Assuming that FOX News explains some version of it to them, that is.

But the real risk and great likelihood that civil conflict in Iraq will intensify for some period of time after the US leaves isn't in itself reason to stay. We also have to look at the effects of staying. And only in the dream-world of Maverick McCain and like-minded war fans is everything coming up roses in Iraq thanks to The Surge,aka, the McCain escalation.

I wish our Republican zealots had stopped to think about the risk of invading and occupying Iraq before we invaded.

God save us from the worshippers of war.

Tags: british empire, india, iraq war, john esposito, kashmir, pakistan