Obama's Beijing kowtow

The unspoken fears that India had of the Obama Administration seem to be coming true. President Obama’s visit to China and the various statements in relation to the South Asian region that have emerged from the visit point to the fact that the pendulum of American interests is once again shifting away from New Delhi to Beijing. As Obama noted in his joint press statement on Wednesday: “President Hu and I also discussed our mutual interest in security and stability of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And neither country can or should be used as a base for terrorism, and we agreed to cooperate more on meeting this goal, including bringing about more stable, peaceful relations in all of South Asia.”
Had the president stopped at the first sentence, it would have been acceptable, but to talk of cooperation in bringing “stable, peaceful relations in all of South Asia” is ominous.


Incidentally in his portion of the remarks, his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao spoke of the need to uphold “peace and stability” and “to respect and accommodate each other’s core interests and major concerns.” As he spelt them out, they related to the Korean peninsula, the Middle East and Gulf region, Iran. Impliedly, they were linked to Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang. There was no hint of any concern with South Asia.
So what has persuaded the US that China can play a role in promoting South Asian peace? Are they not aware of the history, and indeed the contemporary dynamics of the region?
In early 1992, the George HW Bush Administration proposed a five-power system to control nuclear proliferation in South Asia — the US, China and Russia would oversee a non-nuclear pact between India and Pakistan. That proposal, too foundered on the realities of the regional dynamics whose major element was Beijing’s policy of checking New Delhi.

Compulsions
It would appear that Obama is keen to draw out Beijing to play a larger role in global affairs. His aim is to seek Beijing’s increasing heft in world affairs — and its special ties with Pakistan — to get quick resolutions into the emerging quagmire of Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as the potential one in Iran. So, Mr Obama seems to have offered up South Asia as a bait of sorts to Beijing.
This is significant because the Chinese believe that it was only in the administration of his predecessor George W Bush that India was brought out as a kind of potential trump to check China’s rise. What Mr Obama seems to be telling Beijing is that the US does not consider South Asia (read India) as any kind of a counter-weight to China, and is willing to calibrate its own policies in the region with Beijing.
The background of Obama’s compulsions are obvious. In a recent appearance on the Jim Lehrer show, Niall Fergusson put it this way: Chimerica had now become a single economy. The driver of the world economy in the period 1998-2007, was Chinese exports to the US and the US imports from China. The Chinese intervention in international currency markets by keeping the Chinese currency weak has actually helped finance a part of the US deficit. “China has become the banker to the United States. And its policy of reserve accumulation has provided nearly $2 trillion worth of effectively cheap, if not free, credit to the United States.”
The New York Times recently elucidated the consequences of this somewhat more bluntly. The American-Chinese relations offered a a 10:10 deal where China gets 10 per cent growth and the US gets 10 per cent unemployment. In other words, the seemingly symbiotic relationship is actually a parasitical one — China is using the US to ride to world power status.
Instead of altering these adverse terms of trade, or even attempting to do so, Mr Obama seems to be actually encouraging China. And why? Either he does not care, or he feels that in the short time that he needs results — in Afghanistan and Iran — Beijing’s cooperation or neutrality towards US is more important than putting the US economy and its security policy on a sustainable and stable path.
It is true that the US and China have a number of common interests — stability in North-east Asia, Persian Gulf and the need for a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue. But there is no indication that they trust each other enough to evolve a common policy to move forward in any of those areas deemed important by them. Yet, Obama seems to be convinced that the enormity of the economic links that the two countries have with each other can translate into common political goals.
In the case of South Asia, he is thinking for the short term and in the process ignoring our interests. Chinese policy in the region is based on the single aim of checking India. This goes back to the early 1960s when it began to cultivate Pakistan and teach India a lesson. In pursuit of this policy, Beijing has done a lot, including the unthinkable: It actually provided Pakistan the design and material to make atom bombs, and actually tested one for them in 1990. The Chinese efforts to befriend Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Myanmar have had a similar goal. And the one country that it has been systematically hostile to is India.

Balance
The reason for this is that, like it or not, the only country in Asia which can offer a counter-weight to China is India. As of today Indian economic growth and military power cannot match that of China, yet both are proceeding at a respectable rate.
Indian economic growth which has been around 7-8 per cent recently has come despite its hopeless infrastructure and lack of reforms. With more focused efforts, and a little help from its demographic profile, India could well match, and even exceed China in the 2020s.
United States policy had a trajectory similar to the Chinese in the region. In its own way, it, too, sought to check New Delhi’s desire to be an independent actor on the world stage. So, its policy was to maintain good relations with India, even while cultivating Pakistan as its primary strategic partner. The DNA of that policy is still evident. It was only with the Bush Administration that US policy shifted decisively towards befriending India.
But with the Obama Administration veering towards Beijing, this policy is going to remain a work in progress for a little bit longer.

Interests
Obama’s Beijing kowtow is unlikely to succeed. Given the depth of its commitment to Pakistan, China is incapable of playing an honest broker in the South Asian region, even assuming that it wants to. More important, New Delhi is not entirely without options or friends who are thinking for the longer term.
Countries in the periphery of China are worrying about the consequences of the Sino-American love fest. As of today, China’s military modernisation does not offer a threat to the US. But it does pose a potential threat to Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, India, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Their real worry is not so much with China's military modernisation, or even its pace or scale, but the opacity of Chinese strategic thinking.
So next week when Manmohan Singh visits the US, don't be taken in by the verbiage that comes out of Washington, or the glitter of the state banquet billed as a singular honour for the Indian prime minister.
The US is in hock to China and it has a leader who has shown that he does not quite know how to deal with it. While it is in our interest to have good, and even close, relations with the US, we need to be clear that a country of India’s size and varied interests has no option but to have strategic autonomy in matters of security and foreign policy.
This appeared first in Mail Today November 20, 2009

In pardoning criminals, you betray their victims

At the time of the national and state assembly elections, earlier this year, an NGO provided considerable detail to show that our legislative assemblies and parliament had come to be populated by a disproportionately large number of millionaires. The implication is that the legislatures are now skewed towards the interests of the well off.
Coincidence or not, it now seems apparent from the revelations of the Manu Sharma episode that our criminal justice system, too, favours the the rich and powerful. Even if you are convicted of rape and murder, if you have the right connections, not only can you manage the occasional parole, but actually receive a signed and certified pardon from the state.

Pardons
It is true, of course, that with access to good (read expensive) lawyers the rich do have an advantage when it comes to facing the criminal justice system. But they face the same procedures, judges and the law as do the poor. Indeed, the rich and the powerful, too, get convicted, despite their best, and often questionable, efforts to get off.
The conviction of Sharma himself, the son of an influential and rich politician, Vikas Yadav, the son of a powerful West Uttar Pradesh politician, Sanjeev Nanda, former police officer R.K. Sharma have been pointers towards this. But this is where the script changes. Even though they are convicted and liable for the same punishment, the rich, even those guilty of heinous crimes, manage to systematically cheat punishment through paroles, sentence remissions and, worse, outright pardons. The blame for this shameful and amoral situation rests squarely on our bureaucratic and political class.

Why not pardon him as well ? Mohammed Afzal, convicted in the Parliament House attack case

On January 15, 1999, Sriyans Kumar Jain, a Bharatiya Janata Party activist whose life sentence for murder had been upheld by the Supreme Court, put in a mercy petition to the Haryana state government which on January 20, recommended the case to the governor of Haryana, Mahabir Prasad. By January 25th, Jain had gotten his pardon. At the time the government in the state was run by Bansi Lal and the Haryana Vikas Party which was allied to the BJP. Jain had been convicted for the murder of Krishan Kant Khandewala, a Congress municipal councillor of a small town called Hansi in 1987. He was an aide of BJP MLA P.K. Chaudhry who wanted to defeat Khandewala in the elections for the chairmanship of the town’s municipality.pardon shocked Khandewala’s family. This was not a mere commutation of a sentence. It was an actual pardon, under Section 161 of the Constitution and Section 432 of the Criminal Procedure Code, nullifying the original sentence. Subsequently the hapless family was pressured to avoid pressing an appeal in the case.
In July 1999, the successor Om Prakash Chautala government outdid the Bansi Lal largesse. By 2001 it had already pardoned ten convicted criminals. Among them were the killers of Jasbir Singh, a student leader. A sessions court initially acquitted the accused — Sat Parkash, Satbir, Himat and Devinder Singh, but a Supreme Court Bench comprising Justices K.T. Thomas and M.K. Mukherjee set aside the order and sentenced the first two to life imprisonment and the others to lesser terms. All of them were party activists belonging to Chautala’s Indian National Lok Dal and three months after assuming office, Sat Parkash and Satbir were pardoned and the others a short while later.
Neighbouring Punjab’s record is no better. Six years after their son was shot, Bathinda farmer Jagroop Singh and his wife Kartar Kaur thought that justice had been delivered when three accused were given a life sentence by a sessions judge. So confident was Sandeep Singh, the main accused, that his family did not bother to file an appeal; it merely petitioned the governor S.F. Rodrigues who granted a pardon to him. Singh is the son of former Akali minister Teja Singh, who later joined the ruling Congress.

Feudal
Why blame the northern states? Last September, in a grand gesture, Tamil Nadu released nearly 1500 prisoners to celebrate the anniversary of DMK founder C.N. Annadurai’s birth. Among them were lifers who had already served seven years of their sentence. The state justified its action, though you can be sure that among those pardoned were murderers, rapists and other reprehensible people. This act of criminal generosity was followed up by the Andhra Pradesh government this year which released nearly 1000 people, mostly lifers, citing Gandhi Jayanti as a pretext. Its attempt to free G Venkata Reddy, a Congress activist was quashed by the Supreme Court in 2006 on procedural grounds.
The concept of pardon is a feudal leftover of the divine right of kings who could not only take a life, but grant one merely on whim. This system has been inherited by India through Article 72 of the Constitution which allows the President to grant a pardon, or remission of punishment of any convict. But the president cannot act on whim and must be guided by the Home Ministry and the Council of Ministers.
But while the President is so constrained, there seems to be no check on our governors who operate under the radar, as it were, to free convicted murderers or give dangerous criminals parole at will, or at the instance of our politicians.

Amoral
Given instances of wrongful conviction, it is important to have pardoning power in the constitutional system, but its gross misuse by our politicians and bureaucrats requires that it be vested in a judicial body. As a rule, there should be no pardon for violent assault, murder or rape. If an arrest or conviction was bad in law, surely our court system can set that right. Executive intervention is, more often than not, based on extraneous considerations.
The Supreme Court has generally upheld the state’s right to pardon criminals or remit their sentences. This, as various officials who have testified to counter petitions opposing the pardons, is as per the law and the Constitution. The case is often couched in the language of rehabilitation of the criminals. But what of society at large? What about the victims? Is their any consideration that a convicted rapist could rape again or a pathological killer kill? Doesn’t society deserve protection against violent criminals?
Remarkably, neither the executive nor the judiciary has ever bothered to consider the rights of the victims. A person who has been murdered can only depend on the state for judicial revenge. But the state is betraying the interest of the victims by freeing prisoners who have served only a part of their sentence.
The government is supposed to protect the life and liberty of the people of the country. When it fails to do so, it is responsible for ensuring that those guilty of depriving a citizen of his or her life is punished.
But what we are seeing is that large sections of the political and bureaucratic class have lost their moral compass. Instead of care and compassion for the victims of the crimes, they are showing sympathy and kindness to their killers.
This appeared in Mail Today November 13, 2009

The Danger Within (or how unresolved grievance can fuel terrorism)

Twenty days from now we will observe the first anniversary of one of the most diabolic acts of terrorism in the world — the seaborne assault on Mumbai by jehadis who were recruited, trained and directed by state and non-state actors in Pakistan. Just last month, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested American-Pakistani Daoud Gilani aka David Coleman Headley and Canadian-Pakistani Mohammed Tahawwur Rana for plotting with North Waziristan-based Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami leader, Ilyas Kashmiri and two unnamed Lashkar-e-Tayyeba leaders to attack the National Defence College and two residential schools in Uttarakhand.
What this development reveals is that despite the whole-hearted efforts of law enforcement authorities in India and the US, and some half-hearted ones in Pakistan, the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba is still in business. As a result of the Mumbai attack and international pressure, Pakistan had been compelled to arrest Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, and some other planners of the Mumbai carnage, but the leader of the LeT, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, has remained free.

Violence
Coincidentally, it is also just about a year now that a group that called itself the Indian Mujahideen was neutralised. The story began in July 2006, when a radical faction of the Students Islamic Movement of India, organised in secret cells calling themselves the Indian Mujahideen (IM) struck, with seven bombs ripping through Mumbai’s suburban trains, killing 187 people and injuring 700.
The subsequent arrests and chargesheet filed by the Mumbai police’s anti-terrorism squad (ATS) noted that of the 30 accused, 18 were from India and 12 from Pakistan. However after the Delhi blasts in September 2008, the police found out that the 12 were not Pakistani, but people who belonged to the then undeclared and secret militant group called the Indian Mujahideen. They had, in an intriguing and ingenious manner, passed themselves off as Pakistanis for the benefit of the other conspirators.
It was only in the wake of the November 2007, near-simultaneous bomb blasts at court premises in Varanasi, Faizabad and Lucknow, that the Indian Mujahideen outed itself and claimed responsibility for the blasts through an email message, but the IB discounted this and said that the claim was an effort by existing organisations like the HUJI and the banned SIMI to mislead the police.
Then between May and September 2008 came rapidfire serial bomb blasts in Jaipur (May 13), Bangalore (July 25), Ahmedabad (July 26), and Delhi (September 23) killing some 150 people and wounding several times that number.

Moments after the blast at Barakhamba Road, New Delhi

You do not have to accept all the police claims with regard to this group to believe that its emergence ought to set alarm bells ringing. Indeed, it is because of shoddy police work — which includes the extra-judicial execution of two suspects in the Batla House in New Delhi — that we have not been able to gauge the true nature and import of this most serious development.
The Indian Mujahideen was the first home-grown group of Indian Muslim radicals who carried out acts of terrorism without visible direction from Pakistan. In some ways their emergence represented the success of the Pakistani project run by the ISI and the jehadis to set up self-sustaining and autonomous groups of Indian Muslim extremists to carry out acts of terrorism in India.
The radicalisation seems to have afflicted not the stereotypical madarsah student or cleric, but educated young men, some with university degrees and others proficient in the use of computers and electronics. Most of those involved in the blasts were “normal” young men who did not dress in the traditional Muslim style or wear beards. On the surface, they led normal “secular” lives and pursued educational courses or occupations which pointed towards a desire to seek upward social and economic mobility.
According to Paul R. Brass, in the 7,000-odd communal incidents between 1954 and 1982, some five hundred Hindus were killed, but the number of Muslims killed was three times that. Another major watershed was the destruction of the Babri Masjid. Indeed, in his latest book, The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, Brass has argued that “the whole political order in post-Independence north India and many, if not most of its leading as well as local actors… have become implicated in the persistence of Hindu-Muslim riots.”
A snapshot of the situation today can be seen from the response to an RTI query which revealed that in the period April 2004 to 2009, the state of Maharashtra witnessed 96 riots indicating that, on an average, there was one communal riot in about 20 days in the state.

Sachar
A special committee headed by retired Justice Rajinder Sachar looked into the issue of the status of Muslims in India in 2006. Among the other things that the committee found was that though Muslims constitute some 13 per cent of the national population, their presence in the top government services is abysmal. Only 3 per cent of the core IAS officials are Muslim, 1.8 per cent in the Foreign Service and 4 per cent in the central Indian Police Service.
Likewise the number of Muslims in the Army, banks, universities is much lower than their proportion in the population. In no state does the representation of Muslims in the government departments match their population share. Their share in police constables is only 6 per cent, in health services 4.4 per cent.
Clearly, what pushes young Indian Muslims towards violent religious extremism is the fact that they are second class citizens in India, people who are discriminated against when it comes to jobs and housing, and the frequent bouts of violence that their community faces.
But what transforms an angry young man into a terrorist is the activity of a small group of motivators — jihadists or agents provocateurs. Many of these latter people have links with Pakistan — its official agencies — as well as its extremist religious organisations.
The assistance they provide comes in the form of funds, training, arms and direction. The goals of Pakistani official covert agencies is to keep India off balance and check its perceived advance in world affairs. The jihadi goal is much more grandiose — it seeks to convert India into a part of the global Islamic emirate.

Extremism
The issue of violent religious extremism gripping the Indian Muslim community is truly at a cross-roads. On one hand, the period 2006-2008 provides clear evidence that young Indian Muslims — who were not found in Afghanistan or Guantanamo — have taken to terrorism.
On the other hand, it is surprising, given the enormous burden of riot and murder that the Indian Muslim community has faced, we have seen only one unambiguously Indian Muslim terrorist group —the Indian Mujahideen —emerge so far. Even in its case we are not sure as to the extent to which the young men involved were pushed into the path they have taken because of urging and motivation from external actors. Its key leaders like Riyaz Bhatkal, Amir Raza and Abdul Shubhan Qureshi remain at large and we do not yet know the full extent of its organisation.
Last year, India confronted two sets of terror attacks. There has been a flurry of activity on the part of the government to prevent another terrorist attack from abroad.
But they continue to disregard the domestic dimension of the problem. The reason for this is the “cut off my nose to spite my face” attitude of the Sangh Parivar and the pusillanimity of the ruling Congress party which prevents the country from addressing genuine Muslim grievances. We can continue to ignore the problem at our own peril.
This article was published in Mail Today November 7, 2009

China's unchecked buildup is dangerous

We can hope that the increasingly harsh tone that had crept into Sino-Indian relations has been checked by the sequence of meetings that Prime Minister Singh and External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna have had with their counterparts in Thailand and Bangalore respectively. Though neither India, nor China can afford a conflict, one side appears as though it is looking for one, and the other side is once again not ready.
Unless they have been changed recently, the political directive that the government has given to the armed forces is to maintain a posture of “dissuasive defence” vis-à-vis the Chinese in Tibet. This contrasts with the directive of maintaining a posture of “disuassive deterrence” in relation to Pakistan. The latter means that the Indian forces plan and equip themselves for possible operations in Pakistani territory. But the import of the former is clear: India has no plans for offensive operations in Tibet in the event of hostilities. Its plans would call for allowing Chinese forces into Indian territory and destroying them in battle there.
A huge component of this strategy devised in the 1970s was firepower. Unfortunately, that is precisely the area where the Indian forces are lacking. China on the other hand, has built up a formidable force of missiles, rocket and tube launched artillery and mobile units, all on display in the recent 60th anniversary parade. On the other hand, India’s missile programme is distinctly limping and laggard, its deployed rocket artillery is confined to multi-barrel rocket launchers and its mountain divisions are in dire need of an overall upgrade. India has no self-propelled artillery and its towed artillery, even the modern Bofors F77B guns, are some two decades old.


The air force part of the equation once favoured India, but this has changed. First, the IAF combat capability has declined because acquisitions have not kept pace with the obsolescence of its fleet. Second, the Chinese air force’s modernisation has advanced with great speed and depth, despite the informal embargo that has been imposed on it by the western countries.
But despite our weaknesses, 2009 is not the same thing as 1962. At that time the poorly equipped and badly led Indian armies literally lacked the knowledge of what was on the other side of the mountain. Intelligence was non-existent. Today, India has a sophisticated system of aerial and ground surveillance of the Tibetan plateau and ought to have enough fore-warning of a Chinese military adventure.

Rise
Even at the time, the outgunned and outmaneuvered Indian forces collapsed only in the Tawang sector. At Walong in the east, they were forced to withdraw, but not routed. In the west in places like Chushul, they fought heroically, laying down their lives to the man. Though the military balance is tilting against us, it is just about adequate for the defensive battle that we would fight in the event things get out of hand.
The rise of China is an inevitable reality; the 2008-2009 crisis may have accelerated its growth. But there are also alternative interpretations of the figures of the Chinese economic performance which are not very flattering. But there is little room for doubt over the fact of China’s impressive military build-up. It is, in fact, quite open and purposeful — to ensure the defence of the sovereignty and integrity of China. This means the ability to prevail in the event of a conflict over Taiwan and keep a lid on the separatists of Xinjiang and Tibet. But, as The Economist has pointed out, the build-up has now gained a momentum of its own and Chinese capacities are beyond what are required for Taiwan or the internal security of its western regions. A large and capable military capacity could enhance the risk for countries like India which have disputes with Beijing.

Shift
It is through borders with these two regions that India comes into the picture. The recent tensions between India and China can be seen as a function of the latter’s insecurities regarding its minorities who people its geographically vast and resource-rich regions. But there could be other causes as well.


There has been a clear shift in the Chinese position towards India since mid-2005 when the Indo-US nuclear deal was announced in Washington DC. Just months before Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited New Delhi and had signed a far-reaching Agreement on Political Parameters and Guiding Principles to resolve the border issue. It had virtually spelt out the contours of a border settlement on the basis of a mutual exchange of claims — the Chinese would keep Aksai Chin and India would retain Arunachal Pradesh.
In June 2007 at the sidelines of a meeting in Berlin with Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi appeared to resile from Article VII of the agreement which had said that “In reaching a border settlement the two sides shall safeguard populations in border areas.” Mr Yang now told Mr Mukherjee that the “mere presence” of populated areas would not affect China's claims on the Sino-Indian border.
It is from this period that the more strident Chinese line on Tawang, on the visit of Dalai Lama and the like seems to have emerged, though it has been amplified by the Tibetan uprising of last year which took place not only in the truncated region of what is Tibet today, but the large areas that the Chinese have hived away and renamed into other provinces.
Early on, Beijing recognised the Indo-US nuclear deal for what it was: A far-reaching agreement through which the nuclear pill that had been stuck in the throats of India and the US would be washed down and would enable the two to have normal, even strategic relations. Almost transparently, the US was wooing India and the aim seemed to be to balance the rising power of China.

Outcomes
India is unlikely to act precipitously on the border. This is as much a matter of choice as its current weakness. It sees its best option as a need to settle on an “as is, where is” formula. On the other hand, the signals coming out of Beijing are not very good. Its military build-up has gone into overdrive, even as its attitudes towards India have hardened. This is bad news, as much for China, as for India.
A unsettled border only provides opportunity for conflict, notwithstanding the interim agreements to maintain “peace and tranquility” there. China may be thinking that by outpacing New Delhi in building its national power it can get better terms in the future, or hawks in Beijing are contemplating administering New Delhi another lesson.
But things may not work their way. A combination of factors, or a single event could change things: The Chinese economy could stall, India could be provoked into building up its deterrence capacity, Taiwan may act up or the US could elect a hawkish president.
You don’t need Sun Tzu to tell you that it is easier to start a fight, than to predict its outcome.
This article appeared in Mail Today October 29, 2009

Pakistan is pulling its punches on the Taliban

Everything seems to be tentative about the Pakistan Army’s Rah e Nijat (Path to Salvation) operation. It was launched after several months of dithering and carried out after the Army cut deals with two powerful Taliban warlords. Even now, it is not clear as to whether the Army launched the operation to salvage its wounded pride after the recent Taliban attack on the General Headquarters at Rawalpindi, or it is acting under American pressure. Or, that it has now finally come to believe that Pakistan’s deliverance lies in abandoning the sponsorship of terrorist groups.
At the start of the operation, the Pakistan Army chief General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani has tried to wean away the Mehsud tribe from the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan by appealing to their patriotism. He can be forgiven for his caution. You don’t make war with your people lightly, especially if they happen to be Mehsuds who have in the past several years compelled the Pakistan Army to sue for peace thrice, and in the past century given great grief to a succession of armies.
Reasonable people will agree that the operation is truly Pakistan’s path to salvation. For years now the writ of the state has ceased to run in large parts of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Craven peace deals with various Taliban factions have ensured that while Pakistan’s garrisons in towns like Razmak, Wana and Miramshah remained untouched, the surrounding country-side fell under the control of the Taliban.


No war goes according to plan. Most likely this war, too, will end up with unanticipated twists and turns. But the goal that the world community seeks is the destruction of the Taliban as a whole. That is where there are worries about the Pakistani action. Last year a similar operation was launched against Baitullah Mehsud and then called off suddenly without any explanation.

Goals
This time, too, there are questions about the Pakistani goals. They have, for example, made peace with two major Taliban factions led by Maulvi Nazir and Hafiz Gul Bahadur and ignored the Haqqani network which has been operating out of North Waziristan for close to a decade now. As is well known, the Pakistani authorities retain close links with the Haqqanis — Jalaluddin and his son Sirajuddin — who were involved in the Kabul bombing of the Indian embassy last year.
If the deals are tactical — aimed at keeping these powerful warlords out of the battle temporarily — they are understandable. But if they are aimed at destroying the anti-Pakistani Taliban, even while preserving the others as part of the Pakistan Army’s “strategic” depth, then we have reasons for concern.
The US cannot be too happy about these deals because it knows that nearly fifty percent of the Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders it has killed through drone strikes were in the areas controlled by Maulvi Nazir and Hafiz Gul Bahadur. As for the Haqqanis, they lead the most effective Taliban forces operating against the US in Afghanistan.
The Pakistan Army has to beware that it does not become the Taliban’s “strategic depth”. The Taliban of today are not those of 2001. The war they have fought for the last decade has, if anything, deepened their fanaticism and hatred of the US and the West. They no longer require the services of the ISI to lead them into battle as they once did. Not only are they a much more seasoned fighting force, one that is deeply intertwined with the Al Qaeda, they have also expanded their sway across large parts of Pakistan which was not the case earlier.

Denial
The recent attacks in Lahore and at the GHQ indicate that there is very little wriggle room left for the Pakistan Army and establishment. The recent spate of terrorist attacks in the Pakistan Punjab have showed that the Taliban have the capacity to attack at will across urban centres of Pakistan’s heartland. It also indicated that the outfit had developed links with the so-called Punjabi Taliban — the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jaish-e-Muhammad and the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. These organisations have in their own way eaten away at the vitals of the state.
Despite a spate of terrorist attacks, some whose authorship the Pakistani Taliban has openly acknowledged, there are people ready to point fingers at India or the US. Last week in the wake of the Taliban attack on three police targets in Lahore, the city’s police commissioner Khushro Pervez declared, “The enemy has engaged us in the North West Frontier Province and other areas… There is a lot of evidence showing the involvement of a neighbouring country.” Interior Minister Rehman Malik, too, hinted at the Indian connection. Important sections of Pakistan remain in denial about their predicament.
Savage terrorist attacks have hurt Pakistan grievously. The country is stunned and confused. The reason for this is that its leaders, political and military, are not willing to change the discourse of jihad that they encouraged for the past two decades, leave alone dismantle the jihadi armies that have a free run of the country.
Meanwhile there are also military questions about the ability of the Pakistan Army to prevail in Waziristan. Pakistan has a competent and capable army, but one devoid of any counter-insurgency experience. This was evident in its actions against the Baloch separatists in 2006 and, recently in Swat where it used air and artillery strikes liberally.
In Waziristan, too, Pakistan is relying on aerial bombardment to overwhelm the Mehsuds. This will only result in great destruction and a hardening of attitudes, without any diminution of Taliban military capabilities. This has been the experience of air power since the Great Blitz of London in 1940 and most recently in Gaza.

Victory
Perhaps the most accurate instruments of aerial bombardment are the American Predator and Reaper drones being used in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. Yet a New America Foundation analysis released in Washington this week suggests that of the 1000 or so people killed in drone strikes since 2006, as many as 320 or one-third, have been innocent civilians. You can make your own back-of-the-envelope calculation about the number of civilians being killed by the less accurate aerial bombardment currently under way in Waziristan.
Islamabad is using air and artillery fire-power to minimise the use of boots on the ground. But insurgencies can never be defeated this way. Mountains and insurgencies gobble up human resources in large quantities — camps and supply lines need to be guarded, convoys, administrative offices and centres protected. Search and destroy operations require ridgelines and passes to be held and so on. As of now the Pakistani strategy seems to be to capture Hakimullah Mehsud’s hometown Kotkai, probably flatten his home and declare victory.
If that is so, then it is going to be a much longer war than what the Pakistan GHQ has anticipated.
This article appeared in Mail Today October 22, 2009

Expending Capital

PM should keep Pakistan on the backburner and focus on key domestic issues instead

On Monday, the Lahore High Court decided that the police had no case against Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed, the founder of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. In the process, they tossed the ball back into New Delhi’s court. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has to now decide whether he wants to persist with the peace process with Islamabad, or wait till there is some clearer indication that Pakistan has decided that it will no longer be a state sponsor of terrorism.
Insiders say that in a month or two, freed from the burden of public opinion, the PM intends to re-initiate the peace process and the composite dialogue with Pakistan. He has a clear window of about a year before the Bihar assembly polls in 2010 and he hopes to make full use of it.
Perseverance in the cause of peace is praiseworthy, even heroic and statesmanlike. It is the kind of stuff that garners Nobel Peace prizes. On the other hand, persistence in the face of sure failure is foolhardy, and possibly vainglorious.
In the case of Pakistan, persistence may be a virtue, but so would prudence.
The PM’s approach to Pakistan is betraying a stubborn persistence with a policy that is proving to be unworkable. Over the past several months, or actually the year since Pervez Musharraf was forced out of office, it has been clear that the Pakistan problem is not easily amenable to solution.

Containment
As it is, the twists and turns in the PM’s policy have been bewildering. In Russia, inadvertently or otherwise, he snubbed the president of Pakistan on the issue of terrorism. Then, three months later, he veered to the other side and agreed to the impugned Sharm-el-Sheikh statement.
The peace process has a two decade old history. Despite the thousand-year war fulmination of V.P. Singh, the onset of the rebellion in the Kashmir Valley in 1990 persuaded India to push for peace with nuclear-armed Pakistan. Despite Islamabad’s continous support to terrorism and separatism, New Delhi sought to promote peace through a slew of confidence building measures among which was the composite dialogue, first proposed by J.N. (Mani) Dixit in 1994.
The dialogue envisaged a step-by-step approach to solving small problems first, building confidence, and then resolving the big ones — the Pakistani support to terrorists in India and Jammu & Kashmir. However, what the process has revealed is that the big problems have held the resolution of the small ones hostage. In fact, the composite dialogue has become a meaningless talking shop. As for the peace process, it remains a triumph of hope over experience.
After a quarter century of trying to make peace with Pakistan through dialogue, even while the latter has thrown armies of terrorists and saboteurs against us, the time has come for a change. Not only are there limits to what we can achieve with our neighbour, but those limits have been reached.
The situation demands a policy of flexible containment. This requires India to build an unambiguous deterrent capability vis-à-vis Islamabad, and also set our own house in order.
It is not that there are none in the Pakistani establishment who want to make peace with India. Unfortunately, they are weak and divided. Their ambiguous response to the Mumbai carnage and their handling of its aftermath are the best indicator of their weakness and confusion.

Kashmir
The political window that is going to open up after the Maharashtra elections is not exclusively for peace with Pakistan. It may be more fruitful for the Prime Minister to pursue a variety of outstanding issues — economic reform, the Maoist challenge, China, peace in Jammu & Kashmir, removal of institutionalised discrimination of the Muslim community in the country.
The last two issues — the internal negotiation with separatists in Kashmir and the Sachar committee recommendations — are begging for attention. Success there could yield enormous dividends, not in the least in the country’s Pakistan policy. After the victory of the Congress-National Conference in the state assembly elections last year was confirmed by their sweep in the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year, there have been expectations that the Union government would quickly resume the dialogue with the separatists suspended since 2007.
It would also move on the issue of autonomy of the state in relation to the Union government. The separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and the new chief minister Omar Abdullah have both called for a resumption of the dialogue.
At the time the centre-state and centre-separatist dialogue failed to move ahead because it was said that the government in New Delhi was too “weak” to make a deal with the moderate separatists. Since then the government in Delhi has become “strong” but the dialogues remain elusive.
In the meantime, the ground situation has become distinctly brittle. While violence has declined to its lowest levels, separatists have found it convenient to use incidents of alleged rape, molestation and police high-handedness to stoke street protest against the authorities. This year infiltration from Pakistan has again gone up sharply. These militants have not yet displayed their hand, but it is a matter of time before their presence impacts on the ground situation. Therefore, it is imperative that the government take up the issue and move ahead on it. To wait for the Pakistan end of the peace process to deliver before settling with domestic separatists would be futile.
The second issue, too, is one that is of great importance. There may be a post-Mumbai lull in terrorist actions in India. But this is at best temporary. Attacks are likely to resume as soon as the Indian Mujahideen networks disrupted last year are replaced.
The struggle against violent Indian Muslim extremists is a challenge of an enormous magnitude. The government should not mislead itself by the fact that the mainstream Muslims remain firmly committed to the path of democracy. After all, it just takes a couple of hundred radicals to create a security night-mare. But these extremists are sheltered and nurtured by a larger pool of unhappy people. It is the government’s task to take up the gauntlet of the Sachar Committee recommendations and move ahead.

Sachar
No doubt the BJP will seek to capitalise on any move to address the issue of institutionalised discrimination against the Muslim community in the country. That is what makes the challenge of addressing the issue so difficult. But the outcome could pay the Congress party substantial political dividend, and the country’s security would get a payoff by reducing the vulnerability of its minorities to blandishments of radical ideologies and Pakistani agent provocateurs.
The almost continuous cycle of state and national elections are distorting the country’s governance processes. There have been many voices pointing to the need for simultaneous elections to the state assemblies and the Lok Sabha. But the problem is unlikely to be resolved given the nature of parliamentary democracy. So, politics and governance will remain hostage to the election processes whenever and wherever they occur.
Just how important the cycle is apparent from the manner in which the Prime Minister shifted his post-Sharm el Sheikh Pakistan stance with an eye on the Maharashtra elections. Now he has one clear year in which to act. But he would be better advised to focus on issues that are ripe for resolution rather than chase the will o’ the wisp.
The economist-turned-politician has to understand that politics is eminently the art of the possible.
This article appeared in Mail Today October 14, 2009