Pakistan is the central war front, not Afghanistan, it's PakAf, not Afpak

The United States has unveiled a comprehensive new strategy to fight the war against the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even while pointing the gun in the right direction, the US aim still seems to stray away from the target.
Pakistan, not Afghanistan is where the battle against religious extremism must be fought and won. Graham Allison and John Deutch point out in a recent oped in the Wall Street Journal that the new US policy acronym should be PakAf, not AfPak — Pakistan is the central front, Afghanistan only the periphery.
To that extent, President Obama’s new policy — which opens a new Pakistan front — is a minor, though welcome, course correction. While US may not, out of concern for Pakistani sensitivities, put boots on the ground in Pakistan, it will demand a higher level of accountability from Islamabad for doing its bit in the war against the Al Qaeda-Taliban alliance.
But it’s not clear whether Washington has realised that the centre of gravity of the threat has shifted away from Helmand and Paktia, and even the Federally Administered Tribal areas; it now lies somewhere in a region between Lahore and Peshawar, uncomfortably east of the Indus.

State
Devastated Afghanistan can provide nothing but a sanctuary for terrorists. But Pakistan can provide much more. It is a sophisticated country with large urban centres, industry and talented doctors, engineers and a large standing military. It has a nuclear and aerospace industry, as well as universities and research institutes. Significant numbers of professionals in these institutions lean towards religious radicalism, if not extremism. The victory of jehadist radicalism in Pakistan would be a major disaster for the world, comparable, perhaps, to the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols.
The most important military reason for the US to consider Pakistan as the main theatre of the war is Islamabad’s nuclear weapons capability. The A.Q. Khan network proliferated nuclear technology to Libya, North Korea and Iran. Even today we are not sure as to how complicit the Pakistani state was in the process. But we do know that Pakistani nuclear scientists have flirted with the Al Qaeda in the past.

Demonstration in front of Lal Masjid in Islamabad, Pakistan, to mark anniversary of the military operation to clear out militants from there

If the country, or parts of the country fall into the hands of religious extremists, such facilities could be the source of nuclear weapons or materials for a terrorist strike of horrifying power. The only way that the US can prevent a possible terrorist nuclear strike is to remain engaged in Pakistan till religious extremism is utterly defeated.
Afghanistan may be the battle-ground, but almost all observers believe that the higher command of the Al Qaeda-Taliban alliance is located within Pakistan. According to Ahmed Rashid, the Taliban have a vast support structure in Balochistan “ranging from ISI-run training camps near Quetta to huge ammo dumps, arrival points for new weapons and meeting places for the Taliban leadership council.”
The kind of battles the Taliban is fighting in Afghanistan cannot be fought using cottage industry products. It needs thousands of mortar shells, rocket propelled grenades and hundreds of thousands of rounds of AK-47 ammunition every week. The Taliban use the local madarssas to recruit and house fighters and use Pakistani towns and cities to provide medical facilities for their cadre.

Polity
The most important reason as to why we must consider Pakistan, rather than Afghanistan, as the main theatre of the war is that the dark heart of the ideology that seeks to convert the region into a medieval Islamic emirate lies in Pakistan.
There is a messianic streak in Pakistan whose roots go back to the downfall of the Mogul empire. Its early manifestations were the activities of Abul Ala Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami. But the take-off point was during General Zia-ul-Haq’s rule when the jehad against the Soviet Union was used to promote religious fundamentalism across society.
Sectarian conflict has become a sordid feature of recent Pakistani history. The Pakistan Army, for its part, has used the religious militias like the Taliban, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the LeT, and the Jaish-e-Mohammed, to pursue strategic goals in Afghanistan and India. They are, as the scholar Ayesha Jalal has pointed out, deeply enmeshed with the Pakistan army strategic doctrine.
The Taliban may be Afghans, but their ideology was born in the refugee camps of Pakistan encouraged by mentors like Samiul Haq of the seminary Darul Uloom Haqqania where Mullah Omar studied, and the late, Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai of the Binori masjid in Karachi, where the Wahabi-Deobandi alliance between Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden was shaped.
The foot-soldiers of the jehad —overwhelmingly from amongst the poor and illiterate — are to be found in the numerous madarssas and mosques run by competing sectarian groups belonging to the Deobandis, Barelvis, and Ahle-Hadith. The key Punjab province is the recruitment pool of the baleful Jamaat ud Dawa aka Lashkar-e-Tayyeba which offers a Wahabist challenge to the more eclectic Barelvi orientation of Punjabi Islam.
The attackers of the Manawan police academy may have come from the radical Deobandi badlands of Waziristan, but unchecked, the Lashkar is breeding even deadlier killing machines like Amir Ajmal Kasab in training camps in Azad Kashmir and elsewhere.
An elite influenced by such an ethos do not easily accept that the Al Qaeda/Taliban pose a mortal threat to their country. That is why the ISI still continues to back the Taliban against the US in Afghanistan. Or the reason for the peculiarly ambiguous Pakistani response to horrific acts of terrorism not only in Mumbai, but their own country.
Their first instinct is to blame some “foreign hand” . These are only a manifestation of the larger Pakistani state of denial which is preventing effective prosecution of the battle against the Al Qaeda/Taliban combine. Or, action against the master-minds of the Mumbai carnage.
This is not to say that there are no forces or trends seeking to counter the growing radicalisation. But they are weak and disunited. On the other hand, the forces of radicalism, preying on poverty, illiteracy and mis-governance provide certitudes that only religious zealots can provide.
The key to the PakAf battle lies in the hearts and minds of ordinary Pakistanis. So far, alarmingly, its outcome remains a moot issue.

Solutions
The story of how the Bush Administration was distracted by its obsession with Iraq is too well known to recount. But the consequence, as Obama has pointed out, was that the US war in Afghanistan lost its focus.
The US now plans to remedy all the weaknesses. They have come up with a comprehensive plan — with both military and civilian components — which will be led by a tightly coordinated leadership answerable to the White House. The plan envisages enhanced military action against the Taliban along with a systematic effort to create a larger and more effective Afghan police and army to take over that task by 2011.
But in Pakistan, it expects the Pakistanis to do the needful. Obama has ruled out American boots on ground. He has said that there will be no “blank check” and that the US will “insist that action be taken” against high-level terrorist targets in Pakistan. To help Islamabad, the US will give $1.5 billion per annum for civilian reconstruction and provide civilian personnel to effectively manage the programmes.
But how different is this plan from its predecessor? The US gave massive aid, some $9 billion in the 6 years, after 2002. Then, too, it depended on the Pakistan army to deliver on the Pak-Afghan border. But from its Pakistani sanctuaries, the Al Qaeda regenerated and the Taliban went from strength to strength.
Sure, there is talk of greater accountability and supervision this time around, but there is little by way of the kind of radical solutions that the problem of Pakistan demands.
This article appeared in Mail Today April 2, 2009

Change is the only constant in Election 2009

The first phase of the election process has settled. Alliances have been rejigged or abandoned, candidates for the first phase more or less decided, manifestoes rolled out. Not surprisingly, all parties are for the aam admi, independent foreign policy and the war against terrorism. Now, all eyes are down for the race itself to begin. Even now, if someone can tell you which way the wind is blowing, he or she would be lying. Confusion reigns supreme.
But not confidence. The Congress party for one is appearing to be almost cocky in the manner with which it has gone about dealing with allies and potential partners in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The Third Front matches the Congress in its cockiness, but we all know they are whistling in the dark. As for the BJP, it has a somewhat dazed look, perhaps temporary and occasioned by the public spat of its senior leaders.

Alliances

There is clearly a method in the madness of the Congress, and only the first family of the party is probably privy to it. But we can surmise that it is aimed at rebuilding the party, ground-up. Heir presumptive Rahul Gandhi’s “discover India” tour has finally yielded a strategy. Or, so we think.
At some point of time or the other, the Congress party would have had to do what it is doing in these two states. Otherwise it was confronted with the task of being whittled down to extinction. That the Rashtriya Janata Dal was willing to offer the party only three seats for the Bihar alliance, one less than that offered in 2004, was a pointer to that direction. However, what was counter-intuitive was that the Congress party drove its UP and Bihar negotiations so hard that they eventually broke.
Evidence from the ground suggests that the ability to forge pre-poll alliances was the key to the NDA winning the 1998/99 general elections and the United Progressive Alliance getting ahead in 2004. Analysts said that the key to the Congress party’s success in 2004 was that it contested only 417 seats in 2004, 36 less than it had done in the election before. Because of this, though the Congress lost a little of its vote share, it did increase its vote-share per constituency. But for the BJP, the trend was in the opposite direction — it lost its vote-share as well as the vote-share per constituency.
According to the Centre for the Studies of Democratic Societies, since 1996, the electorate has gotten used to coalition governments.But notwithstanding the victory of the NDA and then the UPA, there has been no dramatic change in the broad votes and seats of alliance parties. The BJP’s tally went down from 182 to 138 and that of the Congress rose to 145 from 114 in 2004. But their regional allies were not able to cash in on this and expand their geographical spread. The Samajwadi Party which contested 234 seats did well, but it remained confined to UP. The Bahujan Samaj Party increased its vote-share to over 5 per cent, but its core remained in UP. Likewise the Left had its best showing with 61 MPs, but, they too remained in their traditional base of West Bengal and Kerala.

Y.S. Rajshekhar Reddy Andhra Chief Minister blows the conch-shell to launch his party campaign in Andhra Pradesh

If the Congress party has taken the position it has with regard to its allies, the BJP’s situation is somewhat more complicated. It has been abandoned by three allies—the BJD and its key supporter, the Telegu Desam Party and the AIADMK. In the 2004 elections the allies fared much worse than the BJP. Some, like the TDP, attributed it to the loss of support from Muslim voters who abandoned the party because of its ties with the BJP.

There are a number of new parties testing the waters. But more significant is the manner in which older parties are altering their trajectories. The Congress has decided on a new model alliance system, one in which its partners do not grow at its expense and whose corollary is the party’s aim at regaining its dominant status in the country's polity.

Parties

The BJP is pushing ahead in its post-Gujarat mode politics. The effort to become an umbrella party, attractive to all faiths and communities, seems to have been abandoned. It was just the other day that the now-disgraced party president Bangaru Laxman declared that the Muslims were the blood of our blood. Today the party bends over backward to embrace Varun Gandhi whose USP seems to be an abusive attitude towards the country's minorities.
Mayawati’s BSP is attempting a new all-India formula by approaching the upper castes along with her Uttar Pradesh Dalit base. This election will test that sarvajana model and take the party into what would be largely uncharted waters or run it aground.
This time around, there are some significant regional parties testing the waters in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Older parties, too, are coming up with new identities. The Biju Janata Dal tests the waters minus its BJP ally; the RJD and the LJP are in the curious position of being with the UPA government in the centre going into election 2009, but opposing the Congress party in Bihar in those coming elections. Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (U), too, seems to be on the cusp of a change.
The Third Front, too, is a new manifestation though of an old tendency. But it lacks the certitude of those years. Today, even its proponents do not see it anything more than a waiting room for strong regional parties— and this includes the Left. As it stands, the outfit is neither a United Front where the Left is the dominant partner, nor a Popular Front where a non-Left formation leads. Sonia Gandhi is right when she says that the Third Front has as many prime ministerial aspirants as leaders.

Issues

Election 2009 is bound to establish new paradigms. But the creation will not be the outcome of the personality of one person or a party, but the political and economic dynamics of the past two decades.
Clearly, all the parties see themselves, or are being forced to, function in an era of change. In the Ganga belt, the caste passions of the past seem to have wilted. Caste leaders like Mulayam Singh and Lalu Yadav may still matter, but their era is over. Mayawati’s sarvajan samaj is aimed at overcoming the self-imposed limitations of caste politics.
As the country slowly becomes more literate, better-linked through road, rail and telecommunications, there are common issues that affect everyone. Some arise from the breaking of old social barriers, others from the creation of newer ones. Others from the very process of economic growth and steady urbanisation.
Cable TV has generated its own powerful dynamic which is able to make a minor issue in one part of the country, a major development elsewhere, as was seen in the case of Pramod Muthalik and Raj Thackeray’s fulminations.
The elections are also taking place in a period of profound economic change. On the surface in India, things appear normal. We have not faced the mass housing loan defaults that have pushed people out of their homes, catastrophic unemployment has struck only some sectors like the diamond polishing industry or textiles.
But the election outcome— unless the voters are remarkably prescient— could be based on the verities of the past, instead of the realities of today. This could consign us to a limbo of sorts for some years.
This is time we cannot afford to waste because of the enormous demands and expectations of our overwhelmingly young population. In this sense the slogan we see on Mr L.K. Advani’s posters is right, we do need a strong and decisive government.
This appeared in Mail Today March 26, 2009

China seeks gain in current climate of crisis

Almost everyone recognises that we are living in an era of great flux. Political instability, wars and, the economic crisis are likely to shape the future world order. Most of those affected are rudderless ships, drifting with the tide and hoping for the best. Some, however, are trying to ensure that they retain control and maintain a steady course after some
buffeting.
And then there is China, the engine of the world manufacturing, a great world power through most of its history, which is seeking to see how the world’s present predicament can be used to come out ahead both politically and economically.
There is nothing sinister in what China is doing. All countries are in the game of furthering their interests when the opportunity arises. The present economic crisis has presented China that chance and it is grabbing it with both hands. But the reality is that China is in a position to exploit the situation by the dint of the hard work and sacrifice of its people in the past two decades, and the abilities of its leaders.

Recession

The Chinese are prepared for a recession. According to an IMF official resident in China, “by running prudent and careful fiscal policy in previous years — reflected in low deficits and debt — China has created fiscal space that it can now use to fight the downturn.” But the Chinese cannot cope with a prolonged recession, or a depression, that would take years to overcome. A Japan can lose a decade in the process, but China’s leaders sit on an agenda of unfinished promises and unmet expectations. A recession lasting several years would be disastrous.
The global economic crisis has hit China hard. Exports have collapsed and taken with them large swathes of manufacturing. Beijing has lost a great deal of money in the banking crisis. While its US Treasury holdings are secure, its State Administration of Foreign Exchange lost an estimated $80 billion according to Financial Times, mainly because of the losses in its ill-timed diversification into US equity portfolios. Meanwhile, the China Investment Corporation, the $200 billion sovereign wealth fund, lost more than $4 billion in bad investments.
But the Chinese leaders are dealing with the economic crisis with great energy and sophistication. The always works best in a crisis. The country’s fiscal stimulus package of $600 billion, second only to that of the US, is aimed at an outcome in the period following the present crisis. It seeks to make its companies more competitive by retraining migrant labour and boosting domestic research & development. Provincial governments have got large subsidies to run vocational-training programmes to enhance the skills of its workforce. Guangdong province alone will put four million workers through three-to-six month re-training programmes. That such programmes will also reduce social distress and maintain social stability is a bonus.
China is backing its premier companies to go on a global acquisition spree. Huawei Technologies, one of the top Chinese telecom companies, is sharply enhancing its operations across the world. As it is, the company’s share of deals to supply mobile infrastructure doubled from 7.2 per cent in 2007 to 15.5 last year.

Opportunity

Troubled companies around the world are looking to Beijing for a life-line. The $19.5 billion that a Chinese aluminium company put up to buy convertible bonds issued by troubled Australian mining giant Rio Tinto with interests in Chilean copper and South African iron ore came from a special fund created by the Chinese government to spend on mines and companies. A Chinese server and software maker is in talks with insolvent German memory chip maker Qimonda to set up a factory in Shandong province.
Just how China views this situation is evident from the fact that it now plans to put another $2 billion in its African investment fund which was in fact set up to take advantage of opportunities created by western investors fleeing the continent. Currently the fund, set up in 2006, has a capital of $1 billion of which it has invested $400 million.


On Monday, the Chinese commerce ministry announced that it had simplified the procedures for Chinese companies seeking to make acquisitions of non-financial businesses abroad. Power to approve investments had now been given to local governments except for very large transactions. The Ministry is also embarking on its first mergers and acquisitions trip looking for companies in automobiles, textile, food energy, machinery, electronics etc.
The Chinese focus on dealing with the crisis as an opportunity in the economic sense inevitably flows into the realm of the political.
China most certainly hopes, and is working towards the goal, to ensure that its standing in the world order will go up a couple of notches, just as that of others, including the United States, goes down a few.
In times of wars and recession, countries focus on the essentials. For China and the US, this means an enhanced effort to build cooperative ties with each other. The exchange of visits by the US and Chinese foreign ministers in February and March are merely the first straws in the wind. US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s Asia visit, the first since she took office, had China as its focus.
Last week, Chinese foreign minister Yang Jichei visited Washington as part of a practical effort to set the stage for the first summit between Chinese leader Hu Jintao and President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the Group of Twenty meeting in London on April 2. According to China Daily, Yang told Obama when he called on him last Thursday that Beijing was “willing to work with the US” to make the meeting a success.
The shape of the new relationship was hinted at by Chinese Premier Wen Jia Bao’s remark in mid-March, that he was “worried” about the safety of China’s $1 trillion investment in US government treasury bonds. He called on the US to “maintain its good credit, to honor its promise and to guarantee the safety of China’s assets.” The statement was both subtle and blunt — oxymoronic, but very Chinese.
On Thursday, this week, Zhang Yunling, director of Institute of Asian and Pacific Studies at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said at a press meet in Tokyo that China expected that the value and the role of the US dollar will change after the economic crisis. But, he added, “China hopes to have a stable and gradual transition rather than a radical revolution.” Beijing was so heavily invested in the US, that any drastic change would precipitate a crisis.

India

The Chinese are therefore viewing their ties with the US in terms of a partnership. The Chinese action against a US survey ship off Hainan island is probably part of the process through which Beijing is seeking a relationship of equals with Washington, a relationship where both clearly recognise each other’s lines in the sand.
Inevitably the question arises as to what India can do? A Sino-US condominium dominating the world order is not likely to be a comfortable place. Already, it is becoming clear that the Indo-US love-fest is more or less over.
In some ways the same opportunities that China is exploiting are available to New Delhi as well, though in a smaller measure. But we are less well placed to exploit them. It is not just that India went into the election mode as the economic crisis deepened in the last couple of months. It has to do with our systems which are simply not geared for synergised thinking and coordinated action.
Each state government, ministry and service is a satrapy, and trying to get people to work together as a matter of habit is a difficult task. Forward planning, and even the plans themselves are often seen as emblematic exercises. There is nothing sacrosanct about the targets. As for accountability, it simply does not exist.
This article appeared in Mail Today March 20, 2009

Musharraf's clever lies

Gen Pervez Musharraf was in New Delhi on 6-9 March for the India Today Conclave. During the event and in many interviews he spoke on several India-Pakistan issues. This is my take on his performance and perspective.

The uneven texture of former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf’s visit to India last week tells us a lot about why it is, will be in the near term, difficult to deal with Pakistan. The English language has many ways of shading truth. You can be a plain liar, economical with the truth, or tell a half-truth. In politer language, you could mis-speak something, or offer your own perception about something or the other. Since he was a guest at the India Today Conclave last week, we will say that he offered us his “perceptions” on a range of issues.

A deeper examination of four of them—Siachen/Kargil, terrorism, R&AW/ ISI and Jammu & Kashmir—tell us how sharply they vary from the truth. To begin with the first: According to Musharraf, the Pakistani covert attack on Kargil, which torpedoed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s plans to make peace with India, was nothing but a payback for what India did in Siachen. At first sight it sounds plausible. The two areas are adjacent to each other.

Equations

But there is one vital difference which he conveniently left out. The positions that India occupied in Siachen did not violate any India-Pakistan agreement. The 72-odd kilometers between the last point on the Line of Control NJ9842, and the Indira Col had not been delineated; leave alone demarcated in either the 1949 or 1972 ceasefire agreements. In short, there existed a gap in the border between India and Pakistan with no clear dividing line between the respective areas of their control.

This was not the case in Kargil. Both in 1949, and in 1972, the ceasefire line and the Line of Control had been carefully identified and demarcated by Indian and Pakistani military surveyors together and marked on maps signed by them. There was no ambiguity about where Pakistani control ended and where the Indian began. Further, under the Simla Agreement 1972, Pakistan had given a solemn commitment not to alter this line by force. India’s occupation of Siachen represented a failure of the Pakistan army and in its efforts to erase that it undertook an operation that was a strategic disaster. And, we know who the author of that operation was. Pervez Musharraf.

In another remark in an interview, Musharraf referred to New Delhi’s demand for the extradition of people involved in terrorist acts in India by countering whether India was prepared to extradite Lt Col Srikant Purhoit for engineering the Samjhauta express blast that led to the loss of 76 Pakistani lives. For the record, as of now this is a matter of speculation, no link has really been established between the Purohit group and the incident.

The hidden subtext of Musharraf’s statement is a sly attempt to equate Pakistan-backed terrorism in India which has been involved in hundreds of incidents since the mid-1980s, with the activities of a Hindutva group which have come to light last year and all of whose activities are, too, within India. An invidious attempt is being made to somehow show how “equal” Hindus and Muslims are in supporting terrorism.

The difference between the Indian position and his is glaring. India wants the return of fugitives-- Indian and Pakistani-- who carried out terrorist acts on Indian soil, and are being sheltered in Pakistan, while Musharraf wants someone suspected of a terrorist act on Indian soil that killed Pakistani nationals. Customary international law in this is fairly clear, jurisdiction rests with the authority where the crime took place, not the nationality of the perpetrator, or the victims, leave alone his or her religion.

The third Musharraf red herring was to constantly equate India’s Research & Analysis Wing with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. There is no need to labour the point that the former is under civilian control and the latter under the military to understand that the general is once again talking about apples and oranges.

Intelligence

The R&AW as India’s external intelligence arm is involved in a lot of covert activity, but there is very little evidence to show that it has any covert “operations” capability—assassinating people, setting of bombs to kill non-combatants—leave alone the authority to do so. The bulk of its activity and budget is spent on what the western intelligence community calls “election support”—funding political parties and individuals in countries of interest, paying agents to obtain covert information and so on.

Had R&AW any ops capability, it would have been visible in Bangladesh or Nepal which offer a far easier operational environment for any Indian secret service and where we know several people inimical to this country operate from.

The ISI is another thing altogether. Its intervention in the domestic affairs of Pakistan have been established by Pakistani leaders themselves. Its finger prints on acts of terrorism in India going back to the mid-1980s and the Bombay blasts of 1992 are well established. More recently, its involvement in blast outside the Indian embassy in Kabul was testified to by the US. Mind you, I am not going into the activities of the outfit through proxies like the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and other jihadi groups. A great deal of this evidence comes from the work of Pakistani journalists Khaled Ahmed, Amir Mir and Mohammed Amir Rana. Its actions in Afghanistan are well known and documented in books such as Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars. In 2007, British Special Forces killed an ISI officer in a military compound in the Helmand province. The fact was kept secret till revealed by a well-known British journalist some months ago.

Kashmir

Lastly we have the mother of all equivalences: Musharraf’s attempt to show that Pakistan and India have equal rights in Kashmir. Nothing could be further from the truth. What constitutes India and Pakistan was decided by the Indian Independence Act of 1947 which had no direct provision for the accession of the princely states to either dominion. Lord Mountbatten as the Crown representative told the Chamber of Princes on July 25, 1947 that although they were legally independent, they had to accede to one of the two dominions keeping in mind the geographical contiguity of their states—not, mark you, religious affiliation.

Jammu & Kashmir is contiguous to both India and Pakistan. Indeed Indian leaders were reconciled to the state going to Pakistan. But the tribal invasion engineered by the Pakistan government forced the hand of Maharaja Hari Singh and the state acceded to India, an accession that was somewhat reluctantly accepted by Pandit Nehru.

That religion was not to be the basis of affiliation was confirmed by Pakistan itself when it accepted the accession of the Hindu-majority state of Junagadh in Gujarat. Ironically, till the eve of partition Mohammed Ali Jinnah insisted that the princely states had the unfettered right to do what they wanted, a stand opposed by Nehru who backed the Mountbatten formulation.

Generations have grown up in Pakistan believing that they have somehow been “cheated out” of Kashmir. Nothing could be further from the truth. They have been cheated by their leaders into believing that Kashmir somehow belonged to them. The issue that India is seeking to resolve with Pakistan does not relate to accession, which was final.

Perceptions are important in human affairs. But when they vary sharply, as they seem to do even in a clear-cut incident like the terrorist attack on Mumbai, then we have a problem. Northern Ireland is often held up as a model for the India-Pakistan peace process. But the key to that process was the common belief in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland that the Irish Republican Army in its various forms was a terrorist organization that deserved no succor or sanctuary.

We are clearly at some distance from that point in relation to Pakistan. General Musharraf’s half-truths tell us just how far.

This article appeared first in Mail Today March 13, 2009

Will Election 2009 see a new model of the alliance system ?

This article was written before the Biju Janata Dal pulled the plug on the BJP in Orissa


The kaleidoscope has always held a fascination for children. Every twist of the tube reconstitutes the coloured glass pieces within into a new geometric pattern. Indian politics seems to have had a similar quality in the last few general elections. With roughly the same number of constituents, we seem to be getting a new pattern every election. What does Election 2009 presage? There are straws in the wind suggesting that it could lead to a new model of the alliance system.
When, in 1999, the National Democratic Alliance emerged as the front-runner to form the government in New Delhi, it marked a new point of departure for India’s polity. Its position was determined by the 1998 decision of the BJP, one of the three pole political formations, decided that the only way it could form a government in New Delhi was to create a durable coalition.

UPA

In doing so, it had to self-consciously put what it had earlier proclaimed to be its defining issues on the backburner — building a Ram Mandir at the site of the razed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, scrapping of Article 370 that linked Jammu and Kashmir to the Indian union, and the introduction of a common civil code across the country.
The United Progressive Alliance’s success in 2004 was as much predicated on the strength of the coalition that it offered, as the failure of the NDA as a consequence of the Gujarat massacre and the perception that its economic policy had ignored the common man. The very concept of functioning in an alliance had been a major mental shift of gears for the Congress.
Till 2004, despite a steady decline at the polls, the Congress had insisted that it would contest the elections across the country by itself. Creating the UPA was an acknowledgement of the harsh reality that it had lost traction with voters in large parts of the country. But although the Congress had pre-poll alliances with the NCP in Maharashtra, the RJD in Bihar, JMM in Jharkhand, DMK in Tamil Nadu, the UPA was formed only after the elections.
So, in 2009, the Congress seems to be taking only one step back when it says that it will only undertake state-level alliances. This, at least, appeared to be the import of the outcome of its Working Committee meeting of January 29. Briefing the media, Janardan Dwivedi, a party spokesperson, had declared, “There will not be any coalition at the national level. But existing arrangements with various parties will continue at state levels….”

Strategy

Predictably there has been a lot of kicking and screaming from allies, with the loudest sounds coming from the Nationalist Congress Party. But the other allies are quiescent, or they appear to be so.
Is there a strategic artifice in this seemingly barmy move, given the Congress’ woeful performance in the recent general elections?
A first response could well suggest that the answer is “no”. After all, neither Sonia nor Rahul Gandhi has given any indication of being a deep political thinker. But they do have a deep interest in the fortunes of the party which is really their family enterprise. So, this could well be their last desperate response to save the party which appears to be in a slow free-fall.
In this light, the decision represents bold forward looking thinking which has decided that for the party to continue on the same track is to invite slow, but sure, death. To reverse its decline the party has no choice but to go beyond the NDA or UPA schema.
Two principal reasons could be driving the Congress’ new approach. The first is the as-yet-unspoken belief that its fortunes are on the rise and that of its principal rival the BJP on the decline.
With a factious party and a dysfunctional agenda, the “party with a difference” is set to return to the margins of Indian politics. In this scenario, the NDA allies are ripe for the plucking. Formally, Nitish Kumar, Naveen Patnaik, Sharad Yadav, Om Prakash Chautala and Parkash Singh Badal remain strong votaries of the NDA, but privately, some of them quail at the idea of going into the elections with the BJP of today which seems to be inexorably drifting into the hands of Narendra Modi, away from the idea of the NDA whose éminence grise was Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
The second push comes from the objective changes that have taken place in the Indian polity since 2000 — the electoral consequences of economic growth. Growth may not have benefited the poorest in the pyramid, but it did push a group of people who were poor, into the lower rungs of what can be called as the “self perceived” middle-class.
Rising incomes and sociological consequences of the spread of mobile phones and private TV has created a class of people, urban and suburban, who are now less prone to be influenced by caste or community leaders than their fathers were.
They are less ideological and more aspirational — they want better education for their children, more disposable income, better health-care and so on. Come election time, they are less inclined to throw the baby out with the bathwater and get rid of a party which may not have met all their expectations — though it did meet some — but looks like having a better plan to meet the remaining part. Anti-incumbency is no longer an iron law.

Allies

The Congress’ new model alliance system is based on the party’s belief that it can increase its tally in the coming general election and use the new alliance system to increase it exponentially in the succeeding elections.In other words once again become the default party in the Indian political system.
In an era where there is no ideological glue to hold up alliances, there is no reason why the Congress— a secular, centrist and “socialistic” party— cannot work out a modus vivendi with any two or three competing regional groups — say Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav, Mayawati and Mulayam Singh Yadav, or Jayalalitha and K. Karunanidhi.
With the BJP limiting its already limited appeal and, possibly, in terminal decline, the Congress believes it can offer all things to everyone — have its cake and eat it too.
Usually when something looks too good to be true, it usually is. To work this system requires a great many “ifs”, but more than that it requires deft political handling. The BJP can only provide so much help by its self-destructive ways. The Congress will have to walk its own talk on other issues be they Telengana or Mayawati.
Looked at another way, election 2009 could well be the proverbial last nail in its coffin. But there is one striking development, the hithertofore sclerotic Congress has begun to display some sign of strategic thinking and tactical agility, vital ingredients for any winner.
The article was first published in Mail Today March 4, 2009

NEVER AGAIN

The United Progressive Alliance government’s recent approach to terrorism has been both muscular and active. A great deal of credit must go to the man who was appointed as the single-point counter-terrorism leader in the wake of Mumbai — Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram.
Things are still happening in a command fashion — orders going from top to down. But that is because for a long time nothing was happening. Everything was being dissolved into committees and task-forces. Hopefully, after the emergency surgery, the government will have the foresight to grow durable institutionalized arrangements.
A new National Investigation Agency has been created to deal with terrorist crime and a draconian legislative framework to deal with terrorism approved. Actions frozen for the past four years were unfrozen. In response to a question in Parliament on Wednesday, Mr. Chidambaram noted that the country’s “level of preparedness is higher than it was three months ago.” He added that “by March 31, there will be better coordination between Multi-Agency Centre and its subsidiaries, and also between MAC and special branches of state police and various data centres.”
He also spoke of better equipment for the armed forces and the paramilitary, and observed that the country had strengthened its coastal security in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Dangers

These are brave words, but necessary, given the trauma the country faced when Mumbai was attacked. For sixty hours, a gang of gunmen fought off India’s elite National Security Guard and we had to witness the agony of thousands who lost their near and dear ones in the carnage and of the hundreds who had been injured.
The NSG cannot be blamed-— neither through doctrine, training or equipment were they in a position to deal with the situation effectively. The overwhelming sense that came out of the traumatic days was of helplessness and humiliation, compounded by the fact that no one seemed to be in-charge, either in Mumbai or in New Delhi.
There is a real and present danger of a recurrence of a Mumbai-type event. A great deal depends on whether the recent steps taken to heighten our security work, and the extent to which the promised Pakistani actions against the terrorist masterminds and handlers on their soil disrupt their activities.




The transcripts of conversations between the terrorists and their handlers released by the authorities reveal the almost puppet-like control that was exercised by the handlers in Pakistan. Because this had to be done over unsecured communications networks, this could not have been a preferred situation but one mandated by the circumstances.
And what were they? The Lashkar leadership had a bold and ruthless plan, and they had a set of well-trained and motivated killers. The problem was that most of them —carefully nurtured within Pakistan for security reasons — were semi-literate and not very capable of functioning autonomously. For them to understand the layout of a modern hotel, or function in a modern city, would be difficult. Whatever independent thinking they may have had was wiped out by systematic brainwashing to make them into effective and remorseless killing machines.
If Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, Zarrar Shah & Co are truly out of commission, then it should make it difficult for the Lashkar to mount a similar operation in a hurry. If not, we can anticipate another strike. But we do not know where it will be, or what it would involve.
Having failed in their mission to provoke war between India and Pakistan in November, the masterminds will strive to carry out a more horrific attack, one that would make it difficult for the government to display the kind of restraint it did in the wake of Mumbai.
Given the Indian way of doing things, the biggest danger we confront is complacency. Having put a number of key measures to secure the county’s land and maritime boundaries, to get more effective intelligence coordination and unblocked money held up for vital defence and security needs, the government may well feel satisfied. But we are far from being home and dry.
New institutions and arrangements require time and training to become effective. The new maritime arrangements, the MAC and all the other good things the government has done have to not just be there as new signboards but must be made battle-worthy and battle-ready through training and retraining and tested on the ground.
Then, in pushing new measures Mr. Chidambaram has knocked a great number of heads. The normal tendency is that once the political ankush (goad) is withdrawn, the bureaucratic worms again crawl out of the woodwork and things soon return to normal. After Kargil and the Parliament House attack — the two defining national security disasters of the National Democratic Alliance period — the government carried out an unprecedented and long-overdue exercise to overhaul the country’s defence management system. But the incoming UPA put everything into the deep freeze.

Failure

It was declaratively allergic to stringent counter-terrorist legislation and was not particularly eager to have an NIA, and it had a somnolent Shivraj Patil as its Home Minister. Worse, with M.K. Narayanan, an old spook appointed the national security czar, all steps towards restructuring and reform died out.
The MAC should have been functioning by 2004. Narayanan did nothing about it, nor did he permit the National Technical Research Organisation to constitute itself in a manner it should have to carry out its high-tech surveillance mandate. The R&AW reached a nadir of sorts, and the government simply looked the other way.
Mr. Chidambaram’s timetable of March-end is determined either through the habit of a finance minister, or it is politically driven by the fact that the government will more or less end its term by then. But the country cannot afford to go by that timeline. An effective and agile counter-terrorist machine cannot be built in a matter of months; given our past sloth it could take years. And we need to take several other longer-term steps to be able to put up impregnable defences.

Agenda

First, reconstruct our relations with Pakistan by resolving outstanding disputes and building international pressure on Islamabad to make the paradigm shift away from using terrorism as an instrument of state policy.
Second, draw out the poison out of our inter-communal situation, especially in Gujarat and Maharashtra. This needs active intervention by the state and central government in building bridges with the Muslim community.
Third, overhaul the armed forces so that the enormous treasure we spend on their upkeep is justified by having a balanced and powerful military, one that can provide more options than were available to the government this time.
Fourth, create new centre-state compacts to promote greater synergy in the functioning of not just their intelligence agencies, and home and police departments, but in the joint working of the central and state governments as such.
Fifth, encourage inter-governmental, community and citizen participation in intelligence-gathering and analysis. Sometime bits and pieces of information are floating around at various levels, but it takes a clever intelligence service to pull all the strings together. In 1965, when the Army moved towards Lahore, they had no maps of Pakistan’s Icchhogil canal; the maps were available — with our Punjab state’s irrigation department.
Sixth, put in place a culture of leadership. Wars are fought by generals in a command fashion, and not by committee. Crisis management groups sound impressive, but they are usually ineffective.
Seventh, unlearn the “indigenous” mantra that has led to the police-bureaucracy-technocracy complex believing that they can do everything at home; they can’t. And their failure has led to countless problems ranging from the lack of a good Indian fighter and battle-tank to an inadequately equipped and trained counter-terrorist force.
Eighth, abandon belief that an announcement is tantamount to an achievement. We have announced the creation of the NIA, MAC, etc. What we now need is to make sure they work, and work well.

Everything must be subordinated to one goal: There must never be another Mumbai again.

This article appeared in Mail Today February 28, 2009