It will take more than a visit to end the trust deficit

The government has learnt its lessons from the Sharm el Sheikh surprise. The resumption of dialogue between India and Pakistan has been a carefully choreographed affair. This is evident from External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna’s opening gambit in Islamabad where he spoke of David Coleman Headley and the Mumbai terrorist attack. Yet, South Block has not quite catered for the rapidly changing context of Pakistani policy towards India amidst the stasis in Islamabad.
Earlier this week a Pakistani commentator claimed that there has been “a healthy change in the tone and tenor of the Indian leaders’ statements on relations with Pakistan”. The truth is more complex and harder to detect. While New Delhi, encouraged by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, continues to push normalisation with Pakistan, there is an increasing disconnect between the actors in Islamabad who shape policy towards India. There are four issues here.

Kayani
First, the internal situation in Pakistan where the government seems to be unable to establish its grip on the affairs of state. This allows the viral spread of what is called the Punjabi Taliban to take place without any check.
Second, India’s primary concern— the wrapping up of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba— seems to be the furthest from Pakistani minds. The trial of Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi and others continues desultorily. As for Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, he seems to have been emboldened by the inability of the Pakistani state to act against him.
Third, the Headley interrogation may have deepened the divide between the civilian government in Pakistan and the Army which may have been more deeply involved with the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba than previously known.
Fourth, the main focus of the more significant half of the Pakistani governmental system—the General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army in Rawalpindi—is not India but Afghanistan.
For the GHQ, External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna’s meeting with his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi is only a sideshow, or, rather a holding operation. We have reports of General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani undertaking shuttle diplomacy with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. Other reports purveyed in the slick ISI-sponsored websites suggest Lt Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha, almost the anointed successor to Kayani, enunciating a new strategic policy for his country, one that could lead to Pakistan breaking away from the US-led war against the Taliban in the region. The reason for this, the sites put out, is that the US was allowing India a free hand in Afghanistan, something that militated against Pakistan’s vital national interests.

Krishna and Qureshi

The reason for all this was the much publicised declaration by President Barack Obama in December 2009 that after a surge of forces there, the US would begin withdrawal from Afghanistan by July 2011. In retrospect, this was a blunder. No doubt Obama intended to signal that the US commitment would not be open-ended, but he also set a deadline which appeared to be suspiciously linked to his re-election campaign. Its effect was to set the cat among the pigeons.
The hard pressed Pakistan Army and the Taliban realised that all they needed to do was to wait out the US and then things would fall on their laps. At the same time, it sent a signal to Hamid Karzai in Kabul, that perhaps discretion would be the better part of valour, and that he better start mending his bridges with Islamabad and Mullah Omar. In recent months, the GHQ began to push the idea of a reconciliation between the Haqqani network, perhaps the most formidable grouping of the Taliban, with Kabul. The Haqqanis—Jalaluddin and Sirajuddin—are Pakistan’s principal proxies in Afghanistan.
But things have not been going as planned. As it is, the US time-table in Afghanistan has gone awry. The plan to dominate the Marja has not worked and the much touted Kandahar offensive is yet to get off the ground.

Petraeus
Whether or not it will succeed is an entirely different thing. But, as often happens in human affairs, the Pakistani game plan has now been beset by an unexpected development. The replacement of General Stanley McChrystal as the commander of US forces in Afghanistan by David Petraeus has led to a significant shift in US strategy. The former was the author of the original surge and quit plan, while the latter is known to be a supporter of a longer range strategy. He has quickly sent the message to both Islamabad and Kabul that he will not support a reconciliation strategy till the Haqqanis had been militarily weakened— a sound negotiating strategy.
With the negative fallout of announcing its date of withdrawal becoming obvious, the US is now going out of its way to send the message that it will be around for as long as it takes to put things on the right track. Generals Kayani and Shuja Pasha may find that their overreach in Afghanistan may yet cost them dear.
One consequence of the US blunder was that India began hedging against a precipitate American withdrawal. This has been manifested by a conscious decision to repair ties with Iran, the only country through which New Delhi can directly intervene in Afghan affairs. India formally opposed the new US sanctions on Iran and expressed skepticism about the success of the United Nations sanctions.

Iran
Earlier this month, the foreign ministers of the two countries presided over the 16th Joint Commission meeting between the two countries and signed six minor pacts signaling that New Delhi wished to retain normal, if not close, relations with Teheran, despite the recent imposition of UN sanctions on Iran. This way, India has signaled that it is prepared for the US cutting and running and will continue to be involved in Afghanistan, no matter how the Washington-Islamabad duet plays out.
As it is, that act is not sounding too good now. Pakistan’s blatant end-run around the US in Afghanistan has become obvious. So we are finding a much more cynical American attitude towards the Pakistanis. Reports in the American media, investigations by their Congressional committees have begun focusing on the GHQ’s favourite jihadi group—the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. The more ominous ones say that the Lashkar has now fully become party to the war against the United States forces in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile even as the GHQ focuses on the Afghan front, the time bomb that is Pakistan itself continues to tick. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan attack on the shrine of Datta Ganj Baksh, said by some to be Lahore’s patron saint, brought home the lesson that is driven home to children: if you play with fire, you could burn yourself.
Pakistan is like a bomb whose fuse has been lit on two ends. Contrary to popular perception, those two ends are not in Kabul and New Delhi, but within Pakistan itself.
This article appeared first in Mail Today July 16, 2010

Is that a green light in Beijing ?

Amidst all the buffeting that comes with uncertain times, India and China are patiently trying to bring their relations, that had gone off beam in the 2006-2009 period, to an even keel. National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon’s visit to Beijing is an important step in this direction. Significantly, Menon went as a “Special Envoy” of the Prime Minister, not as what he happens to be— the NSA and the Special Representative on border negotiations with China.
The news from Beijing after Menon’s visit is positive. An important indicator is is that the two sides plan to resume their Special Representative-level dialogue— which had gone into a limbo of sorts— to resolve their border dispute. The cycle of ups and downs in the relations between the two countries indicates that the quality of their future relationship depends on their ability to arrive at a mutually satisfactory settlement on two key issues—the disputed 4056 km Sino-Indian border and the nature of Beijing’s all-weather friendship with Pakistan.
Putting these issues aside and proceeding to develop ties in other areas is a useful process, but its limits are now clearly showing up.

Downturn
The downturn in their relations in the 2006-2009 period was occasioned by three factors: the Indo-US nuclear deal, the Tibetan uprising of 2008 and the somewhat more shadowy power struggle going on in Beijing between hardliners in the PLA and the reform-minded party leadership.
The poor ties manifested themselves in various ways. In June 2009, India declared that it was sharply enhancing its military presence in Arunachal Pradesh, which is claimed in its entirety by China. In turn, Beijing broke tradition and opposed a $2.9 billion loan at the ADB because $60 million from it would be used for a flood management programme in Arunachal. China also tried, somewhat ineptly, to prevent India from getting an exemption from the NSG embargo on civil nuclear trade with India. This was also accompanied by a barrage of media reports in India claiming that Chinese forces had dramatically stepped up their incursions across the Line of Actual Control. In turn the Chinese media taunted India and issued
veiled threats.


Beijing understood the nuclear deal for what it was—a major geopolitical development wherein the United States sought to sweep away several decades of what is called “offshore balancing” of India by virtually recognising its status as a nuclear weapons state. China sought to block the deal by lobbying with smaller NSG member countries.
The Tibetan uprising on the eve of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 caught China off-guard. While Beijing may have anticipated protest, it had not catered for its intensity or its geographical spread which went to regions of what used to be seen as Greater Tibet—now parts of the Chinese provinces of Qinghai and Sichuan. The Chinese were convinced that India and the Dalai Lama were behind the protests that so embarassed China.

Border
It is a bit more difficult to assess the reports that the tough posture towards India has been an outcome of a power struggle between hardliners and reformers in Beijing. Given the opaque Chinese system, some of the reports are, what can at best, be termed “informed speculation.” Nevertheless, China watchers in Taiwan, Japan and the US testify to the fact that there has been, and remains, a constant tussle for power between various factions of the Chinese Communist Party and that the manifestation of nationalism, in the context of Japan and India in recent years, is not something that has happened by accident.
Conventional wisdom is that India and China have had a history of peaceful relations going back millennia. Today, they have complementary economies — we were good at some things, the Chinese at others. Both as rising powers seek stability at home and peace abroad and can therefore cooperate on a range of economic, social and political issues.
This was, of course, a fairly standard message till 2005 when the two sides signed an agreement on the “Political parameters and agreed guidelines for a border settlement between India and China.” This far-reaching agreement seemed to suggest that they would swap their claims and agree to draw their border roughly along the existing LAC.
But that June, the Indo-US nuclear deal was announced in Washington DC. In the years thereafter, the Chinese began to undermine the agreement. In June 2007, a statement of Foreign Minister Yang Jichei to his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee seemed to be going back on that agreement. Then, the process of applying this agreement to the border by Special Representatives seemed to run out of steam. Where they averaged three meetings or so a year in the 2003-2006 period, they had just one meeting in 2007, one in 2008 and one in 2009, after which they issued a statement declaring that henceforth they would discuss “the entire gamut of bilateral relations and regional and international issues of mutual interest.” A process to quickly resolve the border issue had been broadened to discuss the entire agenda of Sino-Indian relations.
The border settlement issue is important because it, along with the Pakistan issue, has the ability to destabilise Sino-Indian relations, as was evident from the reports of Chinese encroachments across the LAC in 2009. In the 1988-2000 period, the two sides thought they could set aside the border issue and proceed on developing relations in other areas. But it is evident from recent experiences, that the border issue must be resolved, as a pre-condition to good relations with China.

Pakistan
The other major issue is that of Pakistan. Whether or not India should take up the Pakistan nuclear deal issue with China is a matter of opinion. Some feel that since it is inevitable, India should not waste too much effort in blocking it. According to Menon, “this took less than 2 ½ sentences in the whole visit.”
We are the beneficiary of the NSG’s decision to overlook our nuclear weapons tests and the fact that we’re not NPT signatories. It does look a bit hypocritical for us to challenge the Chinese decision to supply two nuclear power reactors to Pakistan.
However, on the political plane, it is important to remind Beijing, which now claims to be an exemplar of non-proliferation norms, that it has been guilty of what is perhaps the most outrageous act of nuclear proliferation in history—that of providing another country with the designs of nuclear weapons, material to make them, and then actually testing the weapon in its own test ranges at Lop Nor.
Last weekend, at a workshop on Sino-Indian relations at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, a galaxy of top Chinese scholars and diplomats appeared to send a united message to their Indian counterparts: That good relations with India was central to Chinese foreign policy and that the Sino-Indian rivalry forecast by many was not inevitable.
On Pakistan, the Chinese scholars had an interesting take—while the all-weather friendship, with its nuclear and missile dimension, was part of the Cold War era to counter the Indo-Soviet alliance, at the present time China felt it was important to remain close to Pakistan so as to stabilise it against the threat of jihadist radicals.
China has in the past, too, used its think-tank community to put out feelers that are different from the tone and tenor of their official statements and dealings. It is significant that Beijing’s message right now is one of peace and cooperation. Given China’s importance as a rising power, as well as the “all weather” friend of our big headache, Pakistan, it is worth exploring the possibilities that seem to be opening up.
This appeared in Mail Today July 8, 2010

The Kashmir mess is largely a failure of imagination

THERE should be no doubts in anyone’s mind that what is unfolding in the Kashmir Valley is not part of the separatist game plan. While alienation and angst may be the cause for young men to come out and take on the police, their motivators are hardened militants who operate in the shadowy world of subversion, insurgency and espionage.

But let us be equally clear that the big failure has been New Delhi’s. The present mood in the Valley has been set by large public agitations such as those related to the Amarnath Yatra in 2008, followed last year by the Shopian rape case protests.

The failures can be divided into three— that of imagination, anticipation and that of management. There is little use blaming Omar Abdullah for the problem. The responsibility must be shared between the state and Union governments and the answers that are needed can come only from the effective team- work of the two.

All this is to state the obvious.

The failure of imagination lies in the inability of Manmohan Singh’s government to build upon the solid foundations of the 2003- 2007 period when the ceasefire on the Line of Control came into effect and Pakistani infiltration markedly declined, as did the violence in the Valley. One indicator of this is that the number of security personnel killed went from a high of nearly 300 in 2004 to 80 or so in 2009.

Instruments

In all fairness, the Prime Minister did a lot in terms of resolving the issue with Pakistan. It were his personal efforts that led to the breakthroughs in opening up the LoC to trade and to advancing the back- channel discussions till they narrowed the Indian and Pakistani positions dramatically. But, where he could have done more, he failed. This was in negotiating with Kashmiri parties to draw down the separatist agitation.

True, this was a more complex task since there were so many more variables at play— the various Kashmiri political parties, the different groups of militants and Kashmiri civil society elements and so on. But it is difficult to avoid the feeling that this was due to a shortfall in the effort, rather than the degree of difficulty that was confronted.

The issue of anticipation and management must rest with the intelligence and security establishment in Srinagar and New Delhi. Anticipation can only help you if you have the managerial abilities to deal with the situation and, important in the current context, the effective instrumentalities to do so.

It has been 70 years since the Central Reserve Police Force was founded to take on the resurgent national movement in 1939. It’s been sixty plus years since India became free, and two decades and more since the force was first deployed in Jammu & Kashmir, yet there has been no change in its organisation, principles and ethos. It was— and it remains— essentially a crowd control force which relies on the sequence of tear gas, lathi and bullet. Across the world, even in authoritarian states like China and Iran, managing violent demonstrators and crowds has become a fine art, but in India, it remains a uniquely brutal colonial- era industry.

North Block refuses to see the Kashmir problem in any but a transient mode.

The assumption is that the Kashmiris can be defeated through attrition brought on by applying overwhelming force. What it is doing to the security forces has been amply manifested in the instances of suicides of personnel posted in operational areas. What it is doing to the civilians has been clear to us in the past few days.

Because the Ministry of Home Affairs has worked with the assumption that status quo ante will soon be achieved, they have yet to train the kind of police forces that are needed to cope with the demands of the long haul.

Tactics

The ad hoc approach is manifest in the fact that the CRPF is being used as a crowd control force in most of India, an urban counter- insurgency and anti- riot force in the Kashmir Valley and a rural counter- insurgency force in the jungles of Dantewada— and it is not being adequately trained and equipped for any of these tasks.

In Kashmir, for instance, though the challenge has morphed from the early days of the insurgency to a sophisticated political struggle, the CRPF has not changed in terms of equipment, organisation and doctrine. The CRPF needs a new set of crowd control equipment, training and orientation.

There is a two- track struggle going on in the Valley. The first is a military conflict involving Pakistan- trained and armed militants who are adopting the clever tactic of mostly lying low and allowing the overground elements to stoke anti- Indian fires. The second is a civil protest movement which is a mélange of separatism, Islamism and alienation against misrule and lack of avenues for productive employment. It is important to understand the difference between the two and to acknowledge that to counter them require two different sets of tactics.

The military challenge is easy to handle and it has been handled competently by essentially containing the Pakistandirected insurgency. The civil challenge is more complex and is not being handled well at all. Instead of using a mix of political, police and psychological tactics, we are witnessing a military response, or, to be precise, a paramilitary one.

RAF

The same Union government decided in the early 1990s that a special force was needed to handle communal violence and so the Rapid Action Force was created as a sub- unit of the CRPF. But it took three decades of communal violence and its increased virulence for the Home Ministry to finally act. In fact the RAF’s model of independently mobile units with specially selected personnel who are trained and equipped for their specific task is a good one for Kashmir. To this end personnel need to be educated on the sociology and pathology of street violence, and the units asked to familiarise themselves with the sensitive areas.

All that is lacking is imagination in North Block, and some bureaucratic energy, to create such a special force for the Kashmir Valley.

These days it is difficult to avoid a sense of déjà vu on Kashmir. As in 1990, the heart of the separatist struggle has shifted to Baramulla and Sopur, which are strongholds of the Jamaat- e- Islami. Then, as now, the CRPF is playing a stellar role, or to be accurate, the role of a dark star that sucks up every possible effort to normalise the situation.

If things continue the way they are doing, you can be sure that we are far from resolving the Kashmir problem, even after discounting the Pakistan factor.

This appeared in Mail Today June 30, 2010

Once again to Pakistan, with hope

Three days from now, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram will visit Islamabad to attend a meeting of the home ministers of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation countries. As the tough talking Home Minister, Chidambaram has been the face of India’s counter-terror response since the terrible Mumbai attack of November 2008.
The big question is whether he will forge an independent second track in dealing with Islamabad, or he will be content to be an adjunct to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Track-I process. Mr Chidambaram knows well, as was evident in the case of the 76 police personnel killed by Maoists in April, that with power comes an enormous amount of responsibility. He would have to answer for any major terrorist strike on Indian soil. The Prime Minister, on the other hand, has the luxury of taking the high road, talk of “trust deficits” and history.
In their own way, both engagements are important and necessary. Security constitutes an enormously important element of our relationship with Pakistan. It is useful to have the minister directly involved in managing it dealing with his counterpart in Pakistan. With Prime Ministerial summits, there are always huge expectations which, in our current circumstances, cannot be met. Yet there is need for high-level practical relations between the two countries.

Reality
You may argue that there is a world of difference between the authority of the union home minister of India and his Pakistani counterpart, Rehman Malik, who is actually hanging on to office with the help of a presidential pardon. But we can only work with the tools in hand. Authority in Pakistan is fragmented, notwithstanding the efforts being made to strengthen the hands of Parliament and the Prime Minister through the 18th Amendment to the constitution. There will be many who will argue that there is little point engaging with Islamabad in the present climate of enervation there.
But the issue is whether India needs Pakistan more than they need us. I would argue that it is India that needs Pakistan more because of the latter’s ability to destabilise our country and distract us from the task of economic growth and all-round development. This imposes a bigger challenge on us to craft our policies in such a manner that we can overcome the obvious problems and try and obtain positive outcomes.





Of course, this is easier said than done. As it is, the discourse seems to be stuck in Islamabad’s point of view at the level of India’s demand for Pakistan to root out the perpetrators of the Mumbai carnage. From the Indian point of view it seems stuck at Islamabad’s insistence that the two countries resume the composite dialogue. Ironically, composite dialogue was an Indian device aimed at ensuring that the subject of the India-Pakistan dialogue is not confined to Kashmir, and
only Kashmir.



Chidambaram’s visit is in itself a build up to the visit of External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna later in July. A positive outcome of the Home Minister’s visit could set the stage for a successful visit by Mr Krishna, which could lead to a full-fledged resumption of the Indo-Pakistan dialogue process.
That may be the official scenario, but reality is bound to intrude.
One problem is that in the last five years, the ground situation has changed dramatically in Pakistan. India, on the other hand, has witnessed great change, but on a largely evolutionary track. In 2009, according to a recent RAND Corporation study, there was a 48 per cent increase in attacks in Pakistan over the 2008 levels. Further, these attacks have become more complex. Thus the April attack on the US consulate in Peshawar used a truck bomb, machine guns and rocket launchers.
More alarming has been emergence of a kind of Terror Central in North Waziristan where a conglomeration of groups are sharing personnel, knowledge and facilities to mount or plan complex attacks not only in Pakistan, but in countries like the United States and India.
The Rand study also acknowledges that using militant groups is woven into the DNA of Pakistani policy since independence and that this is in turn gets public support because it is linked to “historical and social milieus of jihad, which has long been viewed as a legitimate mode of conflict.” Nuclear weapons have, if anything, strengthened this tendency.

Army
While we may be progressing in beginning with a Home Minister-level dialogue, we have yet to hear from the Pakistan Army. Over the last couple of years there have been aborted efforts to get the armed forces of the two sides to interact with one another. That has yet to happen. Though such an engagement appears to be a positive thing, were it to take place, there are question marks about what it can achieve considering the enormous asymmetry between the role of the Army in the Pakistani system and its limited role in India.
India’s aim has to be to alter Pakistan’s strategic behaviour. This is, given the situation, an enormous exercise. Yet, we have barely scratched the surface of the problem. In the meantime, things are going from bad to worse in Pakistan. In 2007, Pakistan was listed 12 in a Failed States Index brought out by the Foreign Policy magazine, in 2010, it has gone up two notches to rank No 10; Somalia is number one on the list and Afghanistan number six. The irony is that despite this, Islamabad is gambling that its proxies will soon “win” in Afghanistan. All that this “victory” will achieve, perhaps, is that both countries will move a notch or two towards Somalia’s status.
Yet, the Prime Minister is right in saying that Pakistan is a neighbour and we have no options but to try and improve relations with it. But whatever be the strategic imperative for them to resolve their problems and come closer to each other, it is the tactical problems that compel attention. Nothing is more compelling for most Indians today than the need to prevent the recurrence of a Mumbai-type attack. Yet, when you look at the record, it is impossible not to come away with the conclusion that Islamabad has done precious little.

Mumbai
It is not a matter of dealing with the big issues like Hafiz Muhammad Saeed’s status, but the provision of information about the people who planned and directed the Mumbai attack. We know that there is a huge trust deficit between the two countries. But this is a deficit arising from the willful actions of Islamabad. But it most certainly cannot be surmounted by pretending that the problem does not exist, that it will be overcome with the passage of time or that New Delhi must pander to some Pakistani fantasy about India’s activities in Balochistan and Afghanistan. The Mumbai attack has become something like the October 1962 Chinese attack on India—a watershed event that has seeped deep into the public consciousness. Indeed, this is not something that just the Pakistan government needs to address, but the denizens of the South Block as well.
Mr Chidambaram’s sojourn in Islamabad suggests one way that this can be done—through practically addressing the problem, rather than garbing it in diplomatese like “trust deficit”. We can only hope that it will yield the outcomes we have been waiting for. But don’t bank on it.
This is a long haul.
This appeared in Mail Today June 23, 2010

If you can't ride two horses at once, get out of the circus

There is a distinct feeling among the players and observers of the Afghanistan scene that we are now approaching crunch time. It is not just that the US is now finally ready to sharply escalate the battle, even though it has set itself an impossibly short period of one year in which to regain the momentum and thereafter commence withdrawal.
The stakes are high for many of the players in the new Great Game. That is the reason why, according to Wednesday’s The New York Times report, Pakistan has upped the ante by unleashing its private army, the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, against Indian interests in Afghanistan. But many observers believe that after the London Conference that decided to accommodate the Taliban into a new Afghan structure, New Delhi is effectively hors de combat.
The news coming out of Afghanistan is confusing. It is not just the fog of war, though there is a great deal of that there as well. It is also the inevitable consequence of a complex struggle that pits the United States-led coalition against the Taliban-al Qaeda alliance, along with side battles between alliance partners Pakistan and the US, and the strategic struggle between Pakistan and India, the US versus Iran and, finally, Pakistan against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. With so many variables at play, is it any surprise that things are as perplexing as they appear?


To understand what is happening in Afghanistan we need to understand the aphorism of the Greek philosopher Heracalitus that “you cannot step into the same river twice”. Of course the original fragment attributed to him has a more complex interpretation, but its simpler version means that the Afghanistan of today is not the Afghanistan of 2001.

US
It has witnessed a great deal of flux. Neither, of course, is the US the same country that went to war then riding a crest of global support in the wake of Nine-Eleven. It has undergone the disaster in Iraq, the sub-prime led economic crisis all of which have eroded its political will to stay the course in Afghanistan, leave alone the money to fund the enterprise.
As late as October 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates declared that the US was in Afghanistan for the long haul. Yet six months later when President Obama delineated his Afghan strategy, he set the July 2011 deadline to begin bringing the troops back home.
Obama’s statement laying out the date in which the US withdrawal will begin, set the proverbial cat among the pigeons. It gave hope to the beleaguered Pakistan Army that if they could maneuver a little longer between the US and the Taliban, they would soon be dictating terms in Kabul. The needless controversy over Karzai’s election has alienated the one major Pakhtun leader who was with the western alliance. It has shaken the alliance itself with many of its European allies wanting out, or refusing to commit themselves to the required escalation.
In the coming months we will see how the endgame planned by Generals Petraeus and McChrystal works out. One of the world’s great strategic thinkers Helmuth von Moltke the Elder once observed, “No plan survives contact with the enemy”. That is what seems to be already happening to the ambitious US plan to carry out a quick surge in its capabilities in Afghanistan, followed by an intense offensive involving military power and political reconstruction to break the Taliban’s hold in the key provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, followed by a triumphant withdrawal, beginning July 2011.
The two-month old operation in Marja in the Helmand province led by the crack US marines has failed to provide a decisive outcome. So, the US has postponed or altered the plans of its long-awaited offensive in the neighbouring Kandahar province.

India
This is, of course, good. Persisting on a time-line which is not working would be folly. Speaking in Brussels last week, the US commander in Afghanistan, Lt Gen Stanley McChrystal conceded that the Kandahar operation was not going as planned and that the operation which was to have begun in June and ended by August will now go on till October.
McChrystal did not point out that the problem in Kandahar was more basic. The US and its allies were finding that the locals did not see them as liberators, but rather as foreigners, and that the intolerant Taliban had probably successfully transformed themselves into the vanguard of Afghan nationalism, which has historically been strongly xenophobic anyway. The Afghan component led by Ahmed Wali Karzai, the controversial brother of President Hamid Karzai has not been able to deliver the political part of the operation—the support of some key tribal leaders who are clearly hedging their bets. But the more alarming news for the US is that even President Karzai may be doing so.
India is therefore stuck between a rock and a hard place. It has left New Delhi holding the proverbial can. It is the only actor, along with, perhaps, Iran, which does not see the return of the Taliban, in whatever form, in a sanguinary light. It has developed enormous stakes in the establishment of a non-Taliban government in the country. It is the fifth largest donor to Afghanistan and besides infrastructure projects, it has sought to build a stake by training Afghan bureaucrats and professionals. In this it has had the support and backing of the United States and the European Union. But, unlike the Nato-led alliance, it has little leverage beyond what little goodwill it can gather from the Karzai government. But it has only itself to blame for its predicament.
Its policy has been half-baked and devoid of strategic content. The only way in which it could have retained some autonomous leverage outside American whims and Pakistani ill-will would have been in cooperation with Iran. Because the key to autonomy is physical access to Afghanistan. In clear terms, New Delhi needed to see Iran and Afghanistan along with Pakistan in one regional continuum rather than as two discrete entities.

Iran
In September 2005, some months after the announcement of the Indo-US nuclear deal, India voted with the US and other western countries to send the Iranian case to the United Nations Security Council at the IAEA governing board meeting. Since then Indo-Iranian relations have been in a tailspin.
It is true that it is in India’s interest that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons. But that is a longer term prospect than the possible return of a pro-Pakistan regime in Kabul. Unfortunately, New Delhi decided that the Indo-US nuclear deal trumped all other considerations. India needed to finesse its US and Iran policy in such a manner that it did not lead to a breakdown with one or the other.
Actually maybe even that may not have mattered because India has simply hitched its wagon to the US star and ignored the imperatives of an autonomous regional policy. Since the late 1990s, the Iranians have offered India possible access to Afghanistan and Iran via the port of Chah Bahar. The proposal was that India build a modern container terminal there, build a railway line from the port to Bam via Faraj and to Zahedan on the Iran-Afghan border. However, New Delhi has willfully ignored this option, choosing to put all its eggs in the American basket.
What our Afghan policy demanded was to work constructively with the Americans, even while keeping the Iranian option open. If you can’t ride two horses at once, as the song goes, you should get out of the circus— or the Great Game.
This appeared in Mail Today June 18, 2010

When soldiers turn murderers

The charges of murder leveled against a major of the 4 Rajput Regiment cannot but shock. The diabolic act involved three locals, including a special police officer, bringing three unsuspecting youth from Nadihal village, in Jammu & Kashmir, to the army camp on the promise of jobs. Instead, they were murdered on April 30 and passed off as militants.
Unfortunately, the government, which has a declared attitude of zero-tolerance to violations of human rights, is dragging its feet in acting on several such instances. There seems to be a major confusion in the minds of our politicians and civil and military leaders about the rights of soldiers who may kill as part of their duty, and those who turn murderers in the perverted performance of that duty.

War
The soldiers’ is a peculiar profession. His is the only job which requires, on occasion, that he offer up his life for his country. It is also the only one which provides him the authority, on the orders of a legal state, to kill another human being. Usually, though not always, this happens in war time, and the enemy is the soldier of another state whose job, in turn, is to kill him.



This combat is called ‘war’ and in modern times, far from being a free-for-all as one may think, its conduct is governed by international law. Soldiers, even in war, are duty-bound to act within certain moral and legal boundaries. Some of these are inscribed in the Hague and Geneva Conventions which most nations of the world are party to. Others have emerged out of the practice of international law, especially in relation to the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Society fetes rather than scorns the soldier for his profession which involves the atavistic job of killing or being killed. But it also expects him to maintain the highest levels of discipline, observance of the law of his land, as well as operate on a self-imposed code of conduct, whose key component is the concept of honour.
But sometimes soldiers do not observe these restraints. They ignore discipline, law and, most certainly, honour, to kill another human being who is neither a combatant, nor any kind of a threat to the soldier. There is no other word to term this but “murder”. When this happens on a large scale, as has been alleged recently alleged in Sri Lanka, or earlier in Serbinica, it is called a war crime.
The laws of war as defined by the Hague and Geneva Conventions essentially argue that there is nothing absolute about even total war. In recent decades non-state conflict, insurgencies and uprisings have made the original definitions of war crimes and breaches specified by the conventions somewhat obsolete. The more contemporary law is even more emphatic on the need to protect non-combatants and for the use of proportionate force i.e., you do not flatten a city or a building and kill thousands or even tens of people because you want to kill a terrorist.
Since 2000, there have been several questionable instances of crimes by security forces in J&K. The most telling incident is what is called the Pathribal incident. On March 20, 2000, a group of Lashkar-e-Tayyeba terrorists massacred 35 Sikhs in the village of Chittisinghpora in Anantnag district. There was great satisfaction when just five days after the incident, the Army announced that a team of the Rashtriya Rifles and the Special Operations Group of the J&K Police had managed to corner the group of five foreign militants and eliminate them at a place called Pathribal and the bodies of the men, allegedly burnt in the fierce encounter were buried in a common grave.
Sadly, this was untrue. The killing of the five men coincided with the report of five people having gone missing in villages around Anantnag a few days after the Chittisinghpora killings. After protests, in which another eight people were shot, the government initiated a probe, and on exhumation of the bodies, the families positively identified them as their
relatives.
Attempts were made, including switching blood samples for the DNA tests, to derail the inquiry. In 2002, the CBI was brought in and it took four years to confirm that the five men had been murdered and in July 2006 murder charges were brought against four officers.

Law
The Army and the Ministry of Defence have challenged the proceedings at every step. The J&K High Court ruled in favour of the CBI which argued that the men could not claim protection of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which only provides indemnification for acts which were done in the line of duty, or good faith. But the Army went on appeal to the Supreme Court and that is where the matter is stuck since 2007.
There have been other such instances. In February 2006, a captain and personnel of the Rashtriya Rifles shot and killed four young boys who were doing nothing more than playing a game of cricket in Doodhipora village in Kupwara district. In other instances the villain has been the Special Operations Group of the J&K Police which has murdered people and passed them off as militants to claim the reward.
In an insurgency area, there are occasions when the Army and the police may kill non-combatants— while enforcing a curfew or prohibitory orders, in a cross-firing with militants, or, simply, in instances of mistaken identity. Parliament has therefore passed the AFPSA to guarantee that they will not be charged with homicide for these actions. But to claim that the law also protects an act of murder is a monstrous interpretation of the statute.

Honour
What can be done to deal with soldiers who become murderers? Certainly, legal proceedings to punish them are a must. But equally important is to understand the ethos of impunity in which they are operating. This relates to the actions and activities of the civil and paramilitary police where human rights violations are often the norm. The rot began with the Punjab Police in the years of the Khalistani militancy, when the offer of huge cash rewards led to a spate of murders of innocent villagers, incidents which remain unpunished to this day.
Our political leaders must not heed bogus claims of police and military leaders that “morale” will be affected if action is taken against soldiers and constables. Beating a person to death, or shooting an unarmed man actually reflects poor morale. While no one will grudge the right of soldiers and policemen to indemnify themselves against accidental killings, no law of the Indian Union should be used to justify murder or torture.
The Prime Minister must go beyond mere declaration of “zero tolerance” and insist on its practice. One step that needs to be taken is to institute a clear chain of accountability for human rights violations. Perpetrators must be punished, but action must also be taken against superior officers for failing to exercise command
and control.
The Army itself needs to understand the importance of regaining its moral compass. Ask any Indian Army officer as to which virtue he prizes above all others, the answer will probably be “honour” or “izzat”. It is for the izzat of the regiment and his fraternity that the soldier gives his everything, including his life. That izzat is a compound of two other words— courage and fidelity.
But where is the honour in gunning down an unarmed, innocent man, or in providing fraternal protection to a murderer?
This article appeared in Mail Today June 10, 2010