Time to hit the pause button with United States

As the third round of the strategic dialogue between the US and Pakistan gets underway, it is clear that Washington is getting ready to signal its deeper and longer term commitment to Islamabad’s well-being. Pakistan is central to our security concerns— never mind the brave talk of Pakistan being a pinprick and China our main worry— but it also happens to be central to the US effort to prosecute its AfPak war. Perhaps the time has come for us to reassess what is often termed the strategic relationship between India and the United States.

To start with, the whole business of “strategic relationship” has become a bit overblown. As of now we have strategic ties with just about everyone—the US, EU, Russia, and even China. However, the true meaning of strategic relations would require, at the least, a significant identity of interests over an extended period of time—of the kind that, say, UK and the US have, or Japan and the US have developed since 1945. Just how we can have strategic ties with a country, which has been, and remains, the principal ally of our main adversary, defies intelligence.

Friend
This is not to argue that India should not have good, and even strategic, relations with the US. But we do need to be clear-headed about the terms of engagement and understand their evolution and changing context. For most of our modern history, the US has adopted a strategy of off-shore balancing of India through the use of proxies like Pakistan. The shift towards India in the 1990s has been significant, but tentative. If we continue to work at it, and the global situation so evolves, we may develop strategic ties, but for the moment, it remains a work in progress.
Today, while there is a desire in both countries to intensify the process of coming closer, the ground realities, and the bonds of America’s karma in the region are holding it back. It is apparent that much though it may desire it, the US cannot walk away from Afghanistan or Pakistan. If its commitment were truly directed towards assisting Pakistan’s counter-insurgency efforts against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, it would be fine. But it is not.
Since 2001, under a number of US programmes and its own funds, Pakistan has received maritime patrol aircraft, anti-tank and anti-ship missiles, artillery surveillance radars, self-propelled howitzers, a missile frigate.
The current US-Pakistan strategic dialogue will come up with a new five-year military aid package worth $2 billion. This is, of course, on top of the $6 billion in development aid and more than $8 billion in military reimbursements that Pakistan has already received between 2001 and 2010. Beginning this year, Pakistan will also begin receiving the $7.5 billion economic aid package approved by the US Congress last year. In addition, the US Central Intelligence Agency provides what one estimate says is some one-third of the budget of Pakistan’s ISI.
American assistance has freed funds for a larger shopping list from China and elsewhere which includes tanks, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, AWACS, fighter aircraft, submarines and nuclear technology. None of this has relevance to the Al Qaeda and Taliban; all of them have a relevance for India.

Headley
It is easy to understand why the United States is following the course it is in Pakistan. Softening up Islamabad is a key component of its strategy of defeating the Taliban-Al Qaeda alliance and shoring up the government of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. The other component is the building up of the Afghan National Army. But as long as Pakistan continues to provide sanctuary to the Taliban, even while permitting NATO and the US to ferry supplies for the war in Afghanistan through its territory, the US needs to hold Pakistan close to itself.
Of course, in contrast to the past, the US is much more hard-headed about its relationship. But it cannot escape the logic of its situation. So, even as the US would like to restrict its aid to counter-insurgency items, it cannot but help providing Islamabad with weapons that are directed at India, because that is the only means through which it can retain the trust of the Pakistan Army, and the generals in Rawalpindi know this.


The limits to the ties between India and the US are most vividly brought out by the fallout of the David Coleman Headley revelations. It transpires that the US probably had information on his activities and did not tip off India.
Fair enough. The US was perhaps pursuing its vital national interests. It is entirely possible that at some time he was being controlled, or so they thought, by the CIA, which saw him as a possible means to get Osama bin Laden. For the record, of course, he was an important DEA source who had managed to establish links with the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. So he was allowed to operate freely, till it became clear that he was going to hit Denmark and then, he was pulled in. The Mumbai thing did not seem to have mattered to the US. It was the possible danger to a NATO ally that counted. That’s what strategic relationships are all about—mutuality of outlook and obligations.
Since then, as this paper has extensively reported, Headley has revealed that the Mumbai operation had deep ISI links. He has named names, provided the dates and other information. But that, too, has not mattered to the US. It does not want to raise the issue that could profoundly unsettle its links with the Pakistan Army, the outfit which runs the ISI and effectively controls Pakistan.

Potential
There is a lot that brings India and the US together. Democracy and all that is one part of it, a growing distrust of China is another. But New Delhi would be mistaken if it thought that there was an identity of interests and mutuality of obligations between us right now. The quality of the Sino-US relationship is quite different from that between India and China. The two matter far more to each other, in contrast to their more secondary relationships with India.
The more important point to understand is that there is a great deal of potential in Indo-US relations, but that we are still some way from being able to realise that potential. There are subjective factors that prevent that realisation such as India’s inability to think through its longer range grand strategy, as well as the very real inequality of their status in relation to each other. And there are objective factors such as the current interplay of ties of our interlocutor, the US, with our adversaries, Pakistan and China.
In some future, if the Pakistan problem can be sorted out satisfactorily and Chinese behaviour becomes more problematic, perhaps a strategic relationship may actually develop. But nothing is foreordained. So for the present let us agree to be just good friends, and leave it at that.
Mail Today October 22, 2010

BLUNDERING US PAVED WAY FOR 26/11

Headley’s wife had told FBI in 2005 that he was LeT operative

FBI held key 2008 Mumbai terror conspirator & let him go inexplicably

EVEN two years after the horrific Mumbai terror strikes on November 26, 2008, which claimed the lives of 166 people and injured several times that number, a miasma of suspicion hangs over the role of US agencies in failing to prevent the attack.

A report in the Washington Post on Saturday seems to have only deepened the doubts and raised questions about the nature of Indo- US counter- terrorism cooperation.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI), according to the newspaper, was told in 2005 by one of the key conspirators, David Coleman Headley’s wife that he was a member of the Lashkar- e- Tayyeba ( LeT), that he had trained in its military camps in Pakistan and had shopped around for equipment such as night- vision goggles for them.

Indeed, Headley managed to visit India in March 2009, three months after the Mumbai attack. He was arrested only after British intelligence stumbled upon his plans tocarry out attacks in Europe and tipped off the FBI, which arrested him in October 2009.

The Post reports that Headley’s wife phoned the special line of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York on August 26, 2005, and this led to her husband’s arrest on August 31. “ He was released on bond and was never prosecuted for reasons that remain unclear,” the Post adds.

The unstated suspicion is that he pulled strings with the US Drug Enforcement Administration ( DEA), for whom he worked as an informant between 1988 and March 2008. They used him to break the closely run Pakistani cartels and serve as a witness against drug runners. As part of this operation, they encouraged, and possibly financed, his visits to Pakistan.

Headley’s wife, whose identity is being held secret for her security, not only gave the FBI details of his relationship with the Lashkar but also showed them audio cassettes and jihadi propaganda material, and “ described his emails and calls from Pakistan and to individuals whom she thought to be extremists”. Headley was inducted into the Lashkar’s India operations in 2005 and in 2006, and to draw a smokescreen around himself he had changed his name from Daoud Gilani to David Coleman Headley. He carried out six visits to India for detailed surveillance of targets between September 2006 and March 2009. At any point of time before the Mumbai attack, information on his background would have led to his arrest and interrogation, and a possible foiling of the Lashkar’s Mumbai plan.

Inexplicably, neither the FBI, nor the DEA, with whom Indian officials interact regularly, provided any hint till September 2008 when the FBI tipped off the Indian side about a possible conspiracy to attack Indian targets in Mumbai. India and the US have been cooperating on counter- terrorism since 2000. That was when a Joint Working Group on Counter- Terrorism, a multi- agency outfit, was established and it keeps holding regular meetings in Washington and New Delhi.

Indeed, the FBI tip- off came only by accident. An FBI official seconded to the Special Operations Division of the DEA was asked to listen in to some audio tapes made by Headley in Pakistan.

While listening to the tapes, the FBI officer came across conversation in which there was reference to a “ fedayeen assault” on Mumbai aimed at various places and hotels. Instead of filing the report only to the DEA, the officer also alerted his own agency. After it became clear that the DEA was not raising the issue by itself, the FBI formally warned India in September 2008. The FBI later claimed that their hands were clean on the issue. But the Washington Post revelations indicate that the FBI, a trained counter- terror agency, also failed to act when it should have. Especially since December 2001, when the LeT had been declared a Foreign Terrorist Organisation by the US in the wake of the December 13 attack on Parliament House in Delhi.

Both the DEA and the FBI are refusing to talk about the Headley case because they claim it is ongoing and that they do not discuss informants, but there are other indications as to his association with them. One of them is the manner in which a federal judge cleared him of probation in December 2001, enabling him to travel to Pakistan.

He began serving a 15- month sentence in November 1998, but was out within six months and headed for Pakistan.

Under the original sentence he would have been on probation till mid- 2004. But the prosecutor asked the judge to end his probation early and the judge agreed.

Whether it was 9/ 11, or some other development, this was around the time that Headley was radicalised and in 2002, in one of his visits, probably on behalf of the DEA, he also attended a Lashkar- e- Tayyeba training camp for three weeks and was trained to use guns and grenades. In April 2003, he went for the longer three- month course, which also included close combat tactics and survival skills. In all, he had five rounds of training with the Lashkar.

A statement by the US Ambassador Timothy Roemer in Delhi, meanwhile, has noted that they were examining the Post report, and that “ when we have determined exactly what transpired, we will be in a position to speak to the specific claims made in the article and other media reports.”

Mail Today lead story October 17, 2010

Security is more than a UN seat

The endorsement that India got from 187 out of 192 nations for a seat in the UN Security Council is heartening, but let it not go into our head. After all, we were the sole candidate for the Asian seat,and the seat is a non-permanent one. We have some way to go before we can get a permanent seat of the kind China or the US occupy. The bigger question is, however, what now? What would an Indian incumbency mean for Indian security policies and relations with various countries of the world? Unfortunately, the short answer probably is, nothing.
New Delhi seems to think that the mere fact of wearing the UN Security Council crown would automatically endow it with attributes of being able to operate in the international system in a manner that secures its own interests through the effective use of military, economic and diplomatic instrumentalities, even while ensuring that it degrades the abilities of its adversaries, existing or potential. India has this enormous thirst for being recognised as a world power, but it doesn’t want to expend sweat to attain that goal, all it seems to want are the symbols of power, not power itself.

China
Neither through inclination, institutions— or its leadership— is the India of today oriented towards a relentless promotion of national interest— the core guiding principle of contemporary international politics. It lacks any comprehensive understanding, or maybe the stomach, to get involved in the hurly burly of infighting and maneuvers— and compromises— that are the stuff of being a world power.
India’s weaknesses have become manifest in an era where the international balance of power is in a state of flux. Far from being on the margins, as it was through much of the Cold War, India is now closer to the center because of developments in Afghanistan and the Indian Ocean.
Ironically, two of our adversaries—Pakistan and China—are key players now but in diametrically different ways. Pakistan’s is a negative challenge. The rise of jihadism within the country and the collapse of its institutions have a direct bearing on Indian security and well-being. Associated with this are the consequences of a possible defeat of the American-led coalition in Afghanistan.

The Chinese hospital ship, Peace Ark, which has been deployed in the Indian Ocean in September 2010

China’s incredible rise has a different kind of resonance. Though Beijing remains focused primarily on its eastern seaboard—Taiwan, Korea, Japan, the ASEAN and the US—the enormous dynamism of Chinese growth is spilling over into South Asia and the Indian Ocean. In what should have been India’s backyard, we find a vigourous Beijing undertaking infrastructure projects, offering military aid and undermining New Delhi by its presence.
In the Indian Ocean area besides the Chinese activity in developing facilities in Myanmar, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, the Chinese Navy has taken an active interest in the anti-piracy mission and are wooing littoral nations of Africa. The Chinese are by no means a threat to the Indian position in the ocean today. But you would be foolhardy to suggest that they will not be so tomorrow.
The choice before India is stark—stand up, or kowtow. The second is really no option for a country of India’s size that measures up well with China in virtually every element of national power. India cannot turn away from its historical destiny of being one of Asia’s big powers to stand aside from regional responsibilities will have serious consequences for the global balance of power, the stability of our region, and indeed our homeland security. In this interdependent world, there is no opting out.
The issue then is straightforward— should India be part of a coalition to stand up to a rising China which is becoming more truculent by the day, or should it retain its strategic autonomy and stand on its own as one of the poles in the global order ?

Coalition
Both options are attractive and doable. For a variety of reasons, the rise of India has not been viewed as threatening by anyone. Indeed, the world’s foremost power—the US— sees it as a positively useful development. This was the reason why an unnamed US official had declared in 2005, on the eve of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s visit to New Delhi, that the US “goal is to help India become a major world power in the 21st century.”
In the heady years following this, India was active with the US, Japan and Australia and there was talk of an Asian coalition of democracies. But the idea of a Quad security dialogue was proposed and quickly abandoned. After the economic crisis of 2008-9, and America’s current difficulties, it seems to have been forgotten, even though the countries in question maintain “strategic” ties bilaterally and have even held joint naval exercises.
The American moves towards India have not been based on philanthropy for which that great nation is well known for. It has been based on a sharp perception of American interests. Equally, the manner in which India grabbed the US offer of the Indo-US nuclear deal showed how we could also see the main chance when offered.

Autonomy
But there remain strong forces within India suggesting that we stand by ourselves on matters relating to foreign and security policy. In some measure this is a hangover of the era of non-alignment and to some extent it is a valid argument for a model where India sees itself as one pole in a multi-polar world, one that should stay out of other’s problems and concentrate on building up its own capacities. It is also the bitter lesson learnt from the experience of dealing with the US whose ruthless devotion of its national interests have caused us much harm in the past, and could well do so again, in relation to Pakistan.
Alarmingly, though, it is more likely a consequence of an inability of our political class to provide the leadership needed by the country to cope with the demands of the era.
Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Das Gupta have hit the nail on the head by their analysis of Indian military policy, titled evocatively, Arming without Aiming: India’s Military Modernisation. Their major conclusion is that India’s military modernisation for which the country is likely to import some $100 billion worth of arms, is haphazard and lacks political direction or a strategic-military purpose.
After an initial flurry of activity to implement the GoM Report of 2003 and incorporate the armed forces into the larger decision-making process of the country, things have stalled. So today a military buildup continues sans a grand strategy. The major reason for this is the lack of a integration of the military and civilian elements of national power.
At a simplistic level, the duty of the armed forces is to secure the country and its air space and guard its sea-lanes, but that alone cannot be their utility. Nations do not invest vast sums of money to get their armed forces to merely do chowkidari (guard duty). They have a larger function in the promoting the country’s standing in the world and expanding its sphere of influence.
Mail Today October 14, 2010

A top-heavy Air Force will easily lose its balance

Air Chief Marshal Pradeep Naik has said that he expected the Indian Air Force to close the negotiations for the Medium Multirole Aircraft (MMRCA) by March 2011, six months from now. In an interview to the Vayu Aerospace magazine on the eve of Air Force Day (which happens to be today), he noted that the 126 aircraft will then be expected to be inducted by 2014. In the same interview he also revealed that the likely date for the induction of the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) is 2017. These are also the years in which the IAF will be acquiring additional 150 Sukhoi-30 MKI fighters as well.
So will the IAF go from being weak-kneed to top-heavy ?

The Su-30MKI is already considered the best fighter in the world today, exceeded only by the F-22 Raptor, a programme that the US is terminating because the aircraft are too expensive. India will have some 272 Su-30MKIs by the time the programme ends, presumably by 2020, when the FGFA, the Indo-Russian answer to the Raptor starts coming in.

Expense
By 2025 the IAF could well end up with all top-of-the-line aircraft, and not enough work-horses. If the MMRCA contest goes in favour of either the Eurofighter or Rafale, the IAF could have 272 Su-30MKIs, 126 Eurofighter or Rafale’s, and 200-250 or so FGFA which Air Chief Marshal alluded to in another interview last week. So from an abject position of an air force which is 50 per cent obsolete, India could well end up with the most modern air force in the world, with even more fifth generation fighters than even the mighty US, since the F-22 programme ends at 187 aircraft and we will have 250 FGFAs. There will also be some 320 or so LCAs, upgraded Jaguars, Mirage 2000s and MiG-29s.
All this is a good thing, or is it?
There are two issues here. First, these fighters will be all multi-role, as are most modern fighters and they will overlap each other’s functions. More important is the issue of cost. Heavy fighters cost a lot of money. The Sukhois are of the order of $50 million per piece. The MMRCA, if it is the Eurofighter Typhoon, could cost more than twice that amount. But the bigger costs lie in running them. According to an estimate, the Typhoon and Rafale could cost some $16,000 an hour. The costs for the Sukhoi are not known, but may be twice as much because serviceability is a major problem with Russian aircraft. Their engines have to be replaced at about 300 hours or so, as compared to 3,000 for comparable Western engines.


The country, and, of course, the IAF needs to take a hard look at whether they can afford all this. There is no doubt that we need to modernise our forces, but the need is for a balance that is distributed effectively between the Army, Air Force and the Navy. Bunched up acquisitions such as the ones we seem to be heading for could create major budgetary problems, or, result in parts of the air force remaining grounded because there is not enough money to fly the aircraft.
How did we land in this situation? Actually there is nothing unusual about it. From the 1980s onwards, IAF acquisitions have been an opaque affair. In fact, only the current MMRCA buy is a model of transparency, as compared to what went on in the past.

Bribery
For example, there was no IAF demand for a Mirage 2000, but we bought them anyway. There is no trace of any IAF request for the Su-30 MKI, but we have those, too. This is not unusual in our dense defence decision-making process which we have been trying to open up. At least two former Navy chiefs have told this writer that they do not know who wanted the Akula-class nuclear attack submarine that is likely to be added to our fleet soon.
It is not as though the equipment thus acquired is a dud. It is not. The best example of this is the Bofors 155 mm howitzer whose acquisition was so controversial. The fact that bribes were paid for the buy does not detract from the fact that the guns performed superbly in the Kargil war. The IAF got to love the Mirage 2000, as it does the Su-30MKI.
But the obvious implications of the acquisitions is that they were made for considerations other than purely our defence needs. These “considerations” could be strategic i.e. made as a politico-economic trade off. But the more obvious conclusion is that they are the outcome of bribery and corruption.
The acquisition of the equipment has been a cavalier process, tailor-made for wasting money, rather than obtaining the most economical solution. Take the Sukhoi programme. Initially India sought 40 aircraft, it was then persuaded to buy 10 that Indonesia no longer wanted. Then it was decided that the country would build another 140 under licence. Later, when the LCA programme was delayed, 40 more were ordered, and then, more recently, another 42. On the tarmac of IAF’s Lohegaon airbase, there are another 18 old Sukhoi-27PVs that India had got at the outset of the programme, which the Russians were supposed to upgrade to 30-MKI standards and didn’t. They are no longer operational.

Profile
Ideally, the IAF in 2020 should be a three-tiered force of 16 Su-30MKI squadrons (320 aircraft) in the top-most tier, 8 of the MMRCA (160 aircraft), 6 of LCA (120), which means 280 tier II fighters, and the balance, 6 squadrons of upgraded Jaguars (120), 3 Mirage 2000 (60) and 3 Mig-29s (60) would be tier III, aircraft reaching the end of their airframe life to be replaced by the FGFA, as it comes into service.
This, of course, would assume that the MMRCA would be a lighter aircraft, not a heavy twin-engine fighter. In the current competition there are three that fit the bill— the Swedish Gripen, the American F-16 and the Russian Mig-35. Of the three, the Swedish aircraft is the most modern and economical to operate. Such a force profile would not only provide the optimum defence solution for India, but help keep the operating costs down, a not inconsequential consideration for a dirt-poor nation.
We also need to keep in mind the latest trends in air power—the growth of robotic aircraft. In early 2010, it was estimated that the US will spend some 15 per cent of its $230 billion budget for the next five years for unmanned aerial vehicles.



Considering that the price of the F-22 Raptor is of the order of $150 million, it is little wonder that the US has been forced to curtail the programme. When you can get Predator and Reaper UAV’s for $4 million a piece, bomb your enemies without risking your pilots, the decision is a no-brainer anyway. Already more drone operators are being trained than bomber or fighter pilots in the US.
The trends of the future are more than obvious, but there is little indication that our manned-fighter oriented air force is considering them.
Technology is a fickle master, those who are not sensitive to its trends are condemned to obsolescence.
Mail Today October 8, 2010

Babri issue has lost its political traction

This appeared on the day the Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi verdict was pronounced by the High Court. In my view it is a majoritarian verdict. Let us see what the Supreme Court has to say.

India stands once again at a watershed moment. By clearing the way for the High Court to deliver the judgment on the Babri Masjid title case, the Supreme Court has brought the issue — which has caused riots and mayhem and cost thousands of lives—to its penultimate stage. The High Court bench will now deliver its verdict and the case is then likely to be kicked upstairs to the Supreme Court itself. But the substantive part of the verdict, which could be delivered as soon as this week, is not likely to change, considering the time and attention that the High Court has already given to the case. For most of the country, politicians, those party to the suit, indeed, the average citizen of the country, the overwhelming desire is for a closure to a terrible period in our history and to move on.
What the tensions, some of them media-driven, have done in the past month or so as the verdict was anticipated, are to have compelled the country to confront the demons of the past. And some of those demons have indeed been terrible. Beginning with the holocaust of the Partition, there was an almost continuous string of what were euphemistically called “communal riots” in the country.


The historian Paul R Brass has noted that between 1954 and 1982, there were 7,000 in which five hundred Hindus were killed and nearly three times as many Muslims. You do not have to be a mathematician to realise that disproportionate violence was visited on the minority Muslim community.

Violence
Since then, the intensity of riots became, if anything, worse. There were riots in Moradabad (1980), Biharsharif (1981), Nellie (1983), Bhiwandi and Hyderabad (1984), Ahmedabad (1985), Nawada and Allahabad (1986), Meerut-Maliana (1987), Bombay (1988), Bhagalpur (1989).
Beginning with Mr L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra in support of building a Ram Mandir in place of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1990, a new cycle of violence began— Kanpur (April-May 1990), Lucknow (October 1990), Agra (November 1990), Benares (May and November 1991) which culminated in another holocaust period in the wake of the mosque’s destruction in December 1992 when riots rocked Bombay, Ahmedabad, Surat, Calcutta, Kanpur, Malegaon, Bhopal and Delhi. In the ensuing decade, there were some 150 smaller riots, in addition to some bigger ones at Coimbatore, Kanpur and Malegaon. The Gujarat massacre of 2002 must be included in this list because its ostensible cause was the burning to death in a train of 59 Hindu kar sevaks who were returning from Ayodhya.
The communal climate has since improved in incendiary places like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, but there are states like Maharashtra, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh where politics continues to fuel communal violence.
So are there still parties and individuals who would like to use the issue to stoke tension and provoke violence? We need to understand that by and large communal violence is an organised activity and it is only the apathy or active connivance of the administration and the police that makes it virulent.
The high-tide of emotions in support of a Ram Mandir that brought the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Kalyan Singh to power in Uttar Pradesh in 1991 began to ebb almost immediately thereafter. Though the party used the Mandir movement to enhance its position in Parliament, reaching the point where it was able to finally form a government there in 1998, it was never able to establish itself in the strategic state of UP. Though there may still be individuals in it who seek to use the verdict to further their own cause, most of the party now understands that the issue is unlikely to have much traction with the electorate and has, indeed, become a mill-stone around their necks. The party almost certainly lost its chance to continue its rule at the Centre in 2004 because of the Gujarat killings.
There is a new generation of leadership in the party which finds that good governance is likely to deliver better long-term returns, than the short-term spikes that emotive issues like the Ram Mandir can provide—the comparison between Shivraj Singh Chouhan and his one-time predecessor, Uma Bharti could not be starker.

Demolition
The other set of people who could want to disturb the current flow of events are the radicals in the Muslim community. For the Islamists, be they in outfits like the Popular Front, or the so-called Indian Mujahideen and the Students Islamic Movement of India, any step that leads to a cooling of communal tempers in the country goes against their game plan. Fortunately, such people are in an extreme minority. The bulk of the Indian Muslims have realised that their numbers give them sufficient clout to influence the outcome of elections in the highly fractured Indian polity of today. Many observers claim that tactical voting to ensure the defeat of the BJP has become a feature of Muslim electoral behaviour.
History never repeats itself, either as a tragedy or a farce. That is the reason why the outcome of the Babri Masjid case is unlikely to cause the kind of mayhem that the destruction of the mosque did. That event occurred when the country was already at an edge. The years 1989- 1991 were perhaps the worst in contemporary Indian history. There were four changes of government in a period of 18 months. Two states of the union—Punjab and Kashmir— were in a state of rebellion, India was insolvent to the extent that its gold reserves were transported to London because our creditors wanted iron-clad guarantees for further loans, and, tragically, in 1991, a former and possible future prime minister of the country was assassinated. The country itself was in turmoil as two political mountebanks sought to trump each other—one by announcing reservations for the Other Backward Classes and the other by declaring indirect war on the minority Muslims by demanding the destruction of the Babri Masjid.

2010
The country of 2010— is comprised of some 40 or so percent people who were born after the Babri Masjid demolition and its immediate aftermath—is decidedly different. It has had reasonably stable central governments since 1999, led by pragmatic and centrist prime ministers. High economic growth for the past decade has dramatically improved the mood of the country. There is more money in people’s pockets, there are expectations for the future. There is little purchase for ideas that seek to either transform the world, or, for that matter the Indian political landscape. Poverty and misery may still abound in the land, but there is also, after a long time, opportunity to move ahead, and people sense this and would not like anything to destabilise this period in their history.
There are bound to be rowdy elements who may seek to use the verdict to provoke violence, but they will find that it is not easy to gain traction today. It goes without saying that vigilance against such elements is a must. The lessons of the past decades are such that no party, be it the VHP-Bajrang Dal or the Islamist radicals, can take the response of the people of the country for granted. Indeed, any attempt to opportunistically use the verdict to aggravate the situation could well backfire on them.
That in itself is the best insurance for communal peace in the coming period which could well be a prelude to an era, foreseen by our founding fathers, when the people of the country begin to keep their religious beliefs in the private sphere.
Mail Today September 30, 2010

Time to throw away the old text-book on Pakistan

In an interview with the Washington Post in March 2009, counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen declared that “We are now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state.” In June that same year, Bruce Riedel, wrote an article suggestively titled “Armageddon in Islamabad” in The National Interest pointing to the emerging possibility of a jihadist, nuclear armed Pakistan.
Fortunately today Pakistan is no nearer to collapse, nor further from it. But, the situation has, if anything, become more complicated. A cataclysmic flood has broken even the tenuous link that the people have had with their wayward government. This is alarming because some of the worst affected areas are in southern Punjab which has been on a watch-list for a while because of the growth of Punjabi Islamist militias there. This is but a newer layer of volatility upon the older problems of Pakistan—the expansion of the Taliban in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, the vicious sectarian strife and its non-functioning government.

Failure
When it comes to the health of states, nothing is foreordained, especially something as rare as state failure. There are two ways in which a state can fail—a catastrophic collapse arising from defeat in a war, an internal coup d’etat or mutiny in the army, or, in an even more far-fetched scenario, a decapitating nuclear strike. Actually the other way is the more likely—a slow collapse of institutions, the loss of control over territory due to civil war or external aggression, a loss of legitimate authority because of the failure of governance institutions, financial atrophy, along with collapse of the business climate, accompanied by an inability to provide public services.
Many of these criteria could well fit parts of India, as much as Pakistan. But there are two important differences—first, India’s size which allows failure to be localised, and second, a flourishing economy. Since 2008, Pakistan has gone steadily downhill and there are few positive prognoses for its recovery.
Alarmingly, the Pakistani establishment’s reaction seems to confirm the failure of state institutions. On Thursday, the government announced that they were revising the federal budget —the defence expenditure was being hiked by Rs 110 billion and that for development reduced by Rs 73 billion. According to Dawn, the money is being allegedly appropriated for a new operation in the tribal area. This doesn’t wash because the US reimburses Pakistan the money for its tribal operations, and don’t the worst floods in the century have the absolute priority?
Another pointer came earlier this week, when the Public Accounts Committee of the Pakistan National Assembly were told that the government had made a one-time release of Rs 5.55 billion to the ISI for unspecified reasons in the 2007-8 period.
Spending money to expand its geo-political footprint—clearly the ISI and Army got the money for their India and Afghanistan operations—is folly given the domestic political and economic realities. Pakistan’s economic growth is around 2 per cent, its inflation at 13.5 per cent. Some years ago, Pakistan used to argue that it could not open its economy for fear that Indian industry would swamp it. Today, it has been swamped by the Chinese. Most of its textile mills have been mothballed and there is little other industry functioning. Significantly, the years of détente with India, 2000-2007, were years of high economic growth.


Senior Indian officials argue that in many ways, they are already dealing with Pakistan as a failed state. The Indian experience is that it is no longer possible to deal with a Government of Pakistan—you need to deal with different institutions of Pakistan at their own level—the military, the prime minister, the presidency, the judiciary, civil society, various provincial governments and parties and so on. This itself is not a new development because in the case of Pakistan, successor governments do not automatically uphold the decisions of the predecessors, especially if the latter happen to be military dictatorships.

Engagement
What can you do to deal with a failing state? The most important thing is to remain engaged. But that, as experience shows, is easier said than done. Pakistan has steadfastly refused to allow India most favoured nation status for trade, neither will it permit Indian goods to transit to Afghanistan. To top it all, it also refused Indian aid in the wake of the floods, accepting it finally with bad grace in the form of a cheque in New York, instead of readily available and much needed materials across the common border in Punjab or Sindh.
The Ministry of External Affairs is trying its best to resume the stalled dialogue with Pakistan, but to little avail. It would seem now that far from feeling the continuing Indian pressure over its indifference, if not culpability on the 2008 Mumbai attack, Pakistan is the one posing as the injured party and is stalling the resumption of the dialogue and playing hard-to-get on the proposed meeting between the foreign ministers of the two countries on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly session in New York.
On Thursday, its official spokesman declared that no decision had been taken on the New York meeting as yet. He then excoriated India over Kashmir, and declared that Qureshi’s return visit to India would depend on whether or not India was agreeable to a “comprehensive and sustained dialogue with Pakistan.” The hardened Pakistani position is based on its belief that India is on the back foot because of the developments in Kashmir and the embarrassment over the Commonwealth Games arrangements.
But Pakistan cannot see that Indian self-correction mechanisms are already at work. The Indian political class and media have compelled the government to introspect on its tactics in Kashmir. But that is not the case in relation to terrorism and Pakistan. The long denial of the Pakistani establishment continues, even as the Islamist threat expands.

Army
In trying to arrest the free fall that Pakistan seems to have entered New Delhi has shown that its heart is in the right place. The problem, however, is the head. What seems to be evident from the knee-jerk responses that we are seeing in South Block is that no one is really thinking through the Pakistan policy.
The issue is not the composite dialogue, or Kashmir and terrorism. The situation has qualitatively changed. We are dealing with a failing/failed state and need to throw away the old text book. India needs to focus on trying to engage the Pakistan Army in a dialogue whose aim will be to convince them that the last thing we seek is a broken or breaking Pakistan.
This is not an easy task, not only because the Pakistan Army is not particularly eager to enter into a dialogue. The problem is that the Indian political class which disdains its own army when it comes to policy-making, cannot quite figure out how to deal with the army of another country, one that plays so much of a role in that country’s policies.
Another issue is China’s nuclear assistance to Islamabad. It makes little difference to India strategically, yet we insist on making an issue of it instead of trying to deal with it head on and negotiate a solution to a dangerous problem.
As we noted earlier, when it comes to states, nothing is pre-determined. There are things that can be done with a failing Pakistan that can prevent state collapse; on the other hand, it should be quite clear that should state failure occur, we won’t have too many options to deal with it.
Mail Today September 25, 2010