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December 29, 2008
Mumbai revelations
As gruesome as they were, last month's terrorist attacks in Mumbai were a bold wake-up call. The ten attackers entered Mumbai by boat, fanned out across the city, and attacked and laid siege to many of its most notable landmarks. Over the span of several days, 171 people were killed. The brazenness of the attacks reminded Indians that terrorism could still strike them, even in their largest city. But it also served as a reminder to the rest of the world of something that should have become obvious: the relatively new threat of state-less Islamic terrorism is inextricably linked to the older, state-based tensions between India and Pakistan.
The animosities between India and Pakistan stretch back to the founding of each country. When the British granted independence to its South Asian colony in 1947, two states were created: Muslim-majority Pakistan and predominantly Hindu India. The partition was a bloody and tumultuous affair, and it sowed the seeds for the tensions between the two countries that continue to this day. Pakistan and India have fought three major wars and numerous minor skirmishes over the past 60 years. The two countries' tit-for-tat nuclear weapons tests in 1998 did nothing to reduce the geopolitical or religious tensions, though it certainly raised the stakes of the rivalry to frightening new levels.
A source of much of much of the tension between India and Pakistan is the disputed territory of Kashmir. Uneasily and artificially divided by a “line of control” for the past 60 years, Kashmir has become a symbol of the tortured and seemingly intractable rivalry between India and Pakistan. In recent decades, one of Pakistan's preferred methods for exerting pressure in Kashmir has been supporting militant groups in the Indian-controlled portion of the territory. Pakistan officially denies supporting such groups, but it is widely suspected that they continue to receive protection (if not outright support) from forces within the Pakistani military, particularly from the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI). One such group is Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which was founded in Afghanistan in the early 1990s and maintains connections with the Taliban and al Qaeda. LeT has become notorious, however, as one of the more vicious militant groups operating in Kashmir. Although it denies responsibility for the Mumbai attacks, the sole attacker captured alive after the assault claimed that he was a member of LeT, and other evidence seems to confirm the group's culpability. This has only served to increase tensions between India and Pakistan.
LeT's apparent complicity in the Mumbai attacks has immediate implications for U.S. counter-terrorism policy and for the incoming Obama administration. For one thing, any spike in tensions between nuclear-armed powers is automatically of interest to the United States. Energy, attention, and resources that could be applied elsewhere must be redirected toward this crisis. Ideologically, however, the threat displayed by LeT in Mumbai is not all that different than the threat posed by al Qaeda and its offshoots in the West. In the scope and prioritization of their objectives, the two groups are broadly similar. Each has a near-term, practical objective that drives the bulk of their operational activity. For LeT, this near-term goal is the expulsion of Indian forces from Kashmir, and for al Qaeda, it is the expulsion of U.S. forces Muslim lands.
But each group also has a longer-term objective, based on a more generalized, extremist ideology that serves more as an abstract inspiration than a practical, operational blueprint. In these longer-term goals, LeT and al Qaeda are kindred spirits. LeT hopes to restore Islamic rule across South Asia, and al Qaeda wants to restore the Islamic caliphate over all of the lands it laid claim to hundreds of years ago. Each group draws its long-term inspiration from the same radical font.
Ideology is a tough thing to defeat. In a more practical sense, however, groups such as LeT and al Qaeda can be targeted by military means, and it is in this context that the Mumbai attacks will most directly affect U.S. policy. As tensions rise between India and Pakistan, India will try to send a message by moving more troops to Kashmir and to its border with Pakistan. For its part, Pakistan will seek to defend its borders (and its honor) by reinforcing its forces in Kashmir and along its eastern frontier. Those reinforcements will come from Pakistan's other border, with Afghanistan, where they nominally have been securing restless tribal areas and preventing Taliban and al Qaeda forces from using the region as a base for operations in Afghanistan. So far, however, Pakistan has not been effective in this mission. The situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated greatly over the past year, in large part due to the ease with which Taliban and insurgent forces can move across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border for resupply and repositioning. If the border is porous now, it will become far more dangerous if Pakistan moved troops away from the area to bolster its defenses against India.
In Afghanistan, U.S. and NATO troops are trying to ensure stability and defeat a growing Taliban insurgency. President-elect Obama campaigned on a pledge to end the war in Iraq and bolster the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, where the U.S. mission has long been perceived as more justified and appropriate than the elective invasion of Iraq (for more, see The Water's Edge, July 2008). It was from Afghanistan that Osama bin Laden planned the 9/11 attacks, and it was there that the hijackers were trained. After Afghan mujahideen expelled the Soviet invaders in 1989, the United States abandoned its former allies, leaving a chaotic power vacuum that allowed the Taliban to seize power and granted al Qaeda a safe haven.
If history teaches any lesson about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, then, it is that the mission should be completed. But with the situation rapidly deteriorating in that country, a military worn-out by years of deployment in Iraq, and a growing economic crisis at home, many commentators and even some Obama supporters are questioning the wisdom of sending more troops to Afghanistan. It is a country with a long reputation for resisting outside invaders, and if Osama bin Laden hasn't been captured yet, he likely won't be caught with a few thousand additional soldiers.
Another school of thought takes a more nuanced position. Afghanistan remains an important country for the United States, and it would be unsafe and unwise to simply leave. At the same time, sending more troops to the country would be insufficient to defeat the insurgency and could, in fact, only make it worse. Instead, the United States must pursue a more wide-ranging strategy, in terms of both methodology (military support as well as economic support) and geography (stabilizing Afghanistan, demanding accountability from Pakistan, and urging restraint from India). Obama seems to be adopting a position along these lines: “We're going to have to make a series of not just military but also diplomatic moves that fully enlist Pakistan as an ally in that region, that lessen tensions between India and Pakistan, and then get everybody focused on rooting out militancy in a terrain, a territory, that is very tough.”
In a very straightforward way, then, the Mumbai attacks will have a direct effect on U.S. counter-terrorism policy. The attacks were launched by a group that has connections with the Taliban and al Qaeda and that is being protected by Pakistan's ISI. This raises tensions between Pakistan and India, distracting the former from its already meager efforts to support the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and tempting the latter to exact revenge on its long-standing rival. The crux of this geopolitical maze is, of course, Pakistan. Directly or indirectly, it fosters violence and instability in both Afghanistan and India, and its fragile democracy is wracked by corruption, economic woe, and competing factions within its own military. If Osama bin Laden is still alive, he is probably in Pakistan. And to make the situation even more unsettling, Pakistan also has nuclear weapons. Instead of an Afghanistan strategy, then, President-elect Obama is likely to think more in terms of a Pakistan strategy, or at the very least a regional one. He is fortunate that members of his own nascent administration have already thought along similar lines. During the Democratic primaries, Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden (then a fellow presidential candidate) shared similar views on Pakistan. They supported efforts to increase non-military aid to the country but to tie further military aid to the Pakistan's actual performance in shutting down Taliban safe havens within its borders (for more, see The Water's Edge, November 2007).
As horrific as the Mumbai attacks were, they serve as a potent reminder that South Asia's security challenges are deeply interconnected. Any policy that truly hopes to address them must encompass Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India in a coherent manner and recognize that resolving the deep-seated interstate tensions could help to undermine the region's potent intrastate (and state-less) threats. Already, rumors are swirling that Obama may appoint a high-powered special envoy to focus exclusively on South Asia; Richard Holbrooke, negotiator of the Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, has been floated as a potential appointee to this post. If these rumors are true, he may find that bringing peace to the Balkans was easy by comparison.
Foreign Policy Association, 28 December 2008
Posted by Daniel Widome at 09:53 PM to Asia, U. S. Politics | TrackBack (0)
