Washington’s terms of engagement

US-Pakistan relationship has seen many ups and downs. Traditionally the US has had no direct economic or strategic interest in South Asia. Its interest was derivative emanating from its concern about Communist threat to the region. The relationship thus waxed and waned in proportion to the American perceptions of this threat.

But South Asia has been transformed by the post-cold war world, the Afghan Jihad and its aftermath, the rise of religious militancy, globalization, and by its nuclearization and the events of September 11, and so has the basis for the US relationship with it. While in the past the region was the focus of US interest because of the threat from outside now it is a source of concern primarily because of what happens there, specially in Pakistan, and how it impacts on the outside. The threat is now from inside to outside.

In the post-cold war South Asia, India had been able to command attention of the West, and successfully transcend the pull of gravity that had traditionally dragged it down to the India-Pakistan equation. India could play the West’s game like Pakistan used to at the height of the cold war. Indeed there was a new “cold war”

now, that is against fundamentalist Islam, and America needed allies to fight it. This would at once build up India and lead Pakistan to isolation. The roles had reversed because the issues had changed. We had become part of the problem not the solution.

Clinton’s TV address during his brief stopover in Islamabad was intended to be a rude awakening to us both in real and figurative sense. But because it was so stunningly rude it may have distracted our attention from the substance of the message. His Texan successor was, however, much more focused in his wake-up call to Pakistan leaving us in little doubt where we stood internationally and with the United States, the two being synonymous in the present world.

There is now revival of sorts in the US-Pakistan relations. Broadly speaking, the United States now considers its relations with India and Pakistan as important, for similar as well as different reasons. Whereas with India the US seeks a broader economic and strategic relationship focused on the resurgence of China, with Pakistan it seeks influence and engagement to effect changes helpful to its overall interests in South Asia and beyond specially its own basic security interests.

But any vision of a quantum change in the relationship may be illusory and a throw-back to the inflated self-image of the past. It seems to be neither enduring nor intrinsic to our worth. Pakistan and India are being assigned different roles: Pakistan as a partner and India as an ally. Indeed, Pakistan’s partnership is aimed not only at soliciting its help in the war against terrorism but also in its own move towards building a more open and tolerant society. In other words, Pakistan could both be a partner and a target, an ambiguity that clearly has a potential for friction in the future relationship which could turn adversarial.

There is no such ambiguity in the relationship with India where “the US interests require a strong relationship” and where two sides “share an interest in fighting terrorism and creating strategically stable Asia” as stated in the US document “The National Security of the United States” released last year. The document goes on to say: “today we start with a view of India as a growing world power with which we have common strategic interests” and ... (can) “shape dynamic future”.

The relationship with India is thus long-term, strategic, broad based, predictable and with a strong mutuality of interests. Ours seems to be narrowly-based aimed at achieving specifically designated and identified, and possibly short term, objectives.

Broadly speaking, the United States considers its relations with both India and Pakistan as important, for similar as well as different reasons. Whereas with India the US seeks friendship, with us it seeks influence. To put it facetiously, the difference is perhaps similar to the one between “marriage” and “engagement”.

The United States would like to engage Pakistan to have influence or leverage for reasons that transcend the imperative of fighting terrorism. The US would like Pakistan not to be a threat to India’s stability. It is also interested in restraining Pakistan’s nuclear and missile ambitions and keeping peace between Pakistan and India.

It does not want to see us in a position where we could challenge the pre-eminent status of India that is being increasingly perceived by the West as a factor of stability in the region. But at the same time it would not be in US interest that Pakistan succumb to Indian hegemony.

To use an over-used expression, India card is being played against China and Pakistan card is being played against India. The only problem is it has happened so often in the past, like in the game of bridge, that the US could “discard” Pakistan much more easily.

The future relationship between Pakistan and the United States could, however, feel the effects of many variables. One important consideration for the future of US-Pakistan relations, for instance, could be the stance of the political dispensation in Pakistan. A reluctant or ineffectual role by Pakistan, under-pinned by political constraints of the political government responding to popular discontent, fed by religious sentiments or nationalist impulses, could cause strains in the relationship. So far the government has stayed in line.

There are similar uncertainties on the US side. The present resurgence in the US-Pakistan relationship is not rooted in any long-term strategic alliance. It is a “coalition of the willing” in pursuit of some specific and limited aims . Like the co-operation during the Afghan jihad, it has a strong Pentagon and intelligence dimension and is being guided if not directed, by the White House. Once the short-term objectives are realized, the relationship will revert to the uncertain care of the state department. The imposition of the Pressler Amendment, in similar circumstances more than a decade ago, is a grim reminder of what could possibly happen in future.

We have to keep in mind that if there is a change in the White House in 2004, we could possibly see some re-thinking of the campaign against terrorism, which has been at the heart of the revival of US-Pakistan relations.

There is yet another imponderable. With a new design of political landscape of Iraq in the works, present setbacks notwithstanding, the United States is obviously aiming to convert that country into an ally, a kind of back-up to Saudi Arabia. This would add a whole new dimension to the American presence in the region, one effect, intended or unintended, of which will be Iran’s sense of encirclement by American presence all around it. All this will hold some implications for Pakistan.

Finally, the relationship could feel the impact of Kashmir. The American, or for that matter, broader western concern about the Kashmir dispute is not so much on account of the merits of the issue as due to the fact that the unresolved dispute has the potential to destabilize India, fuel tensions between Pakistan and India — with the possible risk of a war that could conceivably turn nuclear.

The US indeed will face another problem in the event of an India-Pakistan war. It will have to stand up and be counted in Pakistan, as the public would expect US support in the conflict like in the historical past. The US will not be able to do that, and that can have a backlash. Apart from the risk of war the US feels that the unresolved Kashmir dispute would continue to fuel religious militancy and impede the war on terrorism.

US diplomacy may have played some ancillary role in getting India to start talking again, but its role in the solution of the Kashmir dispute, I am afraid, begins and ends here, for all practical purposes, rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding. In the world of diplomats, often the language has no relationship with the reality, and invariably with a purpose.

In the last analysis it would largely be up to India and Pakistan to resolve their tensions and start living normally. Peace will only strengthen them, specially Pakistan. And only a strong Pakistan can have normal and autonomous relations with the outside world, specially with the United States. Otherwise the US-Pakistan relations will continue to be burdened by inflated expectations and misperceptions about mutual interests and obligations, causing cyclic waves of disappointments that have marked their entire history of friendship.

Each side, specially Pakistan, needs to bring its aspirations in line with the national interests of the other to minimize failed expectations. The United States has its national interests and we have our own. They converge partially and not all the times.

The US moves in its orbit, which is global, and we move in our own. The US does not have to agree with everything we do and we, on our part, do not have to be despondent or critical of everything it does. We cooperate to the extent we can in our mutual interests.

There should be no expectation of inherent goodness or fear of betrayal on either side. We have to release the relationship from emotional burden and weight of the past to put it in true perspective.

The writer is a former ambassador.

Bush’s dilemma in Iraq

WITH the steadily rising toll of US military casualties in Iraq — one American soldier dying on an average each day — and the doubling of Iraqi occupation costs, George W. Bush is faced with a serious dilemma: how to solve the ongoing security concerns and secure international support without sharing decision-making in Iraq with other nations.

The US death toll in Iraq is much more than what it was when President Bush declared the end of combat operations four months ago: 138 American soldiers had died by May 1, and a further 140 have died since then. “It has dramatized the vulnerability of the status quo and punctured the illusion that the campaign in Iraq was a liberation,” says former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

When the Bush administration embarked on the Iraqi campaign in the face of entrenched opposition from major European capitals, international public protest and anxiety in America itself over the prospects of war with Iraq, it fondly hoped that success would silence the critics. “Things will change rather markedly once success comes, this threat is removed and the Iraqi people face a bright future”, said secretary of state Colin Powell in an interview in January.

More than seven months later, the turn of events in Iraq has sapped the confidence of the American people as they now face the grim prospect of a long and bloody haul in Iraq. If the bloodshed continues and the security situation does not markedly improve in the coming days, Iraq may well cost George W. Bush re-election.

After nearly twelve months, President Bush will be seeking re-election. His prospects are generally considered uncertain. His approval rating is slipping down. An ABC poll published last week shows that public attitudes to US involvement in Iraq have stabilized at a level lower than where they were four months ago. President Bush’s approval rating is 56 per cent, down from 75 per cent in April. If American soldiers continue to die, his popularity is likely to slip down further.

The shifting political sentiment has encouraged candidates for Democratic nomination to fuel their campaign with anti-war rhetoric. The rising toll of US casualties has also exposed the muddle and confusion in the administration over how best to improve security in Iraq. “The administration is saying two different things”, says Joseph Biden, a senior Democrat on Senate’s foreign relations committee, “they are saying publicly they don’t need any more troops. But they are trying to get the Indians, the Turks and the Bangladeshis to contribute 40,000 additional troops now.

Democratic Senator John Keny, an aspirant for presidency, has attacked Mr. Rumsfeld for “stubbornly” refusing to increase troop numbers, suggesting “politics and pride” are playing a bigger part in decision-making than “ professional military judgment”. Arizona Senator John McCain, who recently returned from a tour of Iraq , has called for a further 20,000 US soldiers to add to the 136,000 Americans and 20,000 Britons already in Iraq.

In an important development, the Senate has voted 97-0 to urge President Bush to “consider requesting formally and expeditiously that NATO raise a force for deployment in post-war Iraq similar to what it has done in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo”. But the problem is that the Bush administration, stubbornly holding onto unilateralism, is not in a position to make the strategic shift necessary to bring the NATO allies truly into the Iraqi equation. That is why it seems unlikely that key allies in Europe will buy a NATO mission in Iraq to legitimize the US occupation and provide for cost sharing.

The likelihood is that the US will now return to the UN Security Council. Mr. Colin Powell recently called for a new U.N. resolution calling on the international community “ to do more.” French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin has, however, rejected the American plan of trying to persuade other nations to send troops to Iraq and place them under U.S. command. In a speech to the annual gathering of French ambassadors on August 29, Mr. de Villepin called for the creation of an international military force and an Iraqi provisional government under the authority of the United Nations.

Even today the real problem is the same as was before the invasion of Iraq: Are the Americans prepared to share decision making with others? Henry Kissinger, a diehard but shrewd pragmatist, says: “It will not be for the US to keep asking for assistance without giving them some role...Big countries which participate have to be given some sense of political participation.”

After the destruction of UN offices in Baghdad, the enormous explosion outside Iraq’s holiest Shia shrine, Hazrat Ali’s mosque at Najaf, killing more than 125 people including a highly-respected top Shia leader, cooperating with coalition forces, has deepened the security crisis in Iraq. The Najaf bombing has not only complicated US efforts to pacify an increasingly violent Iraq, it has also increased the threat of sectarian violence.

The problem facing US forces in Iraq is that the military is over-stretched in both civilian police operations and reconstruction work that the army and the marines are not trained to manage. That is why President Bush so desperately wants some international troops to free the US forces to create “hunter teams” that can track down terrorists and Saddam Hussein’s supporters.

Most experts agree that the best way to combat the growing insurgency in Iraq is to make the problem an Iraqi one — handing over the security problem to an indigenous Iraqi police force and a reconstituted Iraqi military. It will, however, take some time before an indigenous security apparatus can make its presence felt. Until then the brunt has to be borne by the coalition forces. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, admitted after a five-day trip to Iraq that the Pentagon had erred in assuming the local police and a remnant of the military would be in place after the US victory over Saddam Hussein.

The recent bombing attacks signify that violence in Iraq has taken a new form in method and target. In May, most attacks targeted coalition troops. In June, oil installations and utilities were the targets. A month later, the attacks refocused on those in uniforms. And in August, a flurry of violence was directed against oil installations, water utilities in Baghdad, foreign embassies, Red Cross workers, the United Nations and pro-coalition Shia leadership, besides targeting US troops.

It is obvious that hit-and-run tactics using hand grenades and rocket-launchers are the professional military stuff of Saddam Hussein loyalists. Car bombs and suicide attacks bear the fingers of intelligence-fundamentalist alliance. The first group’s aim is to stage a come-back, supported by tribalism; the second group is inspired by anti-western drive targeting the symbols of alien presence in Iraq. Since Iraq has almost an open border, terrorists from neighbouring countries can easily penetrate, complicating the situation further.

Another serious problem the Americans are facing relates to the attitude of Iraq’s neighbours. With the exception of Jordan and Kuwait, none of the neighbours is happy with the scenario emerging in post-Saddam Iraq. Syria has no reason to care for Iraq’s stability. Iran feels threatened by the US military presence. Saudi Arabia is horrified by the prospect of Shia majority rule in Iraq. The coalition-appointed governing council for Iraq comprises 13 Shias, 5 Kurds and 5 Sunni Arabs.

The mounting death toll of military casualties and rising violence in Iraq present the most serious challenge to George W. Bush since he entered the White House three years ago. He knows that as his re-election campaign draws near, continuing bloodshed in Iraq can pose a huge threat to his re-election chances. He is faced with a tough dilemma: how to overcome the security crisis in Iraq and garner international support without sharing decision-making with other nations. It is not going to be easy.

The writer is a former ambassador of Pakistan.

Email: afzaalmahmood@yahoo.com

To help or not to help

“Bring em on,” blustered President George W. Bush a month ago, so the terrorists blew up first the UN headquarters in Baghdad, and then Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, Iraq’s most prominent Shia leader, and a hundred other people in Najaf.

“It is necessary to put an end to the American plan for occupation because it is useless,” said the dead cleric’s brother, Abd el-Aziz — and there are those in Washington who agree.

Slowly and reluctantly, the American supertanker is starting to turn. The idea of going back to the United Nations and trying to get some help on Iraq is being openly discussed in Washington. The debate in administration circles tacitly assumes that foreigners will leap at the chance to send troops and money if only the US accepts a new Security Council resolution that gives the UN some degree of control in Iraq. But as the US debates turning to the UN, the international community is turning away.

Of course, there may never be an official American request for UN help: the neo-conservative ideologues around Mr Bush still cannot say the phrase ‘international community’ without sneering. They also continue to delude themselves that the armed resistance is made up entirely of Saddam loyalists and foreign fanatics, two groups against whom they might win. (In fact, the bulk of the guerilla and terrorist attacks are coming from native Iraqi groups driven by nationalism and/or Islamic fervour, which is much more serious.)

On the other hand, if Mr Bush’s advisers conclude that the humiliation of asking the UN for help is less damaging politically than the cost of fighting a mini-Vietnam in Iraq in an election year, the request could well be made. As Democratic Senator Joe Biden and Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote in a letter to Bush two weeks ago about the “urgent need” to get more foreign troops into Iraq: “Enhancing the role of the UN...will allow us to share the huge risk and expense of securing, policing and reconstructing Iraq.”

So maybe the neocons will be told to eat a little crow, and Secretary of State Colin Powell will be sent back to the Security Council to seek a new resolution that approves a UN peace-keeping mission in Iraq. According to the US script, the UN promptly gives the operation its blessing, and suddenly all those French, German, Russian, Turkish, Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi troops that their governments wouldn’t send without legal cover from the UN show up in Iraq. The pressure on over-stretched US forces drops, there are a hundred thousand extra soldiers to protect Iraq’s infrastructure from constant sabotage, and everybody lives happily ever after.

Except that nobody wants to send their troops into a meat-grinder. All these countries are serious about needing the UN to legitimise any operation they take part in, but they are also using that as an excuse to avoid casualties. Even the coalition’s existing members are getting cold feet: Japan, which was going to send a thousand troops, put it off indefinitely after the Baghdad bomb, and Poland changed its mind and refused to take responsibility for a Sunni Muslim area south of Baghdad, preferring to stick to safer Shia areas.

This reluctance to take casualties is reinforced, in most cases, by the belief that it probably wouldn’t do any good. The Iraqi resistance would kill Germans and Pakistanis just as readily as Americans, seeing them as mere American accomplices, and in the end the US would probably do a Vietnam and pull out anyway. So don’t go in the first place.

At the popular level, in many countries, there is also a grim satisfaction at the mess the Bush administration has got itself into.— Copyright

How one man has changed Gujarat

WHAT is the difference between dictatorship and democracy? In the first, one man changes the people; in the second, the people change him. When I read about the treatment meted out to Mrs. Zakia after she had deposed before the Nanavati-Shah Commission at Ahmedabad on the killing of her husband, former MP Ehsan Jafferey, I wondered how one man, Chief Minister Narendra Modi, had changed the people in Gujarat.

True, those who mobbed Mrs. Zakia and the media men interviewing her were the Sangh Parivar activists. But I know of no person of substance in Gujarat who has condemned the incident. Even earlier I did not find any protest against the case which was initiated against Nafisa Ali, a social activist, who went to Ahmedabad from Delhi to talk about communal harmony.

In the long list of men and women from the world of film, media and academic who have sent a joint letter to the President of India on the immediate withdrawal of the case against Nafisa, I did not find the name of anyone living in Gujarat. It seems as if the Gujaratis have been brainwashed by Modi to believe that the country is oblivious to their sensitivities. They have to fend for themselves. And even for a small incident they are held responsible because they are always in the dock.

Fear of Modi’s annoyance may also be the reason for the Gujaratis’ silence. It is like the emergency days when the mere mention of Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s name would cast terror. Yet the Gujaratis must remember that, as Martin Luther King has said: “The day we see the truth and cease to speak is the day we begin to die.” It is sad that the same Gujaratis who responded to the refrain of ‘Ishwar Allah Tere Nam’ in the song that India’s tallest man, Mahatma Gandhi, liked, flare up at the suggestion of Hindu-Muslim amity.

Gandhi was a Gujarati and he said at the height of rioting between Hindus and Muslims in the wake of partition: “Hindus and Muslims are my two eyes.” Instead, the BJP workers decorated the other day Gandhi’s statute by tying saffron bands on the hands and in the neck. The occasion was to celebrate the return of ashes of Shyamji Krishna Verma from London. The effort of Modi, who brought the ashes, was probably to find an icon other than secular Gandhi to make them feel better.

There is a smouldering hatred which is consuming the best in the Gujaratis. Many believe they have not got the recognition which is due to them. Parochialism is not what they like but this is something that has been imposed on them. Modi keeps stoking fires. What happened at Godhara was unforgivable. But the pre-meditated reprisal in several parts of the state was no less beastly and brutal.

I do not want to go over the story of murder and worse, and of men and women migrating from their places with bundles on their heads and the fear-stricken children trailing behind. Time should have been a healer. But even after 18 months of the tragedy, the process of conciliation has not begun.

Many victims wanting to return to their villages have been stopped. They have been told first to take back their FIRs they had filed to narrate what the mob had done to them and their family. The rehabilitation is a farce because the state has washed its hands off the task. How much of the prime minister’s special grant has been spent on putting back the affected on their legs is anybody’s guess. I wonder if the PMO has ever sent a query.

Surely, I have not seen anything by the PM on the behaviour of the Sangh Parivar activists towards Mrs. Zakia. I do not expect Deputy Prime Minister L.K.Advani and BJP president Venkaiah Naidu expressing regret because they are cast in a different mould. But somehow I go on indulging in wishful thinking, like many others in the middle class, that Vajpayee will speak out to condemn the saffron crowd for having humiliated Mrs. Zakia.

Once again the police behaved in the same manner as it did during the carnage. The force stood as spectators when Mrs.Zakia was mobbed by the Sangh Parivar activists. Her car was kicked. Still the police stayed distant. This fitted into the description of the accounts published on the Gujarat massacre: Even then, most of the government machinery, including the police, was on the side of the mob.

The Concerned Citizens Tribunal confirmed this in a two-volume report: “Despite the mass crimes committed against large sections of the population of Gujarat, the police response to the crimes was such that justice was not done. This is evident from the fact that mass FIRs were filed, often even panchnamas were not recorded and an investigation of forensic evidence was not undertaken.”

It should not, therefore, come as a surprise when the court throws out the Best Bakery case because of lack of evidence. What the National Human Rights Commission went through to get a copy of the court’s judgment is a story of Gujarat government’s deliberate policy to withhold anything relating to the carnage. The judgment was sent after many reminders and that too in Gujrati, without the English translation.

The Supreme Court is yet to decide whether to order a retrial in the Best Bakery Case or to transfer the cases arising out of the carnage to courts outside Gujarat. The important thing is how to stop witnesses changing their testimony under pressure. Probably one way to do so is to record the evidence on an audio-visual tape.

The real problem that confronts the nation is how to ensure justice to the victims in Gujarat. More than that, how to make the Muslims feel at home in the state. The administration is not cooperating. The Centre is not evincing any interest because Modi is the BJP mascot for the coming elections. There is no use demanding President’s rule since the governor is from the RSS.

There is no option other than making an appeal to the Gujarati community. Some among them should assert themselves — poor Malika Sarabai did so at the cost of making her friends strangers — to see how the “blot on the nation” can be removed. Gujarat is still thrown at you wherever you go abroad. I am disappointed that Vajpayee did not do anything although he went on calling the carnage “a shame.” The party interests pushed out human considerations.

The poison of communalism, which is the politics of hatred and division will take us to the road to disaster. The Gujaratis should know that.

Shamefully, some Muslims have come to believe that they must avenge the killing of their brethren wherever it takes place. They have formed groups of terrorists. The Mumbai bomb blasts were their handiwork. They do not realize the harm they are doing to their own community. They cannot afford to indulge in violence. They are playing into the hands of Hindu fanatics who are dividing the society on the lines of religion. The battle against communalism cannot be fought through communalism. Pluralistic approach is the only way out.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in New Delhi.